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Can you buy wine on Sundays? And other Texas drinking questions, answered
Texas has some old liquor laws that are just plain weird. If you’ve lived here a while, you’ve probably already encountered them. If you just moved to Texas, welcome! I hope you enjoy the BBQ and the free chips and salsa. Also, please stop honking your car horn at red lights. We don’t do that…
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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…
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Drink North Texas Wine Festival at the Frontiers of Flight Museum (Dallas, TX)
North Texas wines took flight last Saturday with a special showcase of 12 local producers. DFW wine fans, you came and saw and sipped. From bold reds to crisp aromatic whites to only-in-Texas oddball blends, there was wine aplenty for all y’all Texas wine lovers. The host was the North Texas Wine Country trade organization.…
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Exploring Texas’s Bay Breeze Wine Trail
Bay Breeze is Texas’s newest named wine trail, Texas Wine Lover blog reports. It was organized in 2017 and currently includes five wineries in Southeast Texas. What’s a wine trail? Basically, it’s a group of wineries that are close enough to hop around on a day or a weekend. Bay Breeze is one of the…
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Texas wines and good times at Salado Winery Co. (Salado, TX)
Texas country highways in the springtime are idyllic, all blankets of wildflowers and baby cows. The April rains have made the grass tall and green. The smell of hickory and mesquite smoke hovers faintly in the air. And if you tire of the ever-thickening traffic as you pass through growing cities like Temple and Waco,…
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Texas Wine News Roundup: Spring 2025
If you’re tired of doom-scrolling, have you tried wine-scrolling? That’s when you try not to consume any news unless it’s related to wine. I have been wine-scrolling most of this year. I set up my devices to take me directly to wine content, instead of regular economic and political news. Sure, I’m less informed–but much…
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A big win for a Texas Cabernet (plus 5 other Texas Cabs to try)
Texas enjoyed our own little Judgment of Paris this week when a Hill Country winery won a top prize in The San Francisco Chronicle’s annual Wine Competition. Yessirree–that’s right, California. A Texas Cab beat out many storied Napa producers to achieve the “Best in Class” award for a Cabernet in the $90 to $99 price…
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Llano Estacado acquired, plans expansions in Lubbock and Fredericksburg
Llano Estacado Winery is staking out new territory, according to a press release from January 14, 2025. Texas’s largest premium winery was recently purchased by a group of investors with big plans. Currently, Llano Estacado has just one public location: A tasting room in Lubbock, Texas that also includes a 200-person event center. The planned…
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Don’t Napa my Fredericksburg: Can Texas wineries stay affordable?
The Californication will continue until morale improves! Yes, it’s true: Tech and finance dollars–combined with voracious agrotourism–are coming for Texas’s wine industry. The great relocation of California residents to Texas has kept up its pace, remaining the largest state-to-state migration pattern every single year since 2020. We’re all feeling anxious about it. “Don’t California My…