Tag Archives: Texas wine

Remembering the State Fair of Texas wine garden

Cotton Bowl stadium at State Fair of Texas
The Texas wine garden was at the top of the picture, more or less.

A decade ago, we struck a blow for Drink Local

Shelly Wilfong, a well respected Dallas wine writer, sent me an email over the weekend: “Sounds like a neat gig you had doing the wine chats.”

Which brought back a bunch of memories that I had almost forgotten about — the five autumns that John Bratcher and I did wine talks at the State Fair of Texas wine garden. The first couple of years, we did Wine 101 (first, with the late Camille McBee, and then with Dan Peabody). The next three years, we did interviews with Texas winemakers, sommeliers, chefs, and assorted local wine personalities. I always compared it to a mini-talk show, minus the monologue but with a terrific theme song.

Shelly does a fine job recapping what happened, including the Texas Legislature’s foolishness that ended the wine talks (which, as dumb as it was, doesn’t hold a candle to its power grid shenanigans). She was also quite polite when I sent her a longish e-mail in return, with more information about the talks then she could have imagined.

We did good work, and people still ask me if John and I are going to do it again. So what do I remember the most?

• The enthusiasm of the audiences. Really. We actually had people come early, and especially when we did the interviews. They wanted to know about Texas wine, and this was one of the few places to get it then.

• The enthusiasm of the people we interviewed. We had some big names (including Dean Fearing, a leading celebrity chef, and TexSom impresario James Tidwell) and I didn’t have to do much to convince them to come. Which speaks volumes about how important they thought Texas wine was.

• The crowds during Texas-OU weekend, which came for the football game but ended up attending many of the talks. Our location had chairs, beer for sale, and was next to the Cotton Bowl, where the game was played. The result? I tell people I never had to deal with hecklers in the Catskills; John and I had drunks during Texas-OU weekend.

Winebits 724: Happy 14th birthday to the blog

local wineThis week’s wine news: Stuff that makes the WC shake his head, because some things never seem to change — even after 14 years

• Hooray for Texas wine: No less than the Wine Enthusiast — about as Winestream as it gets — sings the praises of Texas wine: “Over the last 30-plus years, Texas winemakers have honed their craft and the state’s wine has established regional and national esteem.” Wow. Who knew? (Yes, sarcasm.) What’s most annoying is not that Texas wine deserves recognition, but that every time an article like this appears in a major wine magazine, it seems like big news. Which, of course, to those of us who have been advocating for Drink Local, it isn’t. Right, gang?

• Love those chateau: Talk to winemakers and marketing types, and they still insist that putting a castle on a wine label is a smart thing to do. Now, a British study reinforces that approach, because premiumization: Consumers judge the quality of wine by how much it costs and what the label looks like. In blind taste tests, however, they couldn’t tell the difference between £6 (about US$8) and £36 (about US$48) bottles. As if that isn’t depressing enough: Corks and heavy bottles are thought to denote quality, and one-third of those surveyed ranked a £10 wine (about US$13) with an image of a French château on the label as more premium than one costing almost 10 times as much.

• Where is Romania? Here’s a long story blaming the woes facing the Romanian wine industry on the Cold War, when too much of its wine was cheaply and poorly made. The problem with that excuse, as we’ve seen before: Who buying wine today remembers that? Communism fell more than 30 years ago — two generations in wine drinking time.  The reasons aren’t complicated: Declining wine consumption, lots of wine from lots of other places, and the reluctance of importers, wholesalers, and retailers in the U.S. to handle something that no one has ever heard of.

Pat Brennan, 1942-2021

Pat brennan
Pat Brennan, 1942-2021

Pat was a Texas wine pioneer, but more importantly, he was a genuinely nice guy

Pat Brennan, who died last week after a long illness, made his mark in the Texas wine business in any number of ways. Perhaps most importantly, he helped make viognier the state’s signature white grape, and his Brennan viognier was not just one of Texas’ best, but one of the best in the U.S.

Pat did such a good job with viognier that the one time he made a chardonnay, it sat on the tasting room shelf. “We educated our customers so well about viognier that they didn’t want to buy the chardonnay,” he said with a laugh.

But there was much, much more to Pat than that:

• A tremendous sense of humor, even when the joke was on him. I first met Pat during one of those wonderfully 100-degree Texas summer days when he was pouring his wine at a steak cook-off in a town called Hico. It was the first vintage of the viognier, and the polite thing to write in an obituary is to note that it wasn’t Pat’s best effort. Which he knew, and always laughed about when I told the story over the years to people tasting his wine for the first time.

• A genuinely nice guy, who always went out of his way to help others understand and appreciate Texas wine. It didn’t matter if it was someone in his tasting room or wine writers – Pat would open the bottles and start talking about what he was trying to do in Texas. Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post and I once drove the two-plus hours to Comanche to taste Pat’s wines because it was so much fun to do.

