Drink Local Wine!
Monday, September 6, 2010
Jane A. Nickles

This week marks the second annual “Regional Wine Week.”  You might not have ever heard of “Regional Wine Week”, but as a reader of this website you most likely consider yourself a die-hard foodie. 

All good foodies will recognize the word “localvore.” This newly-coined term signifies people who are dedicated to eating food grown within their local food shed.  Localvores strive to support local farmers, reduce environmental stress caused by transportation, and keep jobs and revenues in the local community…all while eating the healthiest, most delicious food possible!

While the term “localvore” is only about five years old, the concept of eating local is, of course, ancient.  Think about it…just a few generations ago people ate what grew in their own backyards, or at the farm down the road.  It was the same for wine…all throughout history people drank what they grew, which somehow melded perfectly with the local foods. 

So, in full circle salute, the national wine community is taking notice of the benefits of local products and is encouraging wine and food lovers to discover something new (old?) and “drink local wine.”  We don’t have a cute name for our followers yet, but I am working on that.  Localwiner?  Vinalocal? Locavin?  It all sounds a bit too much like “crazy local wino” for my taste, so perhaps for now I should just stick with the initials “DLW.” 

All of this eating and drinking locally seems to come naturally for those of us lucky enough to live in Texas.  From my house in Central Austin it’s a short drive to cattle ranches, peach orchards, herb gardens and vineyards.  Texas might as well declare itself the “Eat and Drink Local Capital of the World.”  After all, last month the first annual “Drink Local Wine” Conference was held here in Texas, at the beautiful new campus of the Le Cordon Bleu College in Dallas. 

The Drink Local Wine Conference was the brain child of two dedicated local wine aficionados, Jeff Siegel, a Dallas-based wine writer, and Dave McIntyre, wine columnist for The Washington Post. These two gentlemen have long been proponents of Regional Wine, and the Conference they put on with the assistance of The Texas Department of Agriculture was outstanding.  Close to 100 Wine Lovers gathered to celebrate and Champion Texas Wines as well as the regional wines of many other states.  I met journalists, bloggers, and “DLW’ers” from as far away as St. Louis, Atlanta, Colorado, and Virginia.

Regional Wine, aka Local Wine, in the United States generally refers to wine from any of the smaller wine-producing states.  The “Drink Local Wine” guys define “Regional Wine” as any wine not from the major wine producing states along the West Coast.  Either way, the tag “local wine” includes our favorite wines – the wines of Texas.  Texas, as we know, is the currently the fifth largest wine producing state in the country, with over 4,000 acres of vineyards, and 177 wineries at last count.  Texas has a long history of wine production, starting way back in the 17th Century when Spanish Missionaries arrived and vineyard cultivation began near modern day El Paso. 

I first tasted a Texas Wine sixteen years ago.  I was a new Texan, freshly transplanted from California.  I proudly sported my “I wasn’t born in Texas but I got here as fast as I could” bumper sticker on the back of my new Ford Truck. However, being a native Californian, you know what I thought….I thought California was the be-all, end-all for wine, and I thought I knew it all!

One day a Wine Rep from Block Distributing darkened my office door and said he had some Texas Wines for me to taste.  I looked at him skeptically, to say the least, and said, word for word, at least in my memory’s version of the event:

“Now hold on, Bubba…I wasn’t born in Texas, but I’ve been here a while, aAnd I know all about this state…

We’ve got Austin and San Antonio,
And we remember the Alamo,
And we make some mighty good ‘que.

We’ve got America’s team,
A great Honky-Tonk scene,
And we know what Willie would do.

We proudly claim LBJ,
And Miss USA,
And Lance is our hero so fine,

We’ve got the lakes and the sea,
A & M and U. T…
But we ain’t got no stinkin’ wine.”

Why he stuck around after all that I’ll never know, but he did, and eventually he talked me into tasting the first Texas Wine that would ever cross my lips.  It was Llano Estacado Viviano, a Cabernet/Merlot blend.  The wine I tasted was probably the 1994, the first year that Llano’s brilliant winemaker, Greg Bruni, would produce this style of wine.  One taste of this rich red wine full of the flavors of pepper, currant, and plum forever changed my view of Texas as the land of Sweet Tea and Lone State Beer.  I bought a case to take home to my friends back home in California, and wouldn’t you know it, every single time I handed them a bottle of Texas Wine, they said the exact same thing….”I didn’t know they made wine in Texas!”

Texas Wines have come along way in both quantity and quality since that moment sixteen years ago, but we’re still trying to get the word out about Texas Wines, and Regional Wines in general.  While we have “nothing but love” for the wines of California, Oregon, and Washington State, it is nice to know that other states and areas are home to excellent wine as well. Some of those other states – besides Texas -  that make great “local wine” include New Mexico, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Arizona, Idaho, and Missouri.

By the way, wine is now made in all fifty states, so wherever you may travel, make it a point to eat local and drink local…you never know what you may find!

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