If there’s one example to follow in starting a Texas vineyard, Perissos Vineyards and Winery would be the one. Not only because this boutique winery near Inks Lake makes some phenomenal estate wines but because each deliberate, carefully-planned step owners Seth and Laura Martin took in creating this idyllic winery was a building block to the next level of making beautiful Texas wines.

Having heard so much buzz about Perissos, I was eager to get out there and see it myself. According to the Martins, the winery got its name from a Greek word meaning “exceeding abundantly,” which is a personal mission of owners Seth and Laura Martin who have spent the better part of a decade creating craft wines that raise the bar for Texas wine. And if you taste just about any of their wines, you’ll find that they do. From the beautiful Hlll Country town of Marble Falls, you take a winding stretch of road past Longhorn Caverns. As it turns out, driving into the vineyards is like driving into a little piece of heaven and you soon find that what this family has been blessed with is indeed, exceedingly abundant.

I passed Seth on his 4-wheel ATV on the narrow granite road towards the large barn-style winery while he  was checking on a few vines. He told me to grab a glass of Viognier in the tasting room and he’d meet me in front. I followed his instruction and before I knew it I was walking through the Martin’s “Library Block,” a section of the vineyard with one row representing each of about a dozen different varietals the family grows on their 13-acre vineyard.

The Library Block is the key element in determining what grapes the Martins will grow. Before they decide to work with a different grape, they first plant one row of that grape with about 75 vines—enough to produce one barrel of wine. If they like how that barrel turns out, they’ll invest more acreage in their vineyard with that particular grape, but not before that grape has proved itself in the Library Block.

“We’ve had to boot strap this whole operation. We wanted to a high level of accuracy with our grapes from the very beginning and we had to have that test vineyard to make our mistakes on a manner of scale,” says Seth Martin. “That way we have an idea of what to expect before planting a whole vineyard of a particular varietal. If you have to tear out 75 vines because a certain varietal doesn’t work, that’s better than having to tear out 750 vines that you planted on a whim.”

The idea behind this family vineyard stemmed from a hobby the Martin’s began to foster more than 12 years ago when Seth was a custom homebuilder in Austin. After a couple of test plots and a few barrels of garage-made wines, the Martin’s were on the hunt for the perfect property to start a new life in the wine industry. In 2003, they settled on a plot in the Colorado River Basin with ample soils of decomposed granite and just enough clay to help keep vines well nourished. By the end of 2005, they had finished out much of their Library Block and were well on their way to producing a strong portfolio of wines.

Their primary grape selections? The kind you’d find in Europe, along the same latitude line of Central Texas. (Portugal, Spain, Southern France, Central Italy)

White: Viognier, Roussanne, Muscat

Red: Mourvedre, Grenache, Syrah, Petite Syrah, Tempranillo, Touriga Nacional, Aglianico, Dolcetto, Malbec

When you meet with Seth and Laura a few things become apparent:

Precision in Winemaking

Seth makes the wine. (Though Laura is an integral part of the process as well.) From the beginning, the vines are carefully pruned and nurtured from the first detection of bud break. The canopy of leaves is often thinned out as are unsatisfactory grape clusters to help balance the ratio of fruit to vegetation. All of the grapes are hand harvested rather than using a machine for absolute care of the fruit. It’s a lot of work, but for the Martin’s it’s a true labor of love.

The wines are minimally manipulated in order to let the true nature of the fruit shine through. The Martins let the grapes stay on the vine as long as possible to ripen to their fullest potential of flavor characteristics.

“Winemaking is one percent of what we do,” says Seth. “We’re really making our wine on the vine.”

For Martin, the goal is to have as much fruit on the trellis at as possible, which helps maximize overall production. (That’s Seth’s degree in economics talking.) Once harvested, all of the grapes are immediately cold soaked in water-chilled tanks to better control fermentation. The tank room is extremely clean to help prevent any contaminating effects on the wines. Once wine production is complete, the wines are either in tanks or in barrels and they are tasted. Again and again. Between Seth and Laura, if a wine doesn’t make their grade, it doesn’t go to the public. But it doesn’t get dumped down the drain either.

“We send wines that we think are bad to a third party lab to be analyzed,” says Seth who requests a full panel analysis as well as a microbial analysis to find out what faults are in the wine. If it has traces of acetobactor (a bacteria which turns wine to vinegar) or brettanomyces (a yeast which gives wine a pungent barnyard aroma), the Martins want to know.

“That’s how we learn how to prevent future faults,” says Seth. “Every year has its own learning curve with a new lesson. In some ways it’s something you can never truly master, and that’s what I like about it. It’s like you’re an artist who has to paint the same picture on an entirely different canvas. It could be burlap fabric one year and wood the next. The painting should resonate similarities but they are going to be different because of the canvas you started with. It’s the same with wine.”

These guys are serious about the terroir of estate grown wines. 

The vast majority of wines from Perissos are from grapes grown in their own vineyard. While many wineries source the majority of their grapes from grape growers in the High Plains, the Martins are committed to making as much wine as possible from the grapes they have hand-nurtured themselves.

It’s a control thing, yes. But when you taste their wines, you understand why.

“If you want to have the best quality in your wine, the only way to do that is to control how your crop is being managed,” says Martin. “We do source some of our grapes from well respected grape growers like Cliff Bingham and Neal Newsom in the High Plains, but we know that in general, farmers are looking to harvest grapes for the maximum tonnage of fruit they can give their clients. Our goal is to get the most extensive flavor. Which means that sometimes we compromise the overall volume of fruit we can harvest.”

