Why would you go to the effort of selling your Texas-made wine in New York if you didn’t make much money from it, and there was plenty of demand in your home state?
For William Chris Wine Co., based in the Hill Country town of Hye, it comes from a desire to grow the reputation of Texas’ wine industry, said Chris Brundrett, who co-founded the company with his friend Andrew Sides.
“We sell wine in New York and in different areas where it isn’t necessarily incredibly profitable,” he said. “Our company invests a lot in the growth of that national recognition. It’s important that we’re in those markets, that we’re going into some of those tastings, that we’re presenting our wines, so people can start to identify with them. Because there’s nowhere else in the world where wine tastes like it does that’s grown right here.”
When asked whether oenophiles tend to adopt a snooty attitude toward Texas wines, he described how one of his customers spotted a William Chris baseball cap in Bordeaux, the famed wine-growing region in France.
“He was like, ‘No way!’” Brundrett said. “Most people don’t even know that wine’s grown in Texas.”
William Chris is one of the companies powering the Texas wine industry’s growth. Over the last two years, since it was formed through the merger of Brundrett’s William Chris Vineyards and Sides’ Lost Draw Cellars, its staff has swelled from about 80 employees to 134, they said. It has invested in several expansion projects, acquiring a well-established vineyard near Kingsland, which it is outfitting with a tasting room.
The company is moving the Lost Draw Cellars winery in Fredericksburg, which it deemed too small, to a 24-acre property in Johnson City.
All the company’s wine is made from grapes grown in Texas, they said — whether in the Hill Country, the High Plains area near the Panhandle, or elsewhere. The company also includes the Skeleton Key and Grower Project wine brands. It distributes its wine in several other states and employs a hospitality team to oversee its busy schedule of tastings, dinners and live music shows.
Brundrett and Sides met in the mid-2000s when Brundrett bought grapes from Sides’ uncle, who worked as a farmer and then a vintner in the High Plains. They recently sat to discuss the growth of Texas’ wine industry, the qualities of the state’s various wine-growing regions, and how this year’s extreme weather has affected their grapes. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Do you handle different aspects of the business?
Sides: We definitely do now. We saw the opportunity to bring our companies together for a bunch of different reasons, but one of them was just to provide focus not only for us, but people within our own companies.
Brundrett: When we first started, it was a little rocky because we were all stepping over each other. I think we’ve come to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Today, Andrew runs all of the production side, from grape to bottle. About midway through the season, I started helping out a lot more on the vineyard management side, just because I’ve farmed in the Hill Country more. We’re also working on two building projects right now. I was in the middle of leading our design team, and Andrew’s asking these really great pointed questions when it came to engineering, getting the project from the design stage to the build stage, and we kind of looked at each other like, “Alright, you need to go take this project over, and I’ll take over the vineyard side.”
Q: And everything runs smoothly?
Brundrett: I would say from a respect and organization side, absolutely. We have some shouting matches every now and then. But it’s really helped. We take a look at our organization every six months and look at, “Hey, what’s working, what’s not? How do we move people around?”
Q: What benefits does the Hill Country offer for growing grapes?
Sides: The number one reason that the industry is thriving out here is traffic. You have metropolitan areas in Austin, San Antonio. Dallas is only about a three-and-a-half-hour drive, and Houston is about three hours.
Brundrett: From a farming perspective, we have two of the most amazing areas to grow grapes.(One is) the Pedernales River Basin right here, which is sandy loam over limestone. That very well-drained, poor soil is perfect for growing grapes. And right up north is the Llano Uplift, a formation that was created about 2.5 billion years ago, with an underground lava field that pushed up, and then over time, got eroded away. What you see today is mostly decomposed granite over sandstone, and that is one of the other most sought-after soils for wine growing in the world. The Hill Country produces some of the best quality fruit in the state. Not that we don’t get high quality out of High Plains as well, because we do. I would say that growing grapes in this region is phenomenal. Drawbacks are, land’s expensive.
Q: I’m guessing increasingly expensive.
