CHRISTINA EICHELKRAUT / PVT Bill Loken, owner of the Pahrump Valley Winery, shows off just a few bottles of the winery's selection and the awards they have received. Advertisement

Bill Loken, owner of the Pahrump Valley Winery, doesn't have any qualms about making wine in the hot and dry Nevada desert.

For Loken, it's all about the how the wine is made and the grapes used to make it.

"I tell people you can have a winery in a high-rise building if you have good grapes," Loken said.

So when Loken went from helping to run the winery to being full owner almost two years ago, he made some changes.

The wine using what he describes as "higher end" grapes, mostly from the California wine country, home to areas well-known among wine enthusiasts: Monterey, the Sonoma Valley, Lodi. Other wines are made with grapes that are imported from Oregon.

In addition, Loken began to age in the wine in oak barrels, a process not used at the winery previously.

The wine is aged for two years before being bottled.

But the barrels aren't the only new equipment, just about everything needed to make and serve good wine is new, from new refrigeration to a new wine cellar.

The existing wines have been upgraded, and new wines are being developed.

It wasn't long before almost every wine had a surfeit of medals hung around the bottles' neck.

"We got so many we don't even know what to do with them," Loken said, adding that there were plans to build a display wall for the awards.

The awards come from a variety of national competitions, including the Long Beach Grand Cru and the Taster's Guild to the Indiana State Fair and Jerry Mead's New World Competition, held for "new world" wines from the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

"We didn't realize this would happen," Loken said. "There's only one wine offered now that hasn't won at least one gold medal in a major competition."

This includes the winery's chardonnay, which has been awarded best in class.

"That's a real feather in your cap," Loken said.

And even though Nevada isn't exactly known for being another Napa Valley, since most of the competitions are judged blind, the wine has to speak for itself.

"We like to say we're bringing gold to the Silver State," Loken said.

Loken said in many of the competitions, the winery is competing with anywhere from 700 to 1,000 other wineries.

"It's kind of funny," Loken said. "It takes a couple of months for the competitions, so we forget. Then we get a letter or an email congratulating us."

And the awards just keep coming.

Loken said the first year the winery entered competitions in 2004, the submitted wines won five awards. The following year the winery won seven.

In 2006, however, the desert wines brought back a staggering 32 awards, and so far this year (which isn't over yet), Pahrump's winery has added another 42 medals.

That's two more awards than the winery won overall in its first 14 years of business.

"When you submit six wines and win five awards, that's when you really think you're doing something," Loken said.

And it's not only the competition judges who have noticed the winery's product.

Loken estimated that business overall, both for the winery and Symphony's, the winery's restaurant, had doubled in the last four years.

The owner also said sales of the wines in Las Vegas are also up.

Some out-of-state visitors come to the winery so frequently he thinks they're locals until the visitors tell him otherwise.

So there's little doubt the wine aging in the oak barrels will be in high demand in two years after it's bottled.