Yes! You heard right: Texas has a wine scene, and it is booming.
My Texas tastings have been wonderful; I’ve visited the area on three separate occasions just to ensure I wasn’t dreaming, or that my first exceptional experience wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t. Time to make Texas wine synonymous with great wine!
There are over 70 wineries in the Texas Hill Country, North of San Antonio and West of Austin. They are growing several unique and interesting varieties like Blanc du Bois and Black Spanish (Lenoir). They tend to lean heavily towards Spanish and Italian varietals, but have many other less common varieties that do well too. You’re unlikely to find your typical American Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon here – and that’s a good thing.
Before we continue, I do want to mention a small caveat to the above; the Texan size elephant in the room, if you will – approximately half of wineries in this area don’t grow, produce, or even sell Texas-made wine!
To my surprise, much of the wine offered during my visit was straight from California soil of other states. Wait – didn’t I travel to Texas to taste the “local” wines? Frustrating to think many states actually sell off their “great” wine out-of-state. One way to tell if this is the case is to read the label. “For sale in Texas only,” may not be Texas wine. There are many other tricks companies use to hide their sourcing, or otherwise deceive you. Fortunately many wineries I toured were completely transparent about their product, which I greatly appreciated.
I highly recommend you ask your pourer where the wine comes from. Many times they might just have a single wine grown and produced in Texas, so they can claim the heritage in their marketing. Also take care that many fine-print notes will claim an origin in the Texas High Plains AVA (think panhandle), not in Hill County. This is perfectly acceptable as all the customers are in and around Austin and not in the pan handle. It is also where the majority of wine grapes are grown in Texas… But I digress.
So which are my favorites you ask? For the record I visited 30 wineries (based off industry recommendations, online reviews, and of course them making actually wine from Texas), and here are my top 5: (released a day at a time) starting tomorrow!