Hey there everyone!
Sorry I’ve been away for a bit— I’ve been traveling pretty much constantly for most of November and I’ll be in and out of Nashville for a lot of December, but you can check us out on Instagram to see some of our adventures over the next few weeks... Plus we have some great posts coming up for you! Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled blog post…
Before we jump in, I’d like to provide a little background info on my past few Thanksgivings (I know— thrilling stuff): My brother-in-law’s family lives in Austin. Since Austin is a bit closer to Nashville than California, our little three-person Nashville family has been making the twelve to sixteen-hour drive to Austin for the past four years to celebrate Thanksgiving. Austin is a great city, full of great food, quirky stores...and also John’s family has a hot tub and a puppy so it’s totally great.
Unfortunately, the drive from Texas to Nashville is long. Like, LONG long. So there’s a lot of time to sit, sing Taylor Swift, and listen to podcasts (Special shout-out to Limetown and Serial… If you’ve listened to either of these PLEASE discuss it with me— I have so many thoughts!!). Additionally, all the car bonding time gives us lots of time to plan what we want to do.
The building itself is also cool— it's made out of limestone and has a very castle-y feel to it.
One of the things I’d been hearing about Austin lately is that they have a developing wine region in the Hill Country outside Austin. This trip, I campaigned very intensely to visit one of the wineries (not that anyone really argued that much with me…). By most standards, Texas is fairly new to the commercial wine game. Although they’ve been producing wine for years, they’ve really only gotten buzz in the last thirty years or so, but there’s a lot of new, interesting things happening with Texas wines right now.
We decided to check out Duchman Family Winery (mainly because I’d seen them written up in Southern Living) which ended up being a great decision, since the people we met were fun, knowledgeable, and unpretentious about their wine. AKA, they’re our people.
Wine for daaaaaaays!
Duchman’s been around since 2004, and they’re a primarily Italian varietal winery, and specialize in wines like Vermentino, Montepulciano, and Aglianico (side-note— they also make a couple non-Italian wines, specifically a Tempranillo and a Viognier). They use 100% Texas-grown grapes in their wines, which is kind of a big deal, since where grapes are grown makes a huge difference in how the wine tastes. According to our awesome tour guide Kelly, the grapes they use are from their own property, and also from the “High Plains” AVA, which has the cooler climate needed for Italian varietals.
This is part of their facility. They keep these areas at 55° and store all their barrels on property.
I’ll be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the wines. I’m typically pretty skeptical when a wine is grown outside of a traditional region, but the characteristics of these wines were pretty similar to a lot of Italian varietals I’ve tried. Most of them were pretty light and acidic, and I can picture them with pizza, spaghetti, and basically any other pasta dish with tomatoes.
Overall, a great experience. Is there anything Texas can't do?