Sour Grapes

Last year at a liquor store in Austin a handwritten sign boldly trumpeted something that doesn't often get hyped in serious wine shops: "Texas Wine." Underneath it, in smaller print, undercutting the confidence of the pitch, was written: "We know what you're thinking, but trust us—this is a Texas wine actually worth trying." The wine being touted was from the first vintage of a recently founded Hill Country winery, Alamosa Wine Cellars, whose fourth and fifth vintages will be released October 1 to coincide with the beginning of Texas Wine month. But the real question was, Which was more odd, that a reputable wine store would admit to reservations about a wine or the existence of a Texas wine "actually worth trying"?

That Texas wines are often not good is the state's worst-kept secret. To be fair, Texas produces some good wines, but the vast majority of them are nothing that will turn heads. Of the forty wineries in Texas, only about five or six of them consistently put out decent wine. The thirty-odd others produce wines that, if they make an impression at all, it is usually a bad one. Even at a recent blind tasting at Texas Monthly, two $20 Cabernets—from Llano Estacado and Fall Creek, two fairly reliable producers—seemed thin and off-flavored compared with a $15 bottle from California.

The modern wine industry here, which proudly boasts that Texas is the fifth-largest wine-producing state in the country, has been in existence since the mid- to late seventies, roughly the same amount of time as the industries of Washington and Oregon (numbers three and four). Yet those two states regularly achieve wine that could be considered "world-class," meaning that it consistently receives high marks from the wine press and, because of scarcity caused by high demand and low production, generally fetches higher prices. Why is this important? Average wine does not sell an industry. "If you want to compete in the global or the national marketplace," says Thomas Matthews, the executive editor of Wine Spectator, "then you certainly need to make outstanding wines at a superpremium level with wide distribution and wide visibility."

Why has Texas yet to regularly produce great wine? It is axiomatic in the wine industry that good wine is made in the vineyard, which means that if you can grow excellent grapes, you can make excellent wine. Grape quality has thus far been the stumbling block in Texas. Texas viticulturists must grapple with an extreme climate that makes consistently good harvests difficult, intense heat that often makes the proper maturation of grapes impossible, and pressure from the market to grow popular grapes like Cabernet and Chardonnay even though they often do not do well here.

Greg Bruni, the winemaker at Lubbock's Llano Estacado, the winery generally credited with consistently producing the state's best wines, said that upon moving to Texas in 1993 from California, he was unprepared for the violence of Texas weather. "When I first got out here, I didn't know what a blue norther was," he says, reciting a litany of weather travails. "I had never experienced hail like that in the spring. Soils are spartan. We have extreme conditions. When it's hot, it's really hot. When it's cold, it's really cold. When it rains, it really rains."

Bruni, who made wine in California, is one of only a few Texas winemakers to have earned a degree at the University of California at Davis, considered to be the top winemaking school in the country, if not the world. But, he says, even that prestigious degree couldn't prepare him for the moody Texas climate. "California is a viticultural paradise," says the 47-year-old Bruni. "The grapes are so perfect that you would have to work to mess them up. But that's in a Mediterranean climate. Texas has a continental climate, which is a whole new ball game. They don't teach how to grow grapes in a Texas climate at school in California."

Excessive heat presents an especially difficult challenge. To develop the necessary components—flavors, aromas, tannins, acids, and colors—to make high-quality wine, grapes need to spend a certain amount of "hang time" maturing on the vine. It is during the maturation process, and its complex chemical reactions, that the flavor profiles of different grapes develop. For instance, immature Cabernet Sauvignon could make an herbaceous wine redolent of green pepper, while mature grapes will develop the more desirable cherry and cassis flavors and aromas associated with the best vinification of the grape. "In California," explains Bruni, "ripeness and maturity come often at the same time. But in Texas, because of the heat, ripeness comes before maturity." The dilemma Texas wine producers face is whether to harvest grapes that are ripe but still immature or to leave them on the vines past ripeness to develop maturity, thus risking spoilage and shrinkage. "We have to find a way for maturity to come sooner," says Bruni.

Some of the ripeness-maturity problem may occur because of the varieties of grapes being grown. Here, Texas winemakers find themselves in a unique bind. Wine in this country is marketed by grape type, as opposed to Europe, where wine is marketed by region of origin. American consumers typically shop for a varietal wine by name—a Cab or a Chard, they'll say, naming two of the most popular varieties—while in France, they will shop for a Burgundy or a Bordeaux to get roughly the same grapes. Texas wine producers find themselves in the pinch of having to produce and sell Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Merlot because that's what customers know. But they are probably not the grapes best suited to the Texas climate. There are other grapes, the so-called hot-weather varieties, that may grow better here.

One man who has invested himself in the hot-weather-variety theory is Jim Johnson, whose Alamosa Wine Cellars produced the bottles touted at the Austin liquor store. "If a grape is going to do well in Texas," says Johnson, "it's going to be something that's native to a warmer area, something like Syrah. It loves heat, and we've got plenty of heat." Johnson is giving Syrah, the great red grape of France's Rhône Valley, a try, as well as Tempranillo (the grape that produces famous wine from Spain's Rioja region), Sangiovese (the grape known principally for Chianti), and Viognier (the white grape of France's Rhône Valley). But the fact that these grapes have been able to produce world-class wines in the hotter climes of Europe doesn't necessarily mean they will in Texas: None of those European countries are as far south as Texas, which is in the same latitude as the North African countries of Algeria and Morocco. The risk, of course, is that no matter how good the wine is, consumers won't want it. How many times have you heard someone say, "I'm in the mood for a nice Viognier"?

