Flying Leap is a premium winery and distillery in southern Arizona, crafting exceptional wines and spirits from estate-grown grapes.
(682)
Tucson, AZ
85747
| Monday | 12pm - 4pm |
| Tuesday | 12pm - 4pm |
| Wednesday | 12pm - 4pm |
| Thursday | 12pm - 4pm |
| Friday | 12pm - 4pm |
| Saturday | 12pm - 5pm |
| Sunday | 12pm - 4pm |
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Flying Leap Vineyards & Distillery is a farm winery & craft distillery headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The business was founded in 2010 by three lifelong best friends: Mark Beres, Marc Moeller and Tom Kitchens, who met as freshmen in their late teen years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado in the late 1980s.
Following graduation & commissioning, Mark, Marc and Tom served their country as Air Force pilots in multiple theaters of war and in a number of different roles and aircraft. A native of Walla Walla, Washington, Mark flew as a special operations pilot in the MH-53M Pavelow IV and later graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School, serving as a developmental test pilot. Marc - a native of San Diego, California flew Boeing 757s, serving several US Vice Presidents, First Ladies and Secretaries of State as a distinguished pilot of Air Force Two for many years. Tom “Kitch” Kitchens - a native of Costa Mesa, California flew global airlift missions, flying the Lockheed C-17 for many years in both active duty and in the Air Force Reserve.
The company’s founders performed a tactical rejoin in Arizona following their years of service to found Flying Leap Vineyards, which was originally incorporated in Vail, Arizona in the Fall of 2010. The corporate headquarters was moved to Tucson in the summer of 2020. Initially envisioned as a collaborative small business venture, primarily as a small-scale wine grape farming operation to sell fruit to the state’s nascent commercial wine industry, the Company began in earnest developing what would later become its Block 1 vineyard in a small, rural agricultural growing area south of Willcox, Arizona known as the “Kansas Settlement”. These initial vines were planted in April 2011, and developed & trellised over three full growing seasons. During these years and as serendipity would have it, a very young, unknown and somewhat disorganized Flying Leap would purchase a small farm winery called “Canelo Hills” located in the heart of Arizona’s most scenic wine country south of Tucson in the Elgin/Sonoita wine region. The purchase of this property in Elgin in February 2013 launched Flying Leap’s wine retail operations. With a new portfolio of ultra premium wines and a place to market and sell them, Flying Leap’s sales soared, and the Company expanded rapidly.
The growing demand for the Company’s wines required more planting, more expansion and the creation of even more jobs. Flying Leap’s Block 2 vineyard was planted in 2012 and the small estate vineyard was restored and expanded from 2013-2016. In 2016, the Company planted the Block 3 vineyard, and Block 4 is already designed and slated for planting in 2021-2022. Recognizing early-on that bulk fruit sales in the small Arizona wine market were unprofitable, Flying Leap chose instead to design and build a distilling capability so that surplus fruit could be distilled into immediately-salable products rather than sold off to other wineries or vinified (at great expense) and stored at a loss. Thus the Company began distilling in the Fall of 2016 and opened its distilled spirits tasting room at the winery estate in April 2017.
