Throughout her adult life, Fox School of Wine Headmistress Kirsten Fox has dedicated her time teaching the history and joys of wine.

As a child, Fox was immersed in the Utah mining culture because of her grandfather and great-grandfather on her mother’s side.

“Both were miners and their mines were in the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake,” Fox said during an interview with The Park Record. “My great-grandfather, Emil Raddatz, started a little mining town called Dividend once he started a claim.”

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His son, Harold, followed his father’s footsteps and has a mill named after him. Harold Mill is located south of Santaquin, Fox said.

“If you’re on I-15 in that area, you can see the mill on the hill in the east,” Fox said.

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Earlier this year, Fox decided to combine her two lives for the Fox School of Wine’s Mine & Wines Tours, which will debut on Saturday, Dec. 16.

Fox said the idea for the tours didn’t come from how the words rhyme, but from her soul.

“I started analyzing which Fox School of Wine classes have been the most successful, and the ones that I came up with were the ones with people who, first, had fun, and second, learned something,” she said. “So I thought maybe we could enjoy the fun about being out and learning about the local area, including the ground under the town, while enjoying the experience of having wines selected to be paired at different locations.”

The tours, which require a minimum of eight participants and will max out at 24, will be held weekly, Fox said.

“We are lucky enough to start the tours at one of the largest former mining locations where the Montage Deer Valley sits,” she said. “We have arranged to start the tours there and discuss the history of the town and how miners knew Park City would be a good mining location.”

The discussion then moves onto the location that housed the Daly West Mine.

“You can still see the head frame, which raised and lowered equipment and people into the mine, from the Montage patio,” Fox said.

The tour will pair the area with sparkling wine.

“The wines that are tasted throughout the tour were selected because of a significant connection to each location,” Fox said. “This particular wine was selected because of something wonderful that emerged from the wake of a tragedy at the mine.”

When the tour stops at Miners Hospital, the wine will be a pinot noir.

“Pinot noir is a red wine, which, as many people may have heard, are the healthiest wines to drink because of the antioxidants,” Fox said. “A pinot noir has three to four times the antioxidants that other red wines have. ”

The tour will include three more stops in addition to the Montage Deer Valley and Miners Hospital.

“We will go to an overview location at Deer Valley Resort to view the Ontario Mine and the other outlying mines,” Fox said. “We will also visit the Silver Star Plaza where we will study the historical buildings and view the Iver’s and Spiro tunnels, before we visit Park City’s former red light district.”

The tours, which will be held rain or shine and will run weekly through the end of March, remind Fox of the informal mine tours she took when she was a child.

“We would stop as a family and stop at old mines and poke our head into them because my mom’s family was so into mining,” she said. “We couldn’t go into the mines, but we stopped and poked around and got as close as we could. In fact, we have many Christmas cards with pictures of us in front of those mines.”

The Fox School of Wine tours will run from 1-4 p.m. and cost $187 per person.

Interested parties can register by visiting http://www.foxschoolofwine.com.

Fox is also offering a local resident discount.

“Fox School of Wine has received a tremendous amount of support from Park City residents,” she said. “In light of that, we are offering a special discount code that will cut $40 off each ticket, and allow locals to enjoy the tour at a lower cost.“

The code is “LoyalLocal.”

“I hope the tours give the people who take the tour experiences the concept of using a historical story to anchor the information about the wines,” Fox said.

The inaugural Fox School of Wine Mines & Wines Tour will be held Saturday, Dec. 16. Registration and information can be found at http://www.foxschoolofwine.com.