VintageTexas – Share Your Texas Wine Faves, Raves and Grumbles

VintageTexas – Share Your Texas Wine Faves, Raves and Grumbles

Do you have a favorite Texas wine, a rave about something at a Texas winery, or a grumble about anything related to Texas wine or a winery visit. Let me know. Your opinion is important to me and likely also important to the development, improvement and growth of our indigenous Texas wine industry.

Examples, based on my own recent travels around the state and tasting of a lot of Texas wines, include the following:

Fave – I recently participated in a wine panel at Becker Vineyards where we blind tasted a flight of Rosé wines. The new 2009 Becker Vineyards (www.beckervineyards.com) Provençal made from Tallent Vineyard (Mason County) Mourvedre was stellar. It had all of the hallmarks of France’s Bandol AOC, the epicenter of the Rose wine world. I will be blogging on this panel and more details on this wine in the coming week. What’s Your Fave?

Rave – I recently linked up with U.S. Army Major Tom McNew and his wife, Anne Marie. They are Texas Winery Passport (www.gotexanwine.org/passport/index.html) holders. As they prepared for Tom’s deployment to Iraq, the Fort Hood couple has spent the past months touring Texas wineries. When I found them at Dry Comal Creek (www.drycomalcreek.com), they were debating if the number of Texas wineries they had visited was 108 or 110. That’s more Texas winery visits than I have made and I think anyone else in the Universe has made, as well. What’s your Rave?

Grumble – Well, I think that I have already vented yesterday on my blog where Texas’ Self-Proclaimed Wine Czar (me) Spoke: “What’s Good for Languedoc, is Good for Texas. It’s Time for TxQA!” – See: https://vintagetexas.com/?p=2212. We have to find a way to call attention to the best of our Texas wines, so that consumers at the point of sale can tell the difference between the quality Texas wines and the swill that some wineries are producing and wines that really do not contain Texas wine, but are sold under the Appellation-less moniker “For Sale in Texas Only” that is sanctioned by the federal government. What’s your grumble?

Some of you have sent me your experiences and opinions through comments on this blog. Many thanks to those that have taken the time to comments on VintageTexas. Unfortunately, these comments are not searchable or accessed by Internet search engines (as far as I can tell, this is a shortcoming of WordPress blog software).

So, send your faves, raves and grumbles to russ@vintagetexas.com and I will publish as many as I can in. Help move Texas wines higher, your experiences and opinions will help your fellow Texans find better wines and promote Texas wineries to make more and better Texas wines, too.