Hill Country wine, made in town.

Texas wine is grown in one place and made in another. The fruit comes off the Texas High Plains AVA, up around Lubbock, and the tasting rooms sit in South Austin warehouses and along Highway 290 in the Hill Country. The Austin Winery ferments and ages in a two-story industrial warehouse with food trucks parked outside it, and Nicolai McCrary calls the range natural and low-intervention. 2 No vine is anywhere near it.

Read the label, because the fruit is the part that moved. The Austin Winery's Spaghetti Western is "100% Sangiovese | 205 cases produced" off Walker Vineyards in the High Plains. 1 C.L. Butaud Wines bottles "100% Counoise from Farmhouse Vineyards in the High Plains AVA", under a house rule that every wine is entirely Texan fruit. 3 Ron Yates Wines pours on the 290 strip from Dell Valley Vineyards "at 3,800 feet in the Guadalupe Mountains and Farmhouse Vineyards in the High Plains". 9 Three tasting rooms, and the vineyard named on each label is somewhere else.

C.L. Butaud Wines runs on one rule, that the fruit is entirely Texan, and its 2023 Graciano is bottled as a single varietal rather than folded into a Rioja-style blend. 43 A hot climate needs sorting, and Kalasi Cellars says it was "the first in Texas to buy an optical sorter", which throws out the fruit that would otherwise flatten a red. 7 The Austin Winery's own account of 2023 is a cool, wet spring after drought years, then "persistent heat and wind accelerated ripening, resulting in smaller berries". 1

Randy Hester was a 36-year-old intern at Cakebread Cellars who took viticulture at night and worked under Andy Erickson, Michel Rolland, Mike Hirby and Helen Keplinger before he turned any of it on Texas fruit. 4 Narra Davis grows and makes at Kalasi Cellars with her husband Greg, which the winery notes is rare in Texas, on an estate block that supplies everything they bottle. 7 Lisa and Stan Duchman opened Duchman Family Winery in 2004, hired Dave Reilly and built it on Italian varieties, because the High Plains has "cooler nights and a more continental climate" that suit them. 8

Small lots go where they are made. The Austin Winery made 205 cases of the Spaghetti Western, so the tasting room is the reliable place to drink it. 1 Two growers are worth asking for by name. Walker Vineyards on the High Plains supplies that Sangiovese. 1 Farmhouse Vineyards in the same AVA grows the Counoise and the Mourvedre that C.L. Butaud Wines bottles under the vineyard's name, and Counoise is usually a southern Rhone blending grape, so tasting one on its own is the point of asking. 3 Everything I know about Walker and Farmhouse comes from the cellars that buy their fruit.

Texas spent 2021 arguing about what a Texas wine label may say. Chris Brundrett of William Chris Vineyards championed the bill that put strict geographic definitions on it, and Paula Forbes recorded what changed for him: "five or six years ago he would have walked into a restaurant hat in hand to get his wines listed". 5 Four years later the World's 50 Best Vineyards list put the winery 31st, the only Texas name on it. 6