Here’s the story that I’ve made up about wine from Texas:
Every non-Texan can believe what they want to believe about Texan wine. We can love it, we can hate it, our opinions and tasting notes can be indifferent. To a Texan, it doesn’t matter what the rest of us think. Texans are going to believe what they want, regardless, and they’re going to keep drinking (and loving) their Texan wine, thank you very much.
I don’t know how much of that story is actually true. However, I do know that Texas regularly vies with New York state as the fourth-largest wine producing state by volume, and I know that the number of Texan wineries grew from about 20 in the 1980s to more than 450 today, and I know that the rest of us rarely find a Texan wine on a retailer shelf or restaurant wine list. So someone, some large number of someones, are drinking all that Texan wine. And it isn’t us non-Texans.
White, Red, Rosé wine glasses
So a few weeks ago, when I gathered a group of friends and enthusiastic wine consumers around the table to taste through a lineup of Texan wines, it was fair to anticipate that this would be the first time that most of them had tasted wine from Texas. Which it was. It was also reasonable to anticipate some skepticism about Texan wine, the way we’re skeptical about all things unknown, plus a hefty dose of the group’s own wine favorites (Spain, Italy, Oregon...) further influencing our bias.
In other words, we each sat down at the table with a whole swirl of ideas, real and imagined, clouding our experiences of the Texan wines in our glasses. As the tasting progressed, we voiced those biases and preformed assumptions, and arrived collectively at a few takeaways about these Texan wines.
Red Wines Win
To be clear: This casual tasting was by no means exhaustively representative of all Texan wines, and I am certain that a different lineup of wines would lead to different responses and assessments. But from the wines in front of us that night, the red wines were the clear winners. We tasted white and rosé wines, but moved quickly through them as not our favorites. The reds, on the other hand, both stood on their own and benefited from our biases going in: the dusty leather and plum notes in the 2021 Montepulciano Reserve from Hilmy Cellars, for example, reminded some of us of favorite Spanish red wines, with bonus, unique notes of tamarind and horseradish. Several tasters commented that any winery, Texan or otherwise, deserve to be proud of this wine.
Unknown and Imaginative
It may have been the unknown-ness of these wines that opened the door in some cases to creative and imaginative “readings” of our experiences of the wines. The tamarind and horseradish notes of Hilmy’s Montepulciano Reserve, for example, and these notes about the 2021 Invention LB from Heath Family Brands: “leathery, French thing more than an Italian thing,” and “red pepper seed,” and “the grape jelly on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
On Purpose
One of the most complimentary things I heard all evening was that tasters would drink a wine “on purpose,” meaning that they’d seek it out even if it wasn’t serendipitously poured for them in this group tasting. That was true for the Montepulciano and Invention LB wines mentioned above, and it was true about the 2021 Nichol from Airis’Ele Vineyards, which is a blend of Petite Sirah and Petit Verdot. It was the clear favorite of the night for one taster, and another taster described it as “as advertised,” meaning that there’s an appreciative synergy between the nose and the palate: the aromas were promising, and the taste delivered on that promise.
