NEDERLAND — “Fire-wise, I would think that it would be the whole town burning down, in which case there are bigger issues,” Gussie Walter said.

She was musing about planning for wildfire, as opposed to how she used to confront those thoughts as a Nederland business owner before Augustina’s Winery burned in the Lakeview Fire on October 9, 2025. “But the idea that just that group of businesses would burn down was like, ‘What?! That doesn’t make any sense.’” 

For some, tragedy can have a paralyzing effect. It can freeze them in grief and fear, and curse them with the inability to act. For others, it can have an opposite impact: tragedy can remind them of exactly what they are meant to continue doing.

Gussie Walter, owner of Augustina’s Winery, remembers assessing her stock right after the Lakeview Fire, as she had one immediate thought: to make more wine. 

“This is what I do; I make wine. It doesn’t matter if I have a space, what I have to have is wine.”

The fire that took her tasting room, along with more than 20 other businesses within the Caribou Village Shopping Center, occurred just days after the end of the 2025 harvest season. Walter and her husband were celebrating with a planned bike ride when news of the fire hit them just as they reached their first stop. 

“We had gone to Frisco on Wednesday, the day before the fire, and we took off from there because you can bike-path it all the way,” Walter detailed. She explained how her trips back and forth on Vail Pass to Palisade during that harvest season had inspired her to go cycling out that way, where the fall colors were in full display.

“We got to Eagle, stayed overnight, and Thursday morning I was just checking the weather and I noticed all these bizarre messages, so that’s how I found out.”

In the early days, back in 1997, Augustina’s Winery operated from a warehouse in Boulder and sales made on the festival circuit. Ten years ago she expanded into the shopping center.

With the opening of her Nederland tasting room, Walter was able to convert her business beyond just the nitty-gritty of her craft by curating a comfortable social environment where like-minded community members could enjoy the literal fruits of her labor.

The tasting room presented Walter with the opportunity to host events, customer samplings, special food and wine pairings, and to engage with her fellow shop owners in the center, along with curious newcomers and wanderers and with her friends and neighbors. 

“It was 30 years,” she said about all that she brought into and all that she added to her space in the shopping center. “One friend said that it wasn’t my workspace, it was my living room. All the equipment can be replaced, even the wine, because wine always goes away, but it was all those personal things—the artwork that people had given me, my set of Gumby dolls that people kept bringing me.”

Losing the tasting room was a shock to her system, but not enough to stop her from making the phone calls needed to grab the last few grapes left that she could possibly harvest. Coupled with the generosity of the local winemakers’ community, from whom she secured a space to produce and bottle, Walter—just four days after the fire—was able to make one more small batch.

Just three varieties, but they represented far more to her than just profit. Those varieties meant that, tasting room or not, Augustina’s Winery lived within Walter and her skill and determination as a winemaker. 

“I can’t try to remake what I had. I don’t want to try and do that, but I can try to have a winery again.”

Walter hasn’t just rolled with the changes, she’s relied on her experience and ability to adapt to a new landscape, one where the path ahead was made clear. She knew she needed her own space for production and distribution before the next harvest season began, and she knew that she needed to start producing as soon as possible for the 2026 festival circuit.  

But even with those goals firmly set in Walter’s mind, some of those goal lines were set months away, leaving Walter to need to work in the interim. 

“Within about a week I knew I needed a job because I was going batshit crazy,” she laughed. “I could make that little bit of wine I was able to make, but I needed to interact with people. So in college I was a lifeguard, and I thought, ‘I can do that again.’

“So I got recertified—which was amusing to be back in class with a bunch of 16-year-olds—and then fortunately Gilpin had an opening. There are really cool people over there, and I don’t have to wear shoes, which has always been important in my life.” 

There are certainly worse fates than having to don the familiar work uniform of a swimsuit while still being able to bike back and forth to work over one of the hottest summers on record. But just like an artist without materials or canvas, Walter always feels the nagging need to work in her chosen art.

It’s this, and the diminishing returns of boxed wine as a frugal substitute for home imbibing, that has Walter greatly anticipating what’s coming next. 

“It’s only just a month ago that I finally got a lease for one of these nicer warehouses,” she said. “It’s three times the size that I need, but it’s clean, it’s insulated, it’ll work.”  

Piece by piece, Walter moved into a new warehouse space in Rollinsville, starting with a desk and some beautiful rocks from her and her husband’s geologist days, which she arranges as bookends to hold up her reference books. There are just a couple of her “sports team of beckoning kitties” to bring back some of that character that she had poured into the tasting room.

With this year’s harvest season just beginning, and with the Nederland Jazz & Wine Festival right around the corner on Saturday, August 22, Augustina’s Winery is making a return with that small batch made just days after the Lakeview Fire took everything else. 

“This fall, though normally I’d have 12 different wines, I’ll have about six of my regulars. At Ned Jazz Wine I’ll only have three: I have a dry white, German-style; I have dry rosé; and I have one red—very young, but the grape is called Lineberger.”

Her new space enables her to prepare for the fall and winter festivals, including the Harvest Festival and the Holiday Mountain Market in Nederland. But Walter has realistic expectations for the warehouse in that she does not plan to open it for public tastings, understanding the amount of work that such a conversion would entail. 

Instead, her main goal is for Augustina’s Winery to return to Nederland with a new tasting room within Tebo Properties’ planned rebuilt shopping center. It’s the social aspect of the winery that she feels played an important part of experiencing and appreciating her craft. 

And while there is excitement brewing for the eventual move into a new modern and fire-safe shopping center, that reality is still a few years away. In the meantime, Walter still has questions and reservations in relation to the Lakeview Fire and to what happened in the aftermath.

 “I could see a lot of things that were salvageable,” she remembered. When she was finally able to steel herself to look at the remains of her shop, she noted how she could see the piece of the geode that had always sat at the entrance to the winery. It was given to her by her late father, who received it from a student during his days as an Earth Science teacher. 

The piece came from a much larger geode, which she had Nature’s Own rock shop in town cut into pieces so Walter and her siblings could each keep a piece. But even as her piece of the sentimental keepsake could be seen, intact and just within her reach, she, like so many of the shopping center tenants, was unable to go into the site and claim it. 

“It was very important to me. I had always had that rock, and it was there—it was fine.”  

While standing in front of the Rollinsville warehouse, Walter looks out at her new neighbors, a herd of yaks, as they graze in an open field, and she ruminates about where she is, how she got there, and where she’s going. 

The fire took her shop, her tasting room, her window to her customers and to her community, and in the darkest of times it felt like the fire took her craft, her chosen art form, away from her as well.

But always with her in that long wait over the last nine months were those three wines. Those three varieties contain all that was left from the old Augustina’s Winery, and contain all the passion, pain, and perseverance of the artist that Walter still has burning inside her.