Nine Texas producers poured nine wines in a room in Austin last Monday, and not one of them was a Cabernet Sauvignon.
That absence is the whole story. I was at the ATX Somms and Texas Wine Growers panel on November 9th, tasting through Blanc du Bois, Fiano, Vermentino, Sauvignon Blanc, Tempranillo, Marselan, two Tannats and a Petit Verdot. If you had handed me that lineup blind and told me it came from southern France or central Italy, I would not have blinked.
I have a stake in this. My family and I have been making wine from Texas High Plains fruit since 2015, and we pick at Newsom Vineyards most years. So I am not a neutral observer. But I am also not going to tell you Texas wine is good because it is from Texas, which is the version of this argument that has made people suspicious of it for twenty years.
Here is the honest version, with receipts.
Is Texas wine actually good?
Yes, and there is now third-party evidence rather than regional pride.
At the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, 62 Texas wines scored 90 points or higher. Texas took 122 medals in total, the second most of any US state, and won four Golds, the first in the state's history, out of 32 awarded to the entire country. Decanter named Texas one of five global Regions on the Rise.
The industry is worth $24.39 billion in annual economic activity according to WineAmerica's 2025 study, and Texas wine regions draw 2.64 million visits a year.
Those numbers are recent. Almost none of them would have been true ten years ago, and that is the part worth understanding.
What changed: a 2021 law almost nobody talks about
The most important thing that happened to Texas wine was not a vineyard or a winemaker. It was a labeling law.
For decades, a bottle could carry Texas branding, a Texas-sounding name and a picture of the Hill Country while containing a substantial amount of juice trucked in from California. It was legal, it was common, and it meant that buying a "Texas" wine told you very little about where the grapes grew.
House Bill 1957, passed in 2021 and applying to fruit harvested on or after January 1, 2022, ended that. The shift, as Texas Wine Growers frames it, was from "Made in Texas" to "Grown in Texas." If a label names a Texas AVA, a Texas county, or a Texas vineyard, the wine inside must be made from 100% Texas-grown fruit.
That sounds like paperwork. It is actually the foundation of everything else. Once a region's name on a bottle is a legal guarantee rather than a marketing gesture, the name starts to be worth protecting, and growers start farming for quality rather than volume. Texas Wine Growers, the non-profit that hosted the panel, exists specifically to promote that standard, with 19 member wineries and 22 grower members.
So when you see Texas High Plains or Texas Hill Country on a label now, that is information. If you want the rest of what a label can tell you, I broke it down in how to read a wine label.
Why Texas stopped only planting Cabernet
The second change was agricultural, and it required admitting something uncomfortable.
For years, Texas planted what sells: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot. Grapes bred for Bordeaux and Burgundy, planted in a place with a brutally different climate, producing wine that was a worse version of something you could buy from California for less.
The nine wines on that panel were a different bet entirely.
Tannat from southwest France, a region with a climate genuinely similar to Texas. Marselan, a 1961 crossing of Cabernet Sauvignon and Grenache, bred specifically for heat. Tempranillo from Spain. Fiano from Campania. Vermentino from Sardinia and coastal Tuscany. Petit Verdot, the Bordeaux grape that struggles to ripen in Bordeaux and loves Texas sun. And Blanc du Bois, a hybrid developed in Florida specifically to survive Gulf Coast humidity and Pierce's disease, which kills vinifera vines across much of the state.
Every one of those is a grape chosen because of the climate rather than in spite of it. It is the same move Australia made over the past twenty years, planting Italian and Iberian varieties instead of fighting its own weather, which I wrote about after a similar tasting of Australian wine.
John Rivenburgh of Kerrville Hills, who poured a 2017 Tannat, put it plainly: Tannat is a grape that should be grown in the Texas Hill Country. Not a grape Texas can get away with. One that belongs.
Here is the proof that the bet worked. Those four Gold medals at Decanter, the first Texas has ever won, went to a Souzão, a Tannat, a Tempranillo, and a Tempranillo and Petit Verdot blend. Portuguese, southwest French and Spanish grapes. Not one of them a Bordeaux or Burgundy classic. Texas won its first Golds the moment it stopped competing on everyone else's terms.
How does hot Texas make fresh wine?
Elevation, and it is the thing people miss.
The Texas High Plains AVA sits at 3,000 to 4,000 feet. The vineyards behind these wines run from roughly 3,100 to 3,750 feet. At that altitude you get blistering daytime heat and genuinely cold nights, and that swing is what preserves acidity in the grape. Hot days build sugar and ripeness. Cold nights keep the wine from going flabby.
The High Plains also sits in a semi-arid climate with very low disease pressure, which means growers can farm with far less intervention than in a humid region. The Hill Country works differently, lower in elevation at 650 to 2,550 feet, more humid, with night air pooling down from the Chihuahuan Desert to cool the valleys.
Two regions, two completely different sets of problems, and two different lists of grapes that solve them.
Texas is about to add two new AVAs
Benjamin Calais, the French winemaker behind Calais Winery, made the point of the afternoon when the conversation turned to appellations.
