n a m o k o K story by JAMES SELBY photos by GABRIELLA MARKS
W
ith last month’s issue, localflavor began a series featuring Northern New Mexico’s independent wine merchants. Why these? Being neighbors proffering things to taste, they fit the mission of the magazine. Specifically, attention is being paid because we observed something distinct occurring. In addition to being a small business struggling to keep the lights on, each shop, grand or modest, is guided by individuals in lockstep with consumers concerned with husbandry of fields and waterways, who revere craft and have high regard for natural process, vineyard to table. The indistinguishable
them intent on putting hands-on wine at your table. I was invited to the home of a family newly relocated from Europe to Tesuque, and my eye went to some Châteauneuf-duPape and Crozes-Hermitage by a good producer in the Côtes du Rhône. The host was asked where he liked to shop for his wine selections locally. “Oh,” he said, “I buy them online.” When told he had fortuitously plunked down a couple of miles from Kokoman Fine Wine and Liquor, one of the great wine shops in New Mexico—indeed, the U.S.—he looked askance. “Oh, you mean the place that looks like a warehouse for kegs?” Well, yes, they have those. But take note: Big red letters on the building say BURGUNDY. Now walk through the doors of Kokoman and meet owner Keith Obermaier. A dash of salt peppers Keith Obermaier’s thick, cayenne-colored hair, not much gray for a guy who came from Chicago to attend the University of New Mexico thirty-odd years ago to matriculate in engineering, a path that left him unfulfilled. Leaving college, he took work in Durango as a carpenter and, subsequently, in Central Oregon, on a cattle ranch. “It was fun,” he industrial choices are still says, “but it was very hard work.” available anywhere, but more By this time, he had started a than ever, in your neighborhood family and begun to rethink life retail outlet, they share the shelves after a nightmarish encounter with wines made in the artisanal with a chainsaw left the side of spirit. We wanted to explore his face nearly paralyzed. As it this community and introduce so often will, New Mexico had local merchants, one by one, gotten under his skin and he rewho have journeyed to wine settled in Santa Fe. Using brains country, walked rows of vines, rather than brawn, Obermaier and met the farmer who grew the found success working “hedges” grapes. If not the farmer, then the for Smith-Barney but, again, not winemaker; if not the winemaker, satisfaction. the importer or supplier—all of
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MARCH 2011
magazine.com
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Keith Obermaier
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Phil Hemberger