Last month, fans of the Garretson Wine Company in Paso Robles were greeted with this news from Mat Garretson on his website:
After months of reflection, discussion and prayer, Amie and I have decided to pull the plug on Garretson Wine Company. I am sure that you can appreciate that this was not an easy decision to make…but it’s one that, having now made it, we’re entirely at peace with.
That the co-founder of Hospice du Rhône, one of the world’s most 
successful, not to say unhinged of wine festivals, would no longer make wine, was a little like P.T. Barnum leaving the sideshow of his own circus. And of course, the day the circus takes down its tents is always one of the saddest days of the year.
Garretson’s wine company grew out of an abiding passion for Rhône varieties that had ignited nearly two decades before in Atlanta, Georgia, where Garretson is from, and where he worked in wine retail since high school. There a friend gave him a Viognier from Condrieu for his birthday — a 1980 bottle of Coteau de Vernon from George Vernay.
Back then, Garretson subscribed to the notion that you only drank white wine when you had run out of red. He tucked away the Condrieu in a box and more or less forgot about it. And then one evening, he was cooking a recipe that called for a cup of white wine, and opened, for the first time in his life, a Viognier.
‘I was standing like 4 or 5 feet away from the bottle,’ he says, ‘and I could smell it and I was saying to myself, ‘what the hell is that?’ It was a one-bottle epiphany.’ Garretson was transformed. No wine to that point, even the greatest reds, seemed so exotic, so texturally complex, so refined, sophisticated, and hedonistic all at once.
After ten years of pursuing what few Viognier-based wines he could find in Atlanta — a town more interested in Far Niente Chardonnay, and Silver Oak — he founded a vague promotional entity called the Viognier Guild, and in 1993, threw a tasting in Clermont, Georgia. It was attended by two domestic producers of Viognier, John Alban and Dennis Horton, and featured — by a wide margin — more wines than people.
John Alban, whose winery was the first in California to devote itself entirely to Rhône varieties, and who knew a thing or two about quixotic pursuits, became Garretson’s partner in the Viognier Guild. Alban convinced him to move his ‘operation’ to California, where the Rhône movement was just gathering steam. The following year Alban hosted the event at his winery. Eventually, to broaden their focus, they renamed the effort Hospice du Rhône, and settled on a permanent venue, the County Fairgrounds in Paso Robles, CA. Garretson moved to California, took a sales job, and almost immediately started dreaming of making wines like the ones that inspired him.
Through Alban and Garretson’s efforts, the festival won the attention of Rhône variety producers and aficionados worldwide. In fact, along with the Rhône Rangers, it’s not exaggeration to say that Hospice du Rhône helped to create one of the domestic wine industry’s most vital categories. Not only this, but Hospice’s international flavor and emphasis elevated the Rhône Valley and its wines to levels of attention and interest not seen since World War II, and did the same for the Rhône-variety wines of Australia.
After so many years promoting it, making wine for Garretson seemed to complete the circle, and in 2001 with his wife Amie he 
founded Garretson Wines. From the outset, he wanted to keep the brand small, personal, and quirky. He gave his wines preposterous, practically unpronounceable Celtic names like ‘The Craic’ (a Syrah) and ‘The Celeidh’ (a dry rosé) and ‘The Limoid Cior’ (a Roussanne). He set his labels in garishly bright colors, years before the practice was commonplace. In his first vintage he received 90 point scores from the Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate, back when a 90 point score meant something in those publications.
If you haven’t met Mat Garretson, you should know that he is, in every way, large. At nearly six-three, he towers over most people and is, to put it mildly, amply built (to see him in pink tights, which he frequently donned in skits at Hospice, was always breathtaking). His appetites are large, as are his ambitions, his drive, and his heart.
These fueled his winery enterprise, of course, but they could only take him so far. Garretson was long on passion and short on everything else, including money, manpower, resources, and perhaps some organization skills. Garretson was in charge of winemaking, grower relations, requisitions, managing, and selling the wine, which kept him on the road and away from his family for many weeks in a given month.
In four vintages, production went from 500 to more than 3000 cases (eventually, it reached 10,000), with as many as 20 different bottlings in a vintage. Many of these were small productions; some were admittedly weird wines, like a ripasso Grenache made in the style of an Amarone, or whites which in certain years were so clouded with particulates that, in Garretson’s words, they looked ‘like snow globes.’ He thought of these wines as radical — and in today’s wine market, where the wines of Gravner and Movia are revered, perhaps that’s not farfetched. But it’s just as likely that some of these experiments were borne of neglect or inexperience. Garretson, after all, was never formally trained as a winemaker, and was, for all intents and purposes, the sole employee of his company. A long sales trip might be sufficient to send a sound barrel of wine into experimental territory.
There were other factors. Garretson founded his winery just as Rhône-centric wineries all over the state were starting up. Within a decade the market went from nonexistent to fairly crowded, and nowhere was the concentration greater than in Paso Robles, where Garretson was based. Along with everyone else, he had to work much harder to sell the same amount of wine. To an extent, the success of Hospice had fostered a much more competitive environment for his own winery to operate in.
Then in 2004, Garretson was offered a vineyard property in the Templeton Gap on the West Side of the Paso Robles AVA. He found partners in the Atlanta area and placed a down-payment on the property, but the partnership soured and he lost his seed money; he lost even more trying unsuccessfully to recoup some of this money from his former partners. His mostly shoestring operation was becoming dangerously threadbare. Then, as the economic climate started to sour, distributors started balking on their payments for his wine. There were many, many dark months. Garretson went into hibernation, and both friends and colleagues couldn’t reach him as he tried desperately to salvage his business. In the end, the looming recession was enough to finish off the winery for good.
Garretson isn’t entirely sure what the next chapter in his life will look like for him and his family, but it seems likely for now that he’ll stay in the wine business, and will remain one of the driving forces at Hospice du Rhône. In the meantime, anyone who loves the Rhône owes a debt of gratitude to The Man in the Pink Tights, whose improbable pursuit of an unheard-of variety took him down a one-of-a-kind path — and the wine world we inhabit is considerably richer for it.