Texas High Plains Wine- Where our Grapes Come From

With summer to a close & harvest behind us, I think that it is important to know more about where these grapes, our grapes, are coming from. This is going to be a (fairly) basic overview of our wine region here around the Lubbock area. I would love to cover the other seven Texas American Viticulture Areas, but none are as important to the Texas wine industry as ours (I’m only slightly biased, but the numbers aren’t).

The Great State of Texas is the fifth or sixth largest wine grape producing state of the United States of America (depending on your source). Living in the land where cotton is king, it may come as a surprise that another crop that does well in this region is wine grapes. Having grown up in Lubbock, I was only introduced to this fact while at university in upstate New York. I am not a stranger to our local news or our local customs, and I care deeply for my West Texas roots but was shocked to discover that my home-state and home-AVA have been on the rise in both the Texas and United States wine scenes, producing Spanish, Italian, and French varietal wines and beautiful red blends paying homage to their Italian roots. I have learned so much about a place that I thought I knew in the research for this paper despite the limited amounts of scientific and historical resources pertinent to the specific viticulture and viniculture of the region. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. Ed Hellman, professor of viticulture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, for guiding me to those scarce resources about the Texas High Plains AVA as well as answering questions that I had presented him. (Full disclosure, this is an update from a paper that I wrote for a course whilst in New York. I have grown and learned much more about our region since then and can speak a little more eloquently about the subject than I could nearly five years ago.)

First, let’s talk about what an American Viticulture Area (AVA) is. The AVA system is the American response the French AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) system. These systems allow for the legal certification of wines (& agricultural products) in their respective governments. While the French system (started in 1411 with cheese, no less) is based on terroir and geographic protectionism to lessen incidences of fraud and institute regional standards, the United States system (started in 1980) is solely related to geographic origin of the wine grapes. While there are claims of terroir influence on the AVA system, it is clear that there are still very large AVAs whose areas are simply too huge to be classified in a single climate (the largest AVA, the Upper Mississippi River Valley, spans four states!).

So let’s move on to our beloved AVA. Located just to the south of the Texas Panhandle, the Texas High Plains AVA is a relatively new wine region of the United States only being approved federally in 1993. This vast region is approximately 8 million square acres(!) and is comprised of parts of 23 Texas counties, including most of my home county, Lubbock County. Although this region is large, there are only a couple of handfuls of wineries that produce wines from the region, with many of the other wine grapes being shipped to wineries outside of the AVA or into other AVAs for blending. For this reason it is quite unique to find a wine with the Texas High Plains AVA, or any other Texas AVA, on their label with wineries opting for the more generic “Texas” adornment.

The history of Texas wine mimics the tumultuous history of Texas and unofficially extends to the time when Catholic missionaries established missions in, what was then, New Spain. The site of the first vineyard established in North America by Franciscan priests around in the 1650s was at the Ysleta Mission in El Paso, Texas (strangely enough, this is the Catholic Church where my parents were married). For context, various parts of Texas have been under different governmental rule since the European invasion of the Americas, not to mention the changing boundaries of each new imperial power. From New Spain to French Louisiana, “Texas” has been a state of the Mexican Republic, its own sovereign nation and a state in both the Unites States of America and the Confederate States of America.  It has also had territory claims in today’s modern states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming before being added as the 28th state to the United States on December 29, 1845 where it finally gained its characteristic Texas shape. Despite these changing boundaries there were at least 16 wineries in the state prior to the National Prohibition Act in 1920, with the oldest commercial winery being Val Verde Winery established in 1883 in Del Rio, Texas (McEachern et al. 1982). After the passing of the Volstead Act, all of the winemaking in Texas came to a halt (with the exception of a few Catholic vineyards producing sacramental wine), which ultimately killed the Texas wine scene, until the revival nearly half a century later.