But Johnson is unusual in that he has eschewed the conventional grapes and put his considerable investment into the ones with unfamiliar names. Like Bruni, Johnson is the rare Texas winemaker with a degree from UC-Davis. Unlike Bruni, Johnson is from Texas and didn't start his winemaking career until the age of 43. An affable fellow who wears a salt-and-red-pepper beard and brightly colored shirts, Johnson graduated from Davis and worked in California before heading back to Texas with a mission. "I left Texas to go to UC- Davis with the idea of eventually coming back, and part of that reasoning was that I had had some wines that made me think, 'Damn, I could do better than that.'"

Johnson bought 41 acres of land about 25 miles east of Lampasas, near the town of Bend. The decision to grow unconventional grapes was an easy one for him. "I think we can make great wine here," he says, "and I think when we do come up with something that's that good and world-class, it probably won't be Chardonnay and it isn't going to be Cabernet." So far his gamble seems to be paying off: This year's entire bottling of Tempranillo is already committed to retailers, and he expects the winery to turn a profit next year. That news will be encouraging to Greg Bruni, who has focused much of his energy on researching three or four hot-weather varietals. But he has to watch his bottom line and make the best wine he can from the Cabernet grapes the recalcitrant Texas soil gives him.

Hot-weather grapes may ultimately produce great wines here, but until then, Texas winemakers must deal with yet another obstacle: a shortage of viticultural talent. California has more than 800 wineries, and Oregon and Washington each have more than 150, compared with Texas' 40. More wineries mean a greater confluence of winemaking talent. And the talent simply doesn't flock to Texas like it does to the more temperate, wine-friendly climates of Washington and Oregon. "We first have to make some good wines to attract some people to Texas," says Johnson, "to show it can be done. Heck, if I hadn't been raised in Texas I probably wouldn't be here." That's part of the larger issue of critical mass: Lots of bad wine, it seems, is required to make one good wine. "California has more than eight hundred wineries," says Robert Parker, whose newsletter, The Wine Advocate, is arguably the most influential publicaton in the industry. "But once you get past the first six or seven dozen there, the quality is quite mediocre to actually insipid, probably no different than what you find across the board in Texas."

As it is, most of the strides made here toward producing world-class wine will be made by individuals like Johnson, who can afford (or who have risked everything trying to afford) bucking the market. Better wine is more expensive in part because it costs more to make it. A winemaker going for high quality will probably use French oak barrels, prized over American oak for its higher quality tannins but twice as expensive. Then, he or she must be able to leave the wine—a whole year's crop and the income that it represents—in those barrels for two years or more to age. These are significant expenses that cannot be shouldered by people or companies that can't afford to take a loss or wait to see a profit.

Richard Becker of Becker Vineyards is fortunate to have the resources to devote to making wine his way, relieving him of having to pander to the marketplace and the Texan palate. "We do not make a blush," says Becker, referring to the slightly sweet pink wines that are among the biggest sellers in the country and that are scoffed at by connoisseurs. "We make a completely dry Provincial-style rosé." At his Hill Country winery outside of Fredricksburg, Becker makes wonderful wines of the same Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Merlot that have bedeviled other Texas growers as well as some unconventional wines like Viognier and Chenin Blanc, which are also excellent. He seems to have solved the maturation problem; each of his wines displayed remarkably good varietal characteristics (Cabernet that smelled of cassis, not green pepper) and had excellent color and a wonderful concentration of flavor, unlike many of the other Texan wines tasted. How does Becker do it? To let the Cabernet grapes reach maturation, he actually lets them become overripe on the vine. This means that they lose about 10 percent of their volume and their acidity drops. The volume is Becker's loss on his total production. He adds acid back in, a practice that is common in Texas. To get them at peak condition, he harvests at night, when it's cooler. And he invests in French oak and lets his wine spend a good deal of time there.

Johnson's wines, especially the Tempranillo and the Sangiovese, also show surprisingly good concentration and flavor. Llano's vast array yielded some excellent finds too, particularly its 1999 Passionelle, a Rhône-style blend, and its 1999 Riesling. Texas has also seen its first two $30 wines: Llano's Viviano and Fall Creek's Meritus. These are attempts to satisfy the growing demand for superpremium wine. Both are fine efforts but fall a little short; a better wine from Washington or California can be had for the money.

Clearly, though, the pursuit of a blockbuster wine is on. Even Leonard Garcia, the CEO of Ste. Genevieve, in Fort Stockton, assures that his winery—known primarily for jug wine—performs more than eighty trials a year, searching for that elusive combination of grape, soil, and growing practice that might produce a great wine. It will take that sort of commitment and investment to succeed.

"What you have in California, and you could say the same thing for France and Italy, are leaders," says Parker. "They are the locomotives for the industry. They get most of the publicity, make the best-quality wines, and tend to get most of the extravagant praise from the wine press. That creates a marketable image of Napa Valley or Sonoma, in California, or the Willamette Valley, in Oregon. What you don't have is anybody like that in Texas. That's the problem."