What does the future hold for Texan wine?

Texas has a growing wine industry, and yet its products are seldom seen beyond the borders of the Lone Star state. Does it really matter? Roger Morris investigates. 

When it comes to US wine production, there’s California – with about 85% of the country’s total volume produced in the sunshine state – and then there’s everyone else.

Yet, in spite of this imbalance in terms of size, other American states and regions are now receiving considerable attention for the quality of their wines. Among these are Washington (responsible for about 5% of total US wine production) and Oregon (1.5%) on the west coast, as well as New York (3.5%) and Virginia (1.5%) on the east coast.

Now Texas is looking to break through as both a quality and volume producer – the first state not located on either the west or east coast to do so.

In the past, Texas wines have been discounted by the image – and actuality – of the state as being a very hot and very dry region well-suited to growing cotton and cattle and for pumping oil. In recent years, however, Texas has shown its ability to successfully grow a huge number of wine grapes. In fact, there is probably no other state, or wine region globally, that commercially grows and makes into wine as many grape varieties as Texas.

Consumers are responding positively to its wines. Presently, Texas has 443 wine producers and 1,474 acres (596 hectares) of vines spread across its almost 270,000 square miles (about twice the size of Germany) of mostly flat or hilly land.

The Texas wine industry directly employs more than 75,000 people, and its total economic contribution to the state is estimated at US$20 billion. By comparison, Napa Valley alone has about 500 wineries and 45,000 acres/18,210ha of vines.)

“And we’re still at the front end of the growth curve,” claims John Matthews, president of the Texas Wine and Grape Growers Association (TWGGA), and the owner of Cassaro Winery & Vineyard in Ovilla, located south of Dallas.

“Twenty-five years ago, we only had about 125 wineries.”Although the Texas Hill Country appellation around the small town of Fredericksburg gets all the tourist publicity for its wineries, the biggest wine-producing area is the Texas High Plains AVA (American Viticultural Area) located along the flat prairies near Amarillo, and wineries across the state come here to buy quality grapes. A third primary area and, according to Matthews, the fastest-growing, is the Texoma AVA north of the Dallas Metroplex.

Yet, except for consumers who buy online and have their wines shipped to them, Texas wines are seldom sold outside the state’s border.

Late to the party

In the post-Prohibition era, California held a chokehold on the American quality wine industry. For decades, the east coast was considered too cold or too wet, or both, to grow fine vinifera grapes. The middle part of the country was viewed as being either too hot, too cold or too humid to produce quality wines.

But, beginning in the late 1900s, those arguments were proven to be totally false, and today almost every region of the country produces good wine. This has been brought about by modern viticultural methods, trained winemakers and not an inconsiderable amount of financial investment. Having major cities nearby, with millions of consumers to be lured out into the countryside, is also of great importance to wine regions.

“There is so much going on in the world of Texas wine right now,” says master sommelier Julie Dalton of the Post Oak Hotel in Houston. “I’m genuinely excited about the wines. They get better and better every year as producers learn to work with what nature has given them.”

Although Spanish missionaries in the 1660s made wine along the Texas border with Mexico, there was very little commercial wine production in the state before Prohibition, and it was slow in getting started afterwards. The first winery of the modern era was Llano Estacado, founded in 1976 in Lubbock, in what was to become the Texas High Plains region – the same year that Napa Valley wineries were getting their international recognition with Steven Spurrier ’s Judgment of Paris tasting.

Although local farmers initially had major doubts about the viability of growing grapes on the vast and windy High Plains, the region’s hot days and cool nights – a result of its 3,300 to 3,700 feet in elevation – fast-draining and phylloxera-free soils, as well as a major aquifer to provide irrigation, quickly made it the primary source of Texas-grown grapes that it is today.

According to January Weise, executive director of Texas Hill Country Wineries, “80% of wine made in the Hill Country comes from fruit grown on High Plains. A few wineries here own their own vineyards in the High Plains, but most just buy fruit from there”.

But the High Plains was not the first of the eight Texas AVAs to gain certification.

That was Mesilla Valley, a small spillover region from neighbouring New Mexico, in 1985. Bell Mountain, another small AVA known for its Cabernet Sauvignon, was established in 1986. Fredericksburg AVA, located west of Austin, the state capital, is also part of the larger Texas Hill Country AVA, but was established earlier (1989) than its parent region in 1991. Escondido Valley along the Pecos River was established in 1992, and High Plains finally obtained its AVA in 1993. Texas Davis Mountains AVA was originally a one-winery monopole when it was established in 1998. Lastly, the latest appellation is the fastest-growing Texoma AVA on the border with the Red River and Oklahoma, rubber-stamped in 2005.