How the Verde Valley became an American Viticultural Area

On December 10, 2021, the words “Verde Valley” became a protected place name on American wine labels. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the Treasury agency that regulates wine labeling, had published its final rule a month earlier, on November 10, as Treasury Decision TTB-174. The region now sits in the federal code at 27 CFR 9.280, the third Arizona entry after Sonoita and Willcox.

An American Viticultural Area, or AVA, is narrower than it sounds. The bureau is explicit that establishing one is neither an approval nor an endorsement of the wine made there. It certifies a geography: a grape-growing area with a known name, a defensible boundary and physical features that set it apart from its neighbors. What a winery gains is the right to print that name, and what a buyer gains is some assurance about where the grapes came from.

Who asked, and what they had to show

Any interested party can petition for an AVA. The Verde Valley request came from a producers’ trade group based in Cottonwood, on behalf of local growers and winemakers. The bureau published it as a proposal, Notice No. 187, on February 28, 2020, and took public comments until April 28 of that year.

A petition has to cover five things: evidence that the name is known, an explanation of the boundary, a description of the distinguishing features, the right Geological Survey maps, and a written boundary that follows those maps. The Verde Valley file was modest in scale. It counted 24 commercial vineyards covering about 125 acres, expansion plans of roughly 40 more, and 11 wineries.

The name

Name evidence is usually the easy part, and here it ran back more than four centuries. The petition traced “Verde Valley” to 1583, when the Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo recorded the area. It added an 1890 geological paper and a 1963 Interior Department study on groundwater, both using the name, and then the everyday proof that a name is in use: a fire district, a medical center, a Montessori school, a local newspaper publisher, a ballet studio, a self-storage company. A page from the phone book went into the federal record.

The line on the map

The whole geographic feature called the Verde Valley covers about 714 square miles, most of it national forest. The AVA takes in roughly 200 square miles of it. On the north and west the boundary mostly follows the 3,800-foot elevation contour, the height above which, the petition argued, the land becomes too steep to farm. The eastern edge keeps out steep ground and the national monument land at Montezuma Castle and Montezuma Well. The southern edge follows survey section lines, because the maps offered nothing more natural to trace.

Even so, about a third of the land inside the line is still national forest. The petitioners said it could not practically be cut out, since several vineyards are islands of private land surrounded on every side by federal land.

What makes it different

The bureau accepted three distinguishing features and rejected a fourth. Geology was left out, because the petition described the valley’s rocks without comparing them with the surrounding country or explaining their effect on vines. Climate, soil and topography stood.

The climate figures, for 2012 to 2017, set the valley apart from every direction around it:

The valley is drier and much warmer than the high country that rings it, warm enough, the petition said, for Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Malvasia Bianca and Viognier. Its growing-season nights also fall further. Cold air drains off the higher ground into the basin after dark, and from 2014 through 2016 the average gap between the day’s high and the night’s low topped 30 degrees Fahrenheit in 16 of the 18 growing-season months measured. The petition credits that swing with slowing ripening and holding acidity in the grapes. The same drainage brings spring frost, especially near the river, which is why inversion fans stand in some vineyards.

The soils are mostly alluvial, ranging from very fine sandy loam to gravelly loam with silt and limestone. The hills around the valley are stony, and north and east of it most of the mapped soil series carry “stony” in their names. Inside, the slopes run from 2 to 15 percent and most of the land lies below 3,900 feet, though the AVA reaches from about 3,000 to 5,000 feet.

Eight comments

The public comment period drew eight responses. Six supported the proposal. One supported it but asked for an environmental and cultural review of the region’s effect on its surroundings, which the bureau answered was outside its authority and not required for an administrative labeling rule. The last did not oppose the AVA but doubted that grapes could be grown in an area so prone to long droughts. The bureau’s reply was practical: commercial grape growing was already happening inside the line, and growers made up for the low rainfall with water-conserving irrigation.

The final rule adopted the boundary as proposed.

What changed on the label

The practical effect is a labeling rule. A wine that uses “Verde Valley” as its appellation, or in a brand name, must take at least 85 percent of its grapes from inside the boundary and meet the other federal conditions for an AVA wine. A brand name that used the words before the rule, on a wine that does not qualify, now has to change unless it falls under a narrow exception for brands approved before July 7, 1986.

For someone reading a bottle, the result is simple enough. “Arizona” on a label says the grapes are mostly from somewhere in the state, which often means the Willcox basin in the southeast. “Verde Valley” says they grew inside this basin’s boundary, in the same heat and the same cold nights the petition measured.