Chateau Tumbleweed [May 2023]

I have to give a little context to the totally awesome photo below. I know y’all have met my oldest [and by that I mean my first.. LOL] and very good travel nurse friend, Andrea White. We met and worked together on my first assignment in Charlotte back in 2014!! Well, after I left Charlotte, we went on to spend the summer in Albuquerque, NM for my next assignment, and I started seeing tumbleweeds everywhere. [Turns out that it’s always windy in Albuquerque... LOL] So, I had to text Andrea to find out exactly how the tumbleweeds started being a thing between us. The long and short of it was thing... while visiting family in Arizona, she saw her first tumbleweed and they quickly became one of her favorite things. I have seen many over the years so we talked about them.

When I kept seeing an abundance of them in Albuquerque, I would send photos until that wasn’t enough. I had to see if one could survive being shipped back to Charlotte!! It made the journey mostly intact, and we nicknamed it Weed!! Hahaha!! The first time we visited the Chateau Tumbleweed tasting room and I saw this shirt, I knew it belonged on Andrea's back!! Wait a minute… before this, I had discovered Chateau Tumbleweed at a wine festival, and they have a very interesting story. You see, it was brought to life by four friends, two husband-and-wife teams. [isn’t that so sweet!?] Kris and Joe, Kim and Jeff all met around 12 years ago while working at Page Spring Cellars [which I will write about at a later date] in Cornville, AZ.

In 2011, they created their first few barrels of wine, and the wine world took notice. The owner of Caduceus Cellars, Maynard Keenan, [you may know him from the rock band Tool] saw the combination of youth and ambition. He quickly offered the foursome use of his Four Eight Winery space to continue making their wine between 2012-2014. Finally, in 2015, the two couples took the leap, quit their “day jobs,” and bought the building [seen below] they currently reside in to open Clarkdale’s first commercial winery and tasting room. The winery's name came from how “the voyage of life can be much like that of a tumbleweed. We break away from our roots and go where the wind takes us. We might get stuck when obstacles are in our way, but when we come across wide-open spaces, we can’t be stopped.” LOVE this!!!

I also absolutely love all of their different wine labels; you can see some of them in the second photo!! Above you can see my girl Sherri and me in front of their Clarksville tasting building. She was doing an assignment in Cottonwood, and I’ll have to admit that I may have been a little jealous!! Haha!! You see, being in Cottonwood, you are very close to many wineries and wine tasting rooms. It may actually be for the best that I was not working there; I think I could have gotten myself into a lot of trouble... but I had to go up and visit Sherri at least once while she was there!! Anyway, this is the sole location of Chateau Tumbleweed and where I found the shirt for Andrea that I mentioned above.

For now, they keep the mindset of the song by Roy Clark…  “as tumbling tumbleweeds go, they have a plan of drifting along with nowhere and everywhere to go, pledging their love to the ground, and leaving the cares of the past behind.” I should have asked Andrea how long Weed made it, but I know that eventually he became too brittle and couldn’t hold it together. Sadly, I do not think Andrea and I have ever been to visit the Chateau Tumbleweed Tasting Room together; this will be something to add to our list of future adventures!!

I hope you remember my Water to Wine blog, where we did a kayak trip down the river to Alcantara Winery. Well, next week Wine with Wixy will be visiting the same winery, but with a much different mode of transportation... tune in to find out!!

Cheers to you my wine loving friends, and TTFN!!