• And then there was Comanche, which is not only in the middle of the nowhere but was dry when Pat opened the winery there in 2001. That meant he couldn’t sell his wine from the tasting room, cutting off a key source of revenue. Pat didn’t gripe about it much; he just worked with others to get the law changed, which happened several years later.

• The cleanest winery I’ve ever seen – operating room clean. Which was not surprising, since Pat was a physician. In those days, regional wineries that were that spic and span were few and far between.

So if wine is about memories, and I’m convinced that it is, I’ll always remember Pat Brennan.

Photo: Carole Topalian via Edible Austin

Winebits 602: Texas wine, legal weed, wine gadgets

Texas wineThis week’s wine news: Fredericksburg’s Cabernet Grill honored for its commitment to Texas wine, plus trouble in legal weed land and do we really need more wine gadgets?

• True to its roots: Fredericksburg’s Cabernet Grill has been named one of “America’s 100 Best Wine Restaurants” by Wine Enthusiast magazine for the second year in a row. It’s an honor much deserved – chef-owner Ross Burtwell has had an all Texas wine list for years, and long before drink local was hip and trendy. The list has 145 wines from 45 wineries, demonstrating that local wine pairs with local food. That’s something I’ve been able to enjoy during several visits to the Hill Country.

• Trouble in legal weed land: Constellation Brands, which sold off its cheap wine brands to pursue a future selling legal weed, lost more than $800 million on its investment in the first quarter of this year. The story in the link, from Shanken News Daily, tries to put the high in that low, as trade news reporting often does, but one question remains: Does Constellation understand what it got itself into? The bizspeak in the article doesn’t help with that much, and it wouldn’t reassure me if I was a Constellation shareholder.

• No more gadgets: David Cobbold, writing on Les 5 du Vin, repeats a warning the Wine Curmudgeon has uttered many times: Buying wine instead of gadgets is the best investment almost every time. Cobbold reviews a wine aerator, and his conclusion: Buy good wine, and don’t “worry about useless and expensive gadgets like this!” It’s a sentiment marketers ignore at their own risk; the number of gadget emails I get has seemingly proliferated as wine sales flatten.

Photo: “2014-11-19 Grape Juice Bar 010” by spyjournal is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Asimov on Texas wine: Not quite right

asimov texas wineAsimov gives N.Y. Times readers skewed picture of Texas wine

Eric Asimov of the New York Times is probably the best wine writer in the United States, offering what a friend of mine calls a “thoughtful, balanced but personal approach to wine drinking.” He shows his passion and his joy for wine, he writes clearly and directly, and he doesn’t talk down to his readers. Would that more of my colleagues did that.

That’s why I was so disappointed by Asimov’s recent article about Texas wine — or, more specifically, about a Long Island winemaking couple, Regan and Carey Meador, who moved their Southold winery to the Hill Country. In the process, the story implied, they were bringing civilization and much needed progress to Texas winemaking. The article, displayed prominently on the cover of the paper’s Dining section, was everything that has always been wrong with regional wine reporting – not just condescending, but reinforcing the stereotype that those of us in the provinces can’t succeed without help from our betters.

It was the last thing that I expected from Asimov, and I do not write this lightly. In fact, it took me almost two weeks to decide to write anything. Who wants to be called petty and provincial?

Besides, I respect Asimov immensely (though we have never met) and have written very nice things about him on the blog and in the cheap wine book. And he has been a tremendous supporter of regional wine, helping to give New York the due it deserves. So the last thing I want to do is to get into a cyber-spat with someone who does what Asimov does as well as he does it. And this is not about the Meadors; people who want to make quality wine are always welcome.

Rather, it’s Asimov’s characterization of Texas winemaking that deserves to be called out. It was what those of us who have done journalism call “parachute reporting” – you parachute into a place with little knowledge beyond general stereotypes, do a little reporting and get airlifted out, stereotypes intact, and knowing almost nothing more about the subject than you did beforehand.

So, given what I do here and the blog’s reason for being, as well as my work over the past decade with Drink Local Wine and the regional wine movement, know this about Asimov’s Texas wine story:

• Yes, as Asimov writes, Texas produces lots of middling, mass market supermarket wine (and I’ve criticized the industry for this and taken my lumps). But so do California, France, and almost every other wine region in the world, including New York. I’m sure Asimov has run across Red Cat a time or two.

• Asimov writes that Texas’ move toward varietals more suited to its terroir, as well as the presence of more open and free-thinking winemakers like the Meadors, is a new development. This is untrue; those movements were underway at least a decade ago. We showcased both at our first Drink Local Wine conference in 2009 in Dallas. I wrote about the same subject in 2016, “The Texas Wine Revolution,” for Texas Journey magazine. If I may quote myself: “What is a new, especially in the past 10 years, is the acceptance that Texas wine is not California wine or French wine or Italian wine. It is Texas wine.”

