Tom and Edie Gustason are the definition of learn as you go winemaking.
The Army vets who met not long after leaving the service — she in 2007, he in 2010 — had zero experience making wine when they bought their 36-acre spread 15 miles east of Tombstone in 2011.
But after meeting a local winemaker who greeted them in shorts and a T-shirt, Tom Gustason told his wife that that was how he wanted to spend his retirement.
“He said, ‘I want to do that’,” Edie Gustason recalled.
So the pair reached out to some neighboring vineyard operators for advice and planted a couple of acres of vines in 2014.
Thus was born High Lonesome Vineyard.
Their plan initially was to grow grapes to sell, and had it not been for Edie Gustason’s stubborn streak, they might have carried on with that plan. Her first stab at winemaking was her 2016 vintages; she dumped them out and declared them not ready for primetime.
“It’s kind of trial and error, 100%,” she explained. “I’ve made mistakes and I’ve had to dump wine out, but you learn from it and you just continue.”
Her first “public” vintages in 2017 were winners.
The grape vines are dormant at the moment at High Lonesome Vineyards, 8979 N. High Lonesome Road in McLean. Buds will start to appear in April and harvesting begins in July.
“Our first vintages that came out we had 13 cases and it was gone in a week,” she said.
In 2019, High Lonesome’s Tannat won Best of Class in the AZcentral Grand Wine Awards and Judge’s Choice Bronze for its PicPoul Blanc. The following year, they added two more AZcentral contest medals as well as a trio of awards — two bronze, one silver —from the Beverage Testing Institute.
Edie, a native of Richmond, Virginia, who grew up in Upstate New York, and Tom, who hails from Big Bear, California, have 2¼ acres under vine with plans to plant another 1,000 vines — about three-quarters of an acre — this year.
Tom and Edie Gustason, owners of High Lonesome Vineyards in McLean.
They mowed 12 acres of their land to create an area for so-called “harvest guests,” folks who pull up in their RVs to gaze at the dark skies. Last February they hosted 42 different guests, all of whom do a wine tasting as part of the visit.
Saturday’s Off the Vine Wine Festival in Oro Valley is the first of several events that High Lonesome will participate in this spring. They also are set to pour at the Pecan and Wine Festival in Camp Verde March 19-20, the Tombstone Wine Festival April 2-3 and the Sierra Vista Wine, Beer and Spirits Festival on May 28 in Veteran’s Memorial Park.