When Perissos does use grapes from other growers, they do not blend those grapes with their own to make wine. Instead, they make estate-only wines using their outsourced grapes and clearly label their bottles with the specific vineyard from which it was sourced including the actual geographic longitudes and latitudes of that vineyard. (For a Roussanne using grapes from Cliff Bingham, the bottle clearly states Bingham Family Vineyards on the front label.)

“We do that because I think wine has a distinct sense of place,” says Martin. “When you arbitrarily blend your grapes with someone else’s, you lose that character.”

Of course, from year to year and from crop to crop, such a strong commitment to single vineyard wines means you don’t always get to produce a consistent amount of wines each year. For instance, in 2010, Perissos harvested 1,500 gallons of Viognier from 1,600 vines on their property. In 2011, those same vines only yielded 500 gallons. (Last year’s summer harvest was the result of the traumatic 2011 drought.) This year’s crop is promising to be significantly more bountiful than almost both previous years combined.

It’s one of the reasons you don’t see Perissos wines on the shelves at large retail outlets like HEB or Spec’s. Their commitment to estate wines puts a cap on how much production they can project from year to year. But for the Martin’s that’s just fine. Eighty-five percent of their wines are sold at the winery anyway. And for them, the experience of tasting that wine at the vineyard itself is half of the reward.

This is a family operation 

That’s because Perissos wines are a reflection of a family endeavor. And you can almost taste that in the wine itself. Walking through the vineyards with the Martins you see that each one of these vines is part of their family, which has already been blessed with five children. (That’s right, three girls and two boys, all of whom are raised, educated, and loved on this property.) Likewise, each grape is evaluated and cared for. They each have a temperament and a typicity; just like a child.

During harvest time, Seth and Laura pick and taste ripening grapes and bicker at each other about the exact date to harvest them. “We used to argue about taking out the trash. Now it’s about when to harvest grapes and if we should blend them,” says Seth who adds, “but she’s always right.”

For the Martins starting this vineyard has rooted their mission in life in more ways than they originally expected. It’s grounded their goals as winemakers and as a family. And who wouldn’t want to grow up here among beautiful vineyards in the heart of the Hill Country? They even have three horses, their school room overlooks their grape vines and they have endless nooks and crannies of God’s Country to explore. That’s something the Martins found as a pleasant bi-product of what began as an academic and entrepreneurial venture.

“Over the years we’ve found that this is not just about wine making from what you read in a book,” says Laura. “We work diligently and tirelessly to make this vineyard and winery a success, but what is happening here goes far beyond our own hands.”

“In the poker game of life, we are ALL IN.” adds Seth. “We live here, we work here, we raise our family here, and we are thankful for what we’ve learned along the way.”

And that my friends, is what authentic Texas winemaking is all about…

NOTE: As mentioned, you can’t find many Perissos wines in retail outlets across the state, but you can easily order them online. I tasted through almost their entire portfolio of wines and I have to say I didn’t find any that I didn’t like. Among my favorites: 2010 Syrah, 2011 Roussanne, 2010 Petite Syrah, 2010 Tempranillo, and the 2010 Racker’s Blend. 

- Jessica Dupuy

Tagged: Cliff Bingham, Jessica Dupuy, Laura Martin, Neal Newsom, Perissos Vineyards, Seth Martin

It’s not every day you get to meet the man who grows the grapes that make up your favorite wine. The very guy who painstakingly plans throughout the year on when to irrigate, when to prune, when to net the vineyards, what to do when there’s a hail, heavy winds, late freezes and scorching heat. (And I’m probably only scratching the surface of what goes into vineyard management, aka grape farming.) So it’s a particularly special treat when one of the most well known grape growers in the state joins you (and a restaurant full of other wine lovers) for a dinner paired with wines made from grapes from his vineyards.

Such was the case Thursday evening when Neal and Janice Newsom of Newsom Vineyards trekked some few hundred miles down from the Lubbock area to Fredericksburg for a special dinner in their honor at the Cabernet Grill; a restaurant known not only for its great Texas fare, but for its Texas-only wine menu.

Newsom comes from a cotton family with dating back for more than 100 years in either growing the ubiquitous row crop or managing the cotton gins that helped produce the commodity. It was a path he originally began to take in his younger career helping his father manage a West Texas cotton gin and small cotton farm before following a bit of inspiration he received in college from Texas Tech professor and Texas Wine pioneer Dr.Roy Mitchell and planting his first acreage of grape in 1986; a vineyard of Cabernet Sauvignon.

At the celebratory vintner’s dinner at Cabernet Grill, winemakers from across the state gathered with a dining room full of more than 70 guests to applaud Newsom for his Texas-sized leap of faith almost 30 years ago. In attendance was Gary Gilstrap of Texas Hills Vineyard who presented a beautiful Pinot Grigio and Sangiovese from Newsom’s stock as well as Cord Switzer of Fredericksburg Winery who was one of Newsom’s first buyers. (And one of the first to gain Texas wine recognition with a silver medal from the Chicago International Wine competition with a dessert Orange Muscat wine from Newsom Vineyards.) Dan Gatlin of Inwood Estate Vineyards spoke briefly on Newsom’s contribution to Texas wine industry saying “I’ve done a lot of research across North America and I can promise that there are no better grapes than from Newsom Vineyards–hands down.” (more…)

Tagged: Bar Z, Cabernet Grill, Fredericksburg Winery, Inwood Estates Vineyards, Jessica Dupuy, Neal Newsom, Newsom Vineyards, Texas Hills Vineyards, texas wine