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2025 TEXSOM Diaries: Sommer Camp Part Three
I spent five days volunteering at TEXSOM 2025 as part of the Sommer Camp program. These are my TEXSOM Diaries–a day-by-day, behind-the-scenes look at Texas’s premier wine education conference. Also check out Part One and Part Two! It’s Day Four of the wine wonderland that is Sommer Camp, and we’re getting started early: A Sunday…
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DFW Wine Events: September 2025
Harvest is underway in Texas, and our social media feeds are full of grape crushes from the High Plains and Hill Country. (Jealous!) Although few wine grapes are grown here in the DFW area, that doesn’t mean we have to miss out on the joy of the harvest season. Here’s where to get your wine…
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2025 TEXSOM Diaries: Sommer Camp Part Two
I’m a first-timer at TEXSOM’s Sommer Camp in Irving, Texas this year. I’ll be sharing my conference experiences here on The Wine Fairy blog. This is Part Two, in which we polish a billion glasses, drink a really old Napa Cab, and pair sweet Bordeaux with Tex-Mex. If you haven’t read Part One, you can…
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2025 TEXSOM Diaries: Sommer Camp Part One
Howdy from TEXSOM 2025, where I’m taking part in Sommer Camp! I’ll be sharing my experiences here on The Wine Fairy blog. Here’s what I did (and tasted) on my first day of Sommer Camp. The best way to learn to do something is often just to do it. Or at least, that’s what I…
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Local Sips: Saturday Tastings at Pogo’s Wine & Spirits (Dallas, TX)
Free wine is good wine, for the most part. All but the most hardened wine snobs can generally agree on that proposition. And yet, the more you learn about wine–the more you explore and taste–the more it seems that generic, mass-produced wine loses its appeal. Even if you don’t have to pay for it. Sure,…
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The 2025 Costco Wine Calendar: All 24 wines revealed!
It’s like Christmas came early this year, because the 2025 Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar wines have been named! It’s almost enough to make me want to brave the weekend crowds at my local store to see if that pallet has been plopped down onto the wine aisle yet. (Update: It’s here!) The Costco Wine Advent-ure…
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You hungry, Dallas? DFW Restaurant Week is here!
Say whatever you want about Dallas sprawl, the heat, and the traffic. I like living here because we have some damn good food. And officially starting today, August 4, it’s DFW Restaurant Week! Restaurant Week comes but once a year–and when it does, it brings great cheer. In the summer (in between the wedding and…
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DFW Wine Events: August 2025
August is upon us, and we’re serving up a fresh batch of wine-related happenings in and around Dallas-Fort Worth! Savor delicious wine dinners, do a Sangria-fueled crawl through Deep Ellum, enhance your fermentation knowledge with a homebrewing workshop, and lots more. Events are listed in chronological order. Note that Eventbrite ticket prices now include all…
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An afternoon at Lost Draw Wines (Johnson City, TX)
It looks, perhaps, like AI trickery. But the summer skies in rural Texas really are that shade of robin’s egg blue. The lolling clouds really are that white and fluffy. And the sparkling rosé, poured by a hostess and handed to you as soon as you’ve closed your car door, really is that perfectly pink…
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Becoming a Texas Wine Ambassador (Hill Country Wine Academy review)
I walked into the classroom as a Texas wine fan, and walked out as the leveled-up version: A Certified Texas Wine Ambassador! My reward for a day of attentive tasting and discussion was a snazzy certificate and a pin. Also: A permanent sense of responsibility for representing Texas wine in an industry where it’s constantly…
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Our heart is with the Hill Country
Like many Texans, I was glued to my phone and laptop over this Fourth of July weekend as floodwater overtook Kerr County. I was fervently hoping that more people would be pulled alive from the river and re-united with their families. At the same time–aware of the deadly power of flash flooding–I knew that rescues…
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Texas Wine News Roundup: Summer 2025
Welcome to our seasonal wine news roundup, where we trot out all of our best water-cooler wine chat from the last few months. New wineries, million-dollar deals, and silly numbers, oh my! Here are five of the juiciest wine-related stories from the second quarter of 2025. Story #1: Grape stomp season…kicks off! In Texas, the…