Meet Your Business: Sunbeat Cellars winery growing in San Tan Valley

Believe it or not, the Queen Creek/San Tan Valley area has its own winery.

Nick and Bree Brouwer launched Sunbeat Cellars in 2023 with the goal of making low-intervention, natural wines in as sustainable a manner as possible.

The Brouwers describe themselves on Sunbeat Cellars as “a couple of pre-internet, hard-working millennials who had this crazy idea of starting a winery in urban Arizona.”

Sunbeat Cellars was born out of the COVID pandemic.

“While everyone else was obsessed with making sourdough bread,” Nick Brouwer began wondering what he could make wine with, according to the winery’s website.

After his first batch of strawberry wine, Nick Brouwer was hooked and by 2022 the couple had purchased 3 acres of land in San Tan Valley.

Currently, the couple makes their wines from grapes sourced in California, but their hope is to eventually grow their own crop.

Learn more about the Brouwers and Sunbeat Cellars:

Name: Nick and Bree Brouwer

Business Name: Sunbeat Cellars

Location: 42517 N. Murphy Ave., San Tan Valley

Town/Neighborhood: San Tan Valley/Queen Creek

Hours of operation: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, by appointment only. Information: 559-707-0685, sunbeatcellars.com

What I do: We make natural, low-intervention wines made from grapes we sourced from Paso Robles, California (we hope to source Arizona grapes someday).

What I like most about doing business here: No one else is doing an urban winery in this area, despite its growth potential. We believe there’s a huge future here for a truly, hyper-local winery and brand name that residents are proud to buy, carry and drink.

What am I promoting: Our wines! We have three kinds available right now: a merlot, a cabernet sauvignon, and a wild ferment cabernet sauvignon. In the future, we hope to make a prickly pear wine, too. It should be ready sometime in the summer of 2025.

What I’m excited about and why: We’re excited about the idea of our prickly pear wine. As the Southwest gets hotter and we start losing more water, we’ll need a sustainable way to make alcoholic drinks in the future, and because prickly pear is a native desert plant, it needs less water than traditional wine grapes. We think this is a great reason to start making fruit wine, including kinds made from fruit grown by local farmers.

When and why I started my business/employment here: We started our winery in 2023; our first wines from that year are ready to buy now.

Where I was before and why I left: Nick worked at GoDaddy for nearly a decade; he moved to a few other jobs before realizing that his passion has always been to run his own business. He now works full-time for Sunbeat Cellars and as a dad. Bree currently works as a full-time marketer and spends her evenings working part-time as the head marketing honcho for Sunbeat Cellars.

My family: We have a son and two standard poodles.

My interests & hobbies: When we’re not working on the winery, we love to hike, explore Arizona, show our son new experiences, work on property/house projects and spend time with friends.

My guiding philosophy: From a business perspective, we believe you should enjoy the wine you like, not what France or Italy or the sommelier at your favorite restaurant tells you to like.

We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org.