The right retailers can help you find the perfect bargain or blowout bottle. Here are our favorites across the state, along with their recommendations for the season.
Wine
Decide for yourself how well some of our Lone Star State favorites stack up against international competition.
Jester King Brewery will host dozens of producers from around the world who specialize in a minimal-intervention approach to winemaking.
Which wine complements both gravy and Brussels sprouts? What can you serve alongside pumpkin pie? We've got you covered.
From the most extensive lists to the best by-the-glass offerings, these 35 Texas restaurants are a wine lover's dream.
Why are the world’s biggest wine names spending August in a Dallas suburb? Take a trip inside TEXSOM.
Texas vintners held their own at the competition, which included more than 3,200 entrants.
Jack Mason competes in "Uncorked," Esquire TV's new show about the quest to become a Master Somm.
A decade and a half after I wrote about the poor quality of Texas wines for this magazine, Lone Star vintners are starting to turn heads.
Comfort Bending Branch Winery’s Tannat grapes, a dark, inky variety from Southwest France and Uruguay, make for innovative wines with rich fruit concentration and grippy tannin. 2012 Estate Tannat, CM, $60. Del Rio Val Verde Winery, founded in this sleepy border city in 1883, is the state’s…
Texans are a thirsty bunch, and our drinks package has everything you need to imbibe like Sam Houston's watching.
How one Colorado-based outfit is bringing its formula for urban winemaking to Texas.
The setting and wine list may be sophisticated, but down-to-earth French fare gives Austin’s La V everyday appeal.
Following a rigorous competition at the ninth annual TEXSOM conference, Austin sommelier Scott Ota, of Arro restaurant, takes top honors in what has been called a game-changing year for the state's wine industry.
And 62 more state wines captured awards at the Dallas Morning News and TexSom Wine Competition.
This year kicks off with a Tempranillo for Texas Wine of the Month. By now, you should be fairly familiar with the prevalence of this grape. It’s turning heads in Texas blends (McPherson Cellars La Herencia) as well as in single-varietal wines (Inwood Estates Vineyards “Cornelius” Tempranillo). This month, we…
Image Courtesy of Austin Food & Wine Alliance Tickets are now on sale for the Austin Food & Wine Alliance’s 2nd Annual Wine & Swine. The hog-centric event will take place on Sunday, November 4 at Pioneer Farms in Austin. A…
Newsom, who grew up in Yoakum County, took a chance when he decided to grow grapes on the High Plains. Today his vineyard is one of the largest in Texas, serving more than a dozen of the state’s top wineries. My family has been in cotton farming for more than…
The theater chain recently produced the “Bottle of Wits” wine series, which comes in both red ("Inconceivable Cab”) and white "As You Wish White."
Fresh into his retirement from the Houston Rockets, Yao Ming has taken up viticulture and is hoping his cachet in China will help him sell wine in his home country.
The drought leaves nothing untouched. This week the ongoing drought impacts the state’s Christmas tree production, grapes, quail, and peanut butter sandwiches.
(Editor's Note: This guest post about last week's Texas Sommelier Conference comes from San Francisco food, wine and spirits writer Jordan Mackay, a James Beard Award-winning author for his 2010 book with Rajat Parr, "Secrets of the Sommeliers." But we knew him when!) At TEXSOM, if you were not in a suit and tie, you’d have been likely to feel underdressed. But that’s part of the culture at the Texas Sommelier Conference: everyone’s suited up most all the time. Yet, thanks to the fact that they’re tasting wine all day, they’re likely still having more fun than you. And when they’re not drinking wine, they’re drinking coffee. And when they’re not drinking coffee, they’re drinking Campari, which the bartender of the lobby bar in the Four Seasons at Las Colinas, where the convention took place, told me the hotel stocks up on before the conference. The thirsty, wined-out sommeliers likely drink as much of the red Italian aperitif (with soda or in Negronis), he said, as the hotel goes through the rest of the year. (Other preferred non-wine alcoholic beverages included Aperol and Fernet Branca, as well as mezcal.) The bulk of the conference is taken up with education. In-depth wine seminars ran constantly for two days as heavily credentialed experts discoursed from the dais on subjects like “Grenache around the World” and “Red Wines of Burgundy's Cote d'Or” to hundreds sitting quietly in the audience, taking notes and trying not to spill any of the eight glasses of wine they had lined up before them. And all the while this was going on, a crew of masters from the Court of Master Sommeliers, the premier sommelier training and certification organization in the world, was putting 23 young sommeliers through a grueling multi-day examination to determine the winner of the Texas Best Sommelier 2011. The ultimate champion, Bill Elsey, was crowned at TEXSOM’s concluding event, the Grand Tasting, at which dozens of invited wineries and importers poured their wares for all the convention’s attendees. TEXSOM is of particular relevance to me as, when I left Austin and Texas Monthly in 2001 to pursue my own interest in wine outside Texas, there were, to my knowledge, no dedicated sommeliers in Austin. I hardly knew what a sommelier was when I arrived in San Francisco later that year. Yet destiny led me to fall in love with and, in 2006, marry, a sommelier. Last year, I published Secrets of the Sommeliers. These days, as I learned at TEXSOM, Austin has several sommeliers, like the spirited June Rodil (who won Texas Best Sommelier in 2009) of Congress and the affable Mark Sayre of the Four Seasons (2007’s winner). Texas has long been an important place for wine, even if it wasn’t noted for its sommelier community. Rebecca Murphy, who was one of the first members of the modern sommelier profession in Texas, starting in Dallas in 1972, remembers there being no culture of the professional wine steward. “I was working by myself, figuring out how to be a sommelier on the job,” she said. Today Murphy writes periodically on wine for the Dallas Morning News and runs its wine competition
(Ground beef guru Josh Ozersky, from a 2008 Nightline appearance) Wednesday at approximately 4 p.m., culinary event planner Mike Thelin was driving around Austin in search of hardwood briquettes, trying to fill a last-minute request from one of the many chefs participating in the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival. The 26th edition kicks off tonight with the Stars Across Texas Classic at the Long Center for the Performing Arts. Local talent will be featured at the gala, including Austinites Tyson Cole (Uchi/Uchiko), Shawn Cirkiel (Parkside) and David Bull (Congress), new part-time San Antonioan John Besh (Luke) and current Texas Monthly cover star Tom Perini (Perini Ranch). But Thelin and the festival staff have also wrangled an eclectic out-of-towner A-List for the weekend, including L.A.'s Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (Animal), Australian chef and cookbook author Andrew Dwyer and several luminaries from his own home base of Portland, Oregon.
Veer off I-35 to explore this lively stretch of boutiques, bistros, and gift shops galore.
Hot CDs The real pleasure in Toni Price’s Sol Power (Antone’s/Discovery/Sire) is trying to peg her as country, blues, or folk. Whether she’s singing something silly and simple, such as “Cats and Dogs,” or taking the sultry and sublime route, as when she covers Allen Toussaint’s “Funky,” the Austinite offers…