The new Texas wine industry has its origin in the 1970’s and has expanded slowly, with new and more vigorous growth occurring fairly recently. This new industry is where a handful of wineries in the region finds their origin. One in particular, Llano Estacado Winery, which happens to be the largest winery in the state of Texas, owes its birth to a chemistry professor and horticulture professor from Texas Tech University in 1976. Since then wineries have come and gone with a recent surge in winegrowers wanting to get involved in the later stages of winemaking. Winegrowers turned winemakers are changing the scene. As a natural development, as more wineries become established, tasting rooms for cellar door sales have followed. You can find some headed by the winemakers themselves, the winegrowers, or other wine professionals who have a love for Texas wine. Additionally, with the ongoing changes implemented as a result of the COIVD-19 pandemic, many tasting rooms are shifting toward a more food-focused model that compliment their wine lists. The food component is a welcome and complex change to the industry and is shaping the public’s opinion on wine as part of American, Southwestern, & Texan cuisines.

Figure 1: A map of the counties that are located in the Texas High Plains AVA. (highplainswinegrowers.org)

The climate of the region, according to varying official and unofficial sources, can range in descriptors from “semi-arid desert” to “subtropical continental.” Having grown up in the region, specifically Lubbock, Texas, I can vouch for the scorching hot summers where most days’ high temperatures are above 95˚ F and the bitterly cold winters where Canadian winds travel down the Great Plains and temperatures dip into the negatives after wind-chill has been factored. There are large diurnal temperature swings (often greater than 40˚ F in the summer months) which can prove challenging on the crops that are regularly grown in the region, like cotton and sorghum, but are great for the wine grapes. Due to this temperature range and especially hot and dry summers with cool nights, the Texas High Plains is ideal for Southern European grape cultivars, especially those of Spanish and Italian origin (E. Hellman, personal communication, 2016). The summer heat and early start for the growing season allows for the proper ripening of longer ripening red skinned cultivars and the cooler evenings help to keep up the grapes’ acidity (highplainswinegrower.org). Growing Degree Days range from the 3650 in the northwest corner of the AVA to 4775 (˚F) in the southeast (txwineregions.tamu.edu).

Due to the size of the Texas High Plains AVA it is difficult to characterize the soils of the region. There are 31 different soil associations of which five primary soil associations make up about three quarters. These five soil types are mostly sandy or sandy loam types for the depths to about half a meter. The deeper soil is mostly of a sandy clay loam texture extending to depths of about two meters. These five soil types are Pullman-Randall-Lofton soil contributing to 22.8% of the region’s area, Amarillo-Acuff-Olton soil with 19.5%, Patricia-Amarillo-Gomez soil with 15.5%, Olton-Acuff-Amarillo soil with 9.5%, and the Pullman-Olton-Randall soil with 7.7%. The general pHs of the soils tend to range just above 7 at the surface and approach 8 as soil depth increases. Permeability of the soils ranges from 3.3 in/hr in the topsoil of Amarillo-Acuff-Olton soil to 9.4 in/hr in the topsoil of the Patricia-Amarillo-Gomez soil. The sandy clay loam permeability of these regions ranges from 1.3–2.6 in/hr respectively (txwineregions.tamu.edu).

Various cultivars are grown across this region with a Cabernet Sauvignon topping the list followed by Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc (Texas Wine Marketing Research Institute 1993). Recently, there has been an expansion out of these cultivars to those more Mediterranean peninsular origin: Aglianico, Albariño, Barbera, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Grenache, Malbec, Merlot, Montepulciano, Muscat Canelli, Orange Muscat, Pinot Noir, Roussanne, Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, Tempranillo, and Viognier (www.txwines.org). In fact, in an unofficial blind taste test with Spanish vintners, they preferred the Texas High Plains 2012 Albariño to their own (C. Stanley, HADM Introduction to Wines Lecture 2015). Although all of these cultivars are produced in the region, it is difficult to gauge how many of them are used in the blending processes or which are shipped to other wineries outside the AVA. The Texas High Plains AVA produces 85% of all Texas wine grapes, which as aforementioned are selectively used in varietal wines but also to supply other wineries across the state. This makes it difficult to tell which varieties are characteristic of the region as they can change from year to year depending on the consumer demands.

Many of the grape growