Pahrump Valley Winery undergoing $1M expansion
Within a few years, grocery stores in Nevada will have more wine made in state, thanks to an expansion of the Pahrump Valley Winery.
The winery, located about an hour west of Las Vegas, is undergoing a 7,000-square-foot, $1 million expansion, said Bill Loken, who owns the business with his wife, Gretchen. He said construction on a new building to provide additional space for storage and wine production began in early July and will be complete by the end of the year.
“We’ve had the winery since 2003, but we have just completely outgrown it,” Bill Loken said. “This building is being prepared to handle the influx of Nevada-grown grapes.”
Loken said legislation changes in the last few years are encouraging the growth of Nevada’s wine industry, which is increasing interest in the Pahrump business.
In 2015, legislation passed allowing wineries in Clark and Washoe counties as long as the businesses grow 25 percent of their grapes in the state. Pahrump is in Nye County, where wineries were already allowed.
Loken said an increase in Nevada grapes, along with the vineyard’s expansion, will allow him and his wife to produce more varieties of Nevada wine. Currently, only about 30 percent of their wine is from Nevada grapes, while the rest is California wine.
“Wines take on the character of the area that they’re grown in, so there’ll be subtle differences,” he said about California and Nevada wine. “Our goal is within ten years to (produce) a minimum of 80 percent Nevada-grown wine.”
Although mostly desert, Nevada is a great place to grow grapes, Loken said. The southern, hot environment is suited for grapes destined for red wine, while cooler areas produce white wine grapes.
“Grapes grow in the desert all around the world, we’re just not used to thinking about it in Nevada,” he said. “But we have proven that you can produce award-winning wines with Nevada-grown grapes.”
Gretchen Loken, who makes the Pahrump Valley wine, created the first ever commercially produced Nevada red wine in 2005 after the couple acquired the winery three years earlier.
Neither had experience producing wine, but have now fallen in love with the industry, she said.
She said the added space will let her create more wines, made different by the levels of yeast, blending various grapes, types of barrels and how long the alcohol is aged.
“It’s kind of a combination of art and science,” she said. “That’s what I’m excited about: that we’re going to be able to do more Nevada stuff.”
The winery produces about 9,000 cases a year, but the expansion will let them produce up to 50,000 annually, Bill Loken said. About 100,000 bottles are sold each year.
The bottling process is now semi-automatic, involving nine people operating machines in the small, barrel-lined storage room about 30 days a year. The expansion will allow for fully automated production.
“Currently we have about 160 oak barrels with wine in them,” Bill Loken said. “The new building will give us the capacity to more than double that.”
With the growing wine industry in Nevada, Loken said he’s not worried about competition from potential new vineyards.
“More and more people are getting interested and getting involved in the Nevada wine industry; we like to take some of the credit for that,” he said. “The more the merrier.”
Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter.
