Wineries in Clarkdale

Two tasting rooms, and one of them is unlike anything else in the valley.

Southwest Wine Center is at 601 Black Hills Drive, on the Yavapai College Verde Valley campus, and it is run by the college’s viticulture and enology program. There is an estate vineyard planted on the campus, a teaching winery, and degree and certificate courses behind it. The wine you taste was made by students on the site where the grapes were grown.

That is worth understanding rather than treating as a novelty. Arizona’s modern wine industry is small and young, and a great many of the people making wine up and down this valley learned to do it here. Tasting at the college is tasting the source of the rest of the trail.

Chateau Tumbleweed is the other: a small independent winery and tasting room on the hillside, and one that has built a following on its own terms.

Where this sits on the trail

Clarkdale is a short hop from the Old Town Cottonwood strip, about ten minutes, and from the Page Springs and Cornville vineyards, about twenty. Two tasting rooms is not a day out on its own, but it fits neatly either side of one.

The wine trail guide lays out the whole valley by area, and the Old Town guide covers the walkable Cottonwood stretch where you park once.

Practical

Opening hours at both move with the season and with what is happening on campus, and a college tasting room in particular follows the academic calendar rather than the tourist one. Check each listing, or ring, before making the drive.

If you are combining this with the Verde Canyon Railroad, which leaves from the Clarkdale depot, note that the train runs three and a half to four hours and has its own bar. Doing both in one afternoon is ambitious and needs a driver who is not doing either.