A small family winery owned by Jim & Jeanne Durr, Surface Creek Winery is located in Delta County, Colorado, below the southern rim of the Grand Mesa. Colorado Highway 65 leaves I-70 which goes up over the north side of the Grand Mesa, snakes its way a few of the many lakes and reservoirs on top of the Mesa, and wends its way down to join Surface Creek to the Gunnison River. Well, actually the road refuses to follow Surface Creek towards the bottom when Surface Creek takes a right turn and plunges off the “Surface Creek Mesa” (if you use the older designation) and joins Tongue Creek for the mile or two when what water hasn’t been used for irrigation spills into the Gunnison.
Those of you who have visited this website before will notice a change. We will lose the familiar romantic story of the small production, quality winemaker and his family producing artisan wine and living the good life. After twelve years of being a licensed winery, we will share the reality of having a winery in a very productive agricultural area of Western Colorado while dealing with a changing economy and wine industry.
We are still a “functioning” winery, but we are accepting the realities of the times and cutting back on our production. We may not survive as a business, but we will survive as people who love this place and we will survive as a family who love each other.
With this new approach to this website hopefully I will not let my ego get in the way of a good story. I will try to reveal what we tried to do, what happened, and why we attempted what we did. To be successful at this I will have to admit mistakes, risk offending friends, family, neighbors, and folks in the Colorado wine industry, as well as take my chances with the responses to what is written here.
An observant reader will notice that I have changed from we to I in this little narrative. That’s because Jeanne is far more valuable to society than I am. I will explain this in detail later. The upshot of the fact of her worth is that Jeanne took a job at a lovely university in Wisconsin as a human resources director to keep the family economically viable. Therefore, this modest internet adventure I am introducing here is of my own manufacture. Once Jeanne realizes what I am up to, I will have no choice but to allow her her own space here as she wishes. Jeanne has always required her own space. 
The old “home page” of the website was more formal and dignified. But the storytelling of Buy Our Wine and Art! (yes, we have had an art gallery for some time, too) is becoming storytelling for it’s own sake. I may wander into the social media if someone can show me the actual value of spending my time twiddling some twaddle or getting involved with an E-facebook. “Blog” has always sounded like a very unattractive word – something emanating from the mouth of a swamp monster in an old comic book or something in the Klingon dictionary. So in the mean time, I think I will write essays, haikus, or something in between. Let’s see where this goes. Stay tuned.
- Jim Durr
