Meet Candice Mohr | Founder of Snowy Peaks Winery

We had the good fortune of connecting with Candice Mohr and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Candice, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
We have always thought of the winery as a part of our community or more accurately communities. We try to be a good neighbor in Estes Park by providing good jobs, supporting local non-profits, providing a venue for local artists and a gathering place for friends, families and strangers to meet and spend quality time together. We try to support our business community by carrying products from other small businesses, joining business organizations, promoting other local businesses and collaborating to help us all rise, We belong to the Colorado wine community and promote that through buying our grapes from small Colorado vineyards, participating in promotions for Colorado wine, and serving on boards and working with other wineries to help improve and grow our industry. We recognize that our community relies on the environment around us, so we buy wind energy, recycle everything we can and work to decrease our energy footprint.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Snowy Peaks Winery creates handcrafted wine from grapes grown in western Colorado. We have a tasting room in Estes Park where you can sample our wines along with wines from several other Colorado wineries. We have an extensive wine list and try to help guests find a wine they love. We also carry cheese, salami and other food products produced in Colorado.

Being in Estes Park for the last 20 years, we’ve been through fires, floods, recessions and the COVID pandemic. It has been very challenging at times to keep moving the business forward. The main things that have helped are building a supportive community around us, being open to new ideas and willingness to change. Pivot, observe the outcome and adjust.

This year the time came for us to step away from the winery and let a new owner take the reins. We are so proud to have gotten to this point. Albert Schmurr took over at the end of March and we are so excited to see him take the winery to the next level. He’s already made some beautiful changes to the tasting room and will be introducing a new food menu in the coming months. Our neighborhood got a facelift last year and we are thrilled to see what comes next for our “baby”.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We’d definitely head to the winery for live music on a Friday afternoon. We’d do lots of hikes in and around Rocky Mountain National Park. A visit to the Estes Park Museum is a fun way to learn about the history of the area. Dinner at the Rock Inn for more live music, Twin Owls Steakhouse for amazing views, Seasoned Bistro and Bird & Jim for great farm to table menus and Ed’s Cantina for avocado margaritas. Spa day at Qi Lounge at Estes Park Resort, then a walk around Lake Estes culminating in cocktails on the deck at Ember Restaurant, located above the spa. Stroll the Riverwalk then come back around on Elkhorn Avenue to do some shopping and get some yummy treats. If it’s summer then Farmer’s Market on Thursday. There’s almost always a festival going on, so we’d definitely check that out. We’d need breakfast to fuel up for all that, you can’t go wrong, but the Notchtop Cafe and the Trailhead Restaurant are regulars for us. If they were beer fans, we have so many great brewery options and two distilleries for the whiskey lovers. And of course the winery, there’s too many wines to try in just one visit, so we’d have to go back for a tasting and a charcuterie board.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We have been in business for 20 years, we started from scratch and had so much to learn. We couldn’t have done it without help from hundreds of people, more than we could ever shout-out individually. Every person has something to teach us, some way to support us. I’ve interacted with business owners, non-profit leaders, employees and the people who walk through our doors every day, they are all part of the fabric that is the winery.

Website: https://www.snowypeakswinery.com

Instagram: @snowypeakswinery

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snowypeakswinery/