Bordeaux and Burgundy, he observed, sit roughly 300 miles apart. Two regions that close together produce wines with almost nothing in common, built on different grapes, different soils and different ideas of what wine should be. Nobody finds that strange. It is simply understood that 300 miles in France is enough to change everything.
Texas is around 800 miles across. The Hill Country and the High Plains are roughly 330 miles apart, which is the Bordeaux to Burgundy gap, and they are nothing like each other. Far West Texas is another 450 miles past that.
Seen that way, eight AVAs for a state this size is not precision. It is a rough sketch. Which is why what is happening right now matters.
On August 14, 2026, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau published Notice No. 243, formally proposing two new Texas AVAs:
Llano Uplift, 2,096 square miles across the northern half of the Texas Hill Country AVA. The defining feature is geological. Limestone and sandstone eroded away over millions of years to expose a core of billion-year-old granite underneath.
Hickory Sands District, 193 square miles sitting entirely inside the proposed Llano Uplift, centered on Mason County. Iron-rich granite and sandstone soils, irrigated by the Hickory Aquifer, already planted largely to Spanish and Italian varieties.
The public comment period closed on October 13, 2026, which puts both at the final stage before establishment.
There is a wine on this list from inside that story. The Lewis Wines Two Tales Vermentino comes from Two Tales Vineyard in Pontotoc, in Mason County, grown on loamy sandstone over granite. That is the Hickory Sands District, described exactly.
And then there is Dell Valley
The third proposal is the strangest and my favorite.
Dell Valley sits in northeastern Hudspeth County, in the Chihuahuan Desert about 20 miles west of the Guadalupe Mountains and 75 miles east of El Paso. It runs from 3,640 to 4,200 feet and receives eight to ten inches of rain a year, surviving on irrigation from the Bone Spring-Victorio Aquifer beneath it.
The proposed appellation is, for practical purposes, a single vineyard. One site, in the desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere else making wine in Texas.
That is less unusual here than it sounds. The Escondido Valley AVA, established in 1992, was also created around one vineyard and one producer. But Dell Valley has a detail I cannot stop thinking about. Dr. Justin Scheiner of Texas A&M, who prepared the petition, originally submitted it under the name Hidden Waters, which describes the aquifer the whole place depends on. TTB rejected the name on the grounds that it lacked name recognition, so it became Dell Valley, after the nearby town of Dell City.
A desert valley growing wine grapes on hidden water, renamed for a town because the honest name was not famous enough. The petition was accepted as perfected in August 2024 and is still sitting on TTB's pending list.
You can taste what is at stake. The William Chris Skeleton Key on this list draws on Dell Valley Vineyard fruit from vines planted in 1987. Those are old vines in a place with no appellation, so the label cannot tell you where they came from in any meaningful way. That is precisely the gap an AVA exists to close.
The nine wines, and what each one proves
In pour order. Four of these I would buy again without hesitating, and I have marked them.
Elisa Christopher Wines 2024 Sparkling Blanc du Bois · Mound Prairie Vineyards, Coastal Plains 100% Blanc du Bois, traditional method, six months on the lees, no dosage, 13%. A hybrid grape bred for humidity, made into serious sparkling wine. Gold medal on the Texas Wine Growers Best of Texas list.
Portree Cellars 2022 Fiano · Pepper Jack Vineyards, Brownfield, Texas High Plains 100% Fiano at 12% alcohol and pH 3.2, which is bracingly fresh for a place this hot. 163 cases. Double Gold and Class Champion at Houston 2023. Southern Italian grape, West Texas address.
Lewis Wines 2025 Two Tales Vermentino ★ · Two Tales Vineyard, Pontotoc, Texas Hill Country Six-year-old vines on loamy sandstone over granite, night-harvested by hand, whole-cluster pressed, stainless only, 12.6%. Clean and precise, and the best argument on the table that Texas can make a white with real tension.
William Chris Vineyards 2025 Skeleton Key Sauvignon Blanc · Dell Valley and Boxing Rabbit Vineyards 87% Sauvignon Blanc, 13% Sémillon from vines planted in 1987 and 1975, at 3,400 to 3,750 feet. Large oak fermenter, concrete egg, French oak, partial malolactic. 224 cases. Nearly forty-year-old vines in a West Texas desert that has no appellation to its name yet.
Lost Draw Wines 2020 Tempranillo ★ · Lost Draw Vineyard, Texas High Plains 98% Tempranillo with 2% Malbec, from vines planted in 2005 at 3,100 to 3,600 feet in sandy loam over limestone. Seven days on skins in oak foudres, 21 months in French and American oak. 286 cases, 14.2%. This is the wine that would fool people in a blind tasting.
Sandy Road Vineyards 2023 Estate Marselan ★ · Johnson City, Texas Hill Country 100% Marselan, estate grown at 1,420 feet on sandy loam, limestone and red clay. 16 months French oak, 167 cases, 14.9%. Platinum and Texas Reserve Class Champion at Fort Worth 2025, 94 points from Beverage Dynamics. A grape most Americans have never heard of, doing exactly what it was bred to do.
