We’re going to try this again and see if it stays on track. This is our newest attempt to put a blog on our page. It’s not that we don’t want folks to know what’s going on around here, it’s just that sometimes we get so busy we forget the side quests.
Going into our 20th year is an eye-opening event. It truly is amazing that we’ve been a winery for this long. When we got started, it was a dream, a passion, an excuse to work for ourselves and a reason to make great fruit wines legally. Like so many others in this field, we just got ourselves started and just kept going. It’s been interesting to realize that when we started there were about 100 wineries in Texas and now there’s about 500.
In 2003 the law changed that allowed wineries in a dry area to function like a winery in a wet area. Simply put, that meant they could sell directly to the public. Before that dry county wineries could only sell wholesale. We started our paperwork as soon as the law passed and were the 3rd winery in East Texas, behind Kiepersol Estates and Los Pinos. We would joke that we were the youngest of the oldest set of children in the wine industry. We’ve watched a huge number of wineries come into the East Texas area since then and know many of them well. There is a great selection of incredible wines available in our area now with wonderful people, places and events.
When we started the wine festivals that were available were few and were very different from what we think of them now days. Grapefest in Grapevine, TX and Gruene Music & Wine Festival have been going since 1986, and there were a few others, like the Wine & Sangerfest in New Braunfels and the Red River Wine Festival in Wichita Falls. Wineries also couldn’t sell at farmers markets back then. Now, you can find a huge number of wine festivals of all sorts and many wineries are found at local farmers markets.
Back then, wineries were a novelty, for lack of a better word. People came out to the woods because they wanted to visit the little wineries. We were a lot busier the first few years with people coming out. In 2009, as gas prices went through the roof, people stopped traveling far for just wine, and changed the way they spent the disposable income. This saw an increase in our commercial sales and shipped wines. This was about the time that wine festivals started popping up in various areas also.
We have had 2 children grow up working in this winery, had many great people help us out, and met many wonderful guests. Going into the next decade is exciting and frightening. What will we do new? What can we make different? What do we want to change? There’s going to be several new and different things coming up just this year and we’ll try to start this with a regular posted blog on some sort of randomness.
Have a wonderful day, enjoy all you do, and be excellent to one another!