Brundrett: Oh yeah, absolutely. We can buy land in the High Plains for $2,000 an acre; this land is $80,000 an acre.(The Hill Country and High Plains) produce different challenges. In the High Plains, we have some of the highest elevation wine growing in the world, from 3,300 to 3,700 feet, which is pretty cool. So some of the coolest nights, highest elevation in the High Plains, which is really favorable to grow grapes into. And a bunch of really experienced farmers. Dell City, another great place: far West Texas, 3,700 feet of elevation.
Sides: The Hill Country AVA(or American Viticultural Area) and High Plains AVA are the two largest AVAs in the country.
Q: Do Hill Country wines tend to have certain taste profiles?
Brundrett: Absolutely. The wines from the Pedernales River Basin taste very different than the wines from the Llano Uplift; then those two taste very different than the High Plains. For an experienced palate, you can tell which one’s which.
Sides: We’re doing a lot of work now to subdivide the AVAs because they are so large. There are wines from different areas within these AVAs that taste very different. We’re trying to sub-appellate, which basically will give the distinction to an even more defined area, and not just blanket statement like the High Plains or the Hill Country.
Q: Do you feel the reputation is growing for Hill Country wines?
Brundrett: 100 percent. We’re getting more and more publications across the country. I mean, it’s like exploding. There’s pluses and minuses, right? The plus is, half the wine at William Chris is sold the day it’s released. So we need more people to grow more grapes and more people to make more wine to support the thirst of Texans and the country.
Q: How has this year’s dry, hot weather affected your fruit?
Brundrett: The grapes are smaller. We didn’t get the spring rains. When the grapes are growing from little pea size to bigger, a lot of the spring rain helps develop those grapes. Last year, for example, we had a really healthy amount of spring rain. We had one of the wettest, coolest springs and cool summers, so the grapes were able to get bigger. We made really high-quality; we had a long growing season. This year, we had a shorter growing season. Because our grapes were smaller, the vines had less to ripen. The grapes are meant to survive, right? They want to ripen that fruit because(the extreme weather is) stressing them out.
The hotter the vintage, generally, the thicker the skin. So you create richer, riper fruit with a little bit higher alcohol, typically. From a winemaker standpoint, the last vintage was really good too.
Sides: Just very different.
Q: Did you have to take measures to protect the grapes?
Brundrett: We watered as much as we could, which is costly from a labor standpoint — just monitoring and rotating all the watering that we had to do. Most grapes, whenever it’s over about 94 degrees, depending on what variety it is, the stomates — basically how the plant breathes — shut down. They’re trying to conserve all their energy. So you have the vine not bringing in the sunshine and making chlorophyll and all that good stuff.
Q: Do you guys think much about climate change?
Brundrett: Absolutely. We’re being engaged more by different wine regions, asking about hot weather growing, because we’ve been used to it for the last 15 years, right? Climate change, in a weird way, has been almost positively affecting us in that we haven’t had a spring frost because it’s been warmer.
Q: Looking into the future, do you think it poses a threat to the industry?
Brundrett: We’re going to have to continue to adapt and evolve. We’re already pretty set up in that we’re growing a lot of hot weather varieties. We don’t grow hardly anything cold weather. I think of any grape region, we’re probably the most prepared because, say, Napa(Valley in California) thrives on cabernet sauvignon. Well, if they don’t prepare to start making the hot weather cabernet, it’s tough for them to shift.
Q: I suppose that dealing with extreme weather is just part of the business.
Brundrett: A lot of winemakers that I know, on the West Coast, they have this very consistent weather pattern because they’re coastal. We’re continental climate. We have drastic swings in our vintages, and it has made us way better winemakers because we have to adapt to every weather event that happens. I think our fans really love that and find that interesting because we’ll make great wine out of the ’21 vintage, and we’ll make great wine out of the ’22 vintage.
Sides: The coolest thing for me about making wine is there’s not a recipe to it. With beer, you just throw everything into a tank and try to make it taste the same every time, but we get a different product to work with, which you only get to use one time a year. The end product is different. We celebrate that for different reasons.
Oct 5, 2022|Updated Oct 6, 2022 2:34 p.m.