Buckel Family Wines “You are beautiful” Hawk’s Nest Pinot Noir 2024

The Land

Hawk's Nest is believed to be the highest Pinot Noir vineyard on Earth, planted at 6,800 feet in Colorado's West Elks AVA, in the North Fork Valley between Hotchkiss and Paonia. It is alpine-desert country: warm days, cold nights, over 300 days of sun a year, and a steady downvalley current locals call the Million Dollar Breeze. The growing season is short, as little as 150 frost-free days, which forces vines to ripen fast under intense high-altitude sunlight. It shouldn't work for a grape as famously finicky as Pinot Noir, and yet the volcanic mesa soils and huge diurnal swing between day and night temperatures give the fruit both sugar and real acid retention.

The Wine

100% Pinot Noir from Hawk's Nest at 6,800 feet, made with the minimal-intervention approach that defines the winery: gentle handling, low sulfites, no added sugar. That altitude does more than make headlines, it shapes the wine directly, producing naturally lower alcohol, brighter acid, and an intensity of aroma that high-elevation, thin-air ripening seems to concentrate rather than dilute. Colorado's Western Slope doesn't have the long, cool ripening window of Oregon or Burgundy, so the wine leans toward fresh red fruit, tart cherry and cranberry, with real aromatic lift. Of everything on our shelves, this might be the most uniquely Coloradan wine we have found: full of purity and lifted aromatics that read like nothing else in the state, built to be poured young rather than cellared.

The People

Joe and Shamai Buckel could have set up their winery on the West Coast; instead they chose Colorado's Western Slope, moving to Gunnison to work with the state's small network of high-altitude growers. Joe spent two decades in wine before Colorado, including stints at Flowers Vineyard and Winery and B.R. Cohn in Sonoma, and Sutcliffe Vineyards in southwest Colorado, before turning his attention to a place with almost no winemaking track record. Shamai runs the community side of the business: the tasting room, events, and relationships with the Western Slope's grape growers. Buckel Family Wine sources Hawk's Nest fruit from a grower working at an elevation most vineyards would consider unfarmable, and treats that extremity as the point rather than a problem to work around.

Food Pairing

This Pinot Noir's brightness and lower alcohol make it a wine for lighter fare than you'd pair with a bigger red. Try it with grilled trout, a mushroom and gruyere quesadilla, roast chicken with root vegetables, or charcuterie built around soft cheese and cured meats. It also takes well to a slight chill, which makes it a good choice after a day outside, on the trail or on the mountain, when you want red wine without the weight.