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Boredom and a global pandemic led to one of the world’s best winery disc golf courses in rural Douglas County, Kansas, at White Tail Run Winery and Vineyards.
“I have to stay busy or I get real bored, real easy,” Dan Fuller, who retired from the U.S. Postal Service in 2002, said.
That’s how Fuller started the White Tail Run with his daughter, Christy, and son, Dusty.
“We used to have cattle and hogs and horses,” Fuller said. “When the kids graduated from high school, they left and so did the animals, so I had to do something with this 40 acres.”
He planted three types of grapevines on five acres, but the 18-hole disc golf course wasn’t added until 2023 with help from a Kansas Tourism grant.
“It all started with Covid,” White Tail Run Co-Owner Christy Flyntz said. “My brother and I, our kids were out of school because all the schools had closed.”
Playing disc golf at nearby Big Bull Creek Disc Golf Course became a way to expend the stir-crazy school kids’ energy.
“We like it (disc golf),” Flyntz said. “We're not the best at it, but it's something fun to get out and do.”
No one in Fuller’s family had ever run a winery — “I liked drinking wine,” Fuller said with a laugh — and things got off to a rough start.
“Within, I want to say the first six months, deer had come through and ate everything down to the ground,” Flyntz said. “That's why we call ourselves White Tail Run.”
Fuller said it takes three full years of growth before vines are ripe for harvesting in the fourth year after planting, but the damage caused by the deer meant White Tail Run didn’t begin harvesting anything until 2008.
Offloading their grapes amid an economic recession proved challenging, so Fuller started tinkering with making his own wine.
“I liked it (wine) and I've made beer,” Fuller said. “I've done all that kind of stuff, piddled around, so I liked trying to make it.”
It turned out he was good at it, snagging a bronze medal at an amateur winemaking competition in 2010.
“I was shocked that we took a bronze our very first year,” Fuller said. “We were competing against people that had been doing it for quite some time, so we were quite pleased about that.”
White Tail Run opened a tasting room in 2011 and has grown from there with the disc golf course attracting a new range of customers.
It turns out, the disc golf course is an award-winning 18-hole layout as well, snagging the No. 9 spot on UDisc’s rankings of the best winery disc golf courses in the world.
“That was not what we thought would ever happen, but it was something that we're super proud of and glad that we could bring to Kansas and our neighboring cities,” Flyntz said.
Wine is all about pairings and, at White Trail Run, the addition of disc golf has proven to be as good as red wine and a nice steak.
“The Cab Franc that we've got this year really goes well with a good ribeye steak — you know, inch and a half thick,” Fuller said.
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