Ab Astris Winery 2022 Estate Tannat · Ab Astris Estate Vineyard, Texas Hill Country 100% estate Tannat, fermented in stainless to dry, then roughly 30 months in 40% new American oak. 93 points from James Suckling. Tannat is tannic and structured by nature and Texas gives it the ripeness to carry that.
Kerrville Hills Winery 2017 Tannat · Rustic Spur Vineyard, Fredericksburg, Texas Hill Country Harvested August 2, 2017 at 25 Brix, aged in neutral oak, bottled March 2020. Roughly ten years of ageability. A nine-year-old Texas red that is still holding, which is the thing skeptics assume cannot happen here.
Calais Winery 2020 Cuvée du Chêne ★ · Narra Vineyards, Texas High Plains 100% Petit Verdot from 3,300 feet in shallow sandy loam, 32 months in French oak, 154 cases. 95 points from Jonathan Cristaldi. Benjamin Calais is a French winemaker making French-styled wine from Texas fruit, and this was the finale for a reason.
How to buy Texas wine without guessing
Three rules.
Look for a place name on the label. A Texas AVA, a Texas county, or a named vineyard. Since 2022 that is a legal guarantee of 100% Texas fruit. A bottle that says only "Texas" without any of those is telling you less.
Expect to pay $30 to $60, and understand why. These are tiny productions. Several wines on this list were under 200 cases. Texas does not have the acreage or the scale to compete on price, and a $12 Texas wine is usually a worse deal than a $12 wine from somewhere with cheaper land.
Start with the grapes nobody expects. Tannat, Marselan, Tempranillo, Fiano, Vermentino. The classics are where Texas competes worst and these are where it competes best.
What I would tell you as someone who picks here
I pick Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat in the High Plains most years, and I have stood in those rows in August when it is 100 degrees at nine in the morning. I know what the fruit tastes like coming off the vine and I know how hard the weather makes it. This year a late freeze and a dry summer cut our yield nearly in half. I am not a grower. I harvest alongside them and make wine from the fruit, which means I have the hands-on version of this and not the twenty-years-of-risk version.
That is the honest counterweight to the medal count. Texas is a difficult place to grow grapes, the vintages swing hard, and the wine costs more than it should because the margins are thin and the risk is real.
But the gap between Texas wine in 2016 and Texas wine in 2026 is not a marketing story. It is a labeling law, twenty years of figuring out which grapes actually belong here, and a generation of growers who stopped apologizing. The wines on that table were not good for Texas. They were good.
If you want somewhere to start, every bottle I have recommended lives in one running list organized by style and by store, and Calais Winery has been on it for a while. If you would rather taste through Texas with someone walking you through it, that is what the private tastings are for, and a Texas flight is one of my favorites to pour because it changes minds in about twenty minutes.
Texas wine, quick answers
Is Texas wine good?
Yes, and there is third-party evidence now. At the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, 62 Texas wines scored 90 points or higher and Texas took 122 medals, the second most of any US state. The state won its first four Gold medals, and Decanter named Texas one of five global Regions on the Rise.
What grapes grow best in Texas?
Heat-adapted Mediterranean, Iberian and southwest French varieties rather than Bordeaux and Burgundy classics. Tannat, Tempranillo, Marselan, Mourvèdre and Petit Verdot for reds. Fiano, Vermentino, Roussanne and Blanc du Bois for whites. Texas won its first ever Decanter Golds with a Souzão, a Tannat, a Tempranillo and a Tempranillo-Petit Verdot blend.
What does "Grown in Texas" mean on a wine label?
It means 100% Texas-grown fruit. Under House Bill 1957, passed in 2021 and applying to fruit harvested from January 1, 2022, any wine whose label names a Texas AVA, a Texas county or a Texas vineyard must be made entirely from Texas grapes. Before that law, a bottle could carry Texas branding while containing out-of-state juice.
How many AVAs does Texas have?
Eight established AVAs, with two more at the final stage of approval. TTB published a proposal on August 14, 2026 to establish the Llano Uplift and Hickory Sands District AVAs in the Texas Hill Country, and the public comment period closed on October 13, 2026. A third, Dell Valley in Hudspeth County, is still pending.
How much should you pay for good Texas wine?
Expect $30 to $60. Texas productions are tiny, often under 300 cases, and the state does not have the acreage to compete on price. A $12 Texas wine is usually a worse deal than a $12 wine from a region with cheaper land and larger scale.
Which Texas wineries should I start with?
From this tasting, Lost Draw Wines, Lewis Wines, Sandy Road Vineyards and Calais Winery are the four I would buy again. For broader exploration, the Texas Wine Growers member list is a reliable filter, since membership requires 100% Texas-grown fruit.
Jennifer Strachan is the founder of Wine, Uncomplicated. WSET II certified, Texas Wine Ambassador, and has been making wine from Texas High Plains fruit since 2015. She attended the ATX Somms and Texas Wine Growers panel at the Hahn Agency in Austin on November 9, 2026.