• Hence, it was especially annoying to read that a New York winemaker had to come here to save the Texas wine business from itself.

• The Hill Country, which Asimov visited, is not the most important place in the Texas wine world. It gets the most tourists (think Red Cat again), but the High Plains near Lubbock produces 80 percent of the grapes and most of the best grapes. Because, among other reasons, Pierce’s Disease in the Hill Country — the grapevine version of the Black Death. So judging Texas wine off a visit to Fredericksburg is hardly the entire picture. And by the way, it’s not Hill Country, as the story referred to it, but the Hill Country, in the same way it’s Queens, and not the Queens.

• And since the Hill Country is not the center of the Texas wine business, Asimov apparently didn’t taste Brennan Vineyards’ viognier, always among the best in the country; McPherson Cellars’ Tre Colore, a red Rhone blend that speaks to terroir; and Haak Cellars’ amazing Madeira-style wine made with blanc du bois. None have anything to do with Fredericksburg. And it also seems that he missed Perdernales Cellars outside of Fredericksburg, with its terrific tempranillos.

So that’s a more complete picture, and one I wish Asimov had seen. He could have called Russ Kane, who probably knows more about this stuff than anyone, or Texas Monthly’s Jessica Dupuy. Either could have recommended Texas wine producers who would have been able to offer more perspective.

The old saying that any publicity is good publicity still rings true, but accurate publicity is even better.

wine tourism conference

Five things I noticed about Texas wine during an Amarillo road trip

texas wineTexas wine is making inroads in the least likely places

• The shock of seeing a Hampton Inn – yes, a Hampton Inn – with a Texas wine on its Happy Hour list is almost indescribable. I’ve been in chain hotels in some of the biggest cities in the world that didn’t have any local wine. But a Hampton Inn in Amarillo? It’s hardly the garden spot of wine country. But the Bar Z winery is in the area, and someone, somewhere in the chain bureaucracy let the hotel do the right thing. This is just one more example of drink local’s move into the mainstream.

• Even more amazing: Much of this part of Texas has historically been dry, but has embraced the state’s wet trend. Since 2004, almost 80 percent of wet elections have been successful.

• I grew up in Chicago where you can buy any kind of booze at the drugstore; a fifth of Scotch at midnight, anyone? And I’ve spent lots of time in California, where you can buy a bottle of gin in the grocery store at 7 on a Sunday morning. But I will never understand the drive-thru liquor stores so common in so many small towns in rural Texas. I passed a couple of them between Dallas and Amarillo, and there were cars in line in each.

• One is never out of Texas wine country. It’s 350 miles or so between Dallas and Amarillo, and almost all of it is in the middle of nowhere. So what did I pass, about 40 minutes northwest of Denton? Brushy Creek Vineyard. Again, if someone had told me there would be a winery in this part of the state when I started writing about Texas wine, I would have laughed.

• The owners of the legendary Big Texan Steak Ranch want to do the Hampton Inn one better. Owners Bobby and Danny Lee want to expand the Texas wines on their list, since they see the tie-in between Texas wine and Texas food. That’s impressive enough. But they also want to price them so that customers can afford to buy them – $20 or $25 Texas restaurant red wine. Could they be on to something that the rest of the restaurant wine world hasn’t figured out?

Winebits 557: Captain Obvious, Kerrville, direct shipping

Captain Obvious
Even Drinky knows the value of customer service.

This week’s wine news: Captain Obvious strikes again – a study says customer service matters in selling wine. Plus, the end of a Texas wine era and a victory for direct shipping

• Believe it or not: A new study has discovered that customer service is more important than anything else in selling wine from winery tasting rooms. Or, as Paul Mabray, who probably knows more about winery tasting room sales than anyone put it, “File under nothing could be more obvious.” In other words, we have one more wine-related study that does nothing to help the wine business adapt to the 21st century. My grandfather, who sold blue jeans to farmers in central Ohio, knew about customer service 80 years ago. Then again, he didn’t have to publish or perish.

• The end of an era: The WC didn’t talk about Texas wine over the weekend; the Kerrville Fall Folk Festival and its annual Texas wine panel is no more. I will miss the event, and not just because I got to promote Drink Local. Kerrville was an adventure in and of itself. There is irony, too, since local wine has become a Winestream Media darling, and one of the events that helped it achieve that status is gone. Yes, a Texas wine panel was added to the Memorial Day festival, but it’s not the same thing.

• Hooray for Mississippi: A judge threw out an attempt by Mississippi’s liquor cops to stop residents from receiving wine from out-of-state retailers and wine clubs. It’s a ruling that could be significant in the continuing fight over three-tier reform. The Associated Press reports that a Rankin County judge dismissed the state’s lawsuit, though his written ruling offered few details. It’s another blow to state attempts, says the story, in restricting direct to consumer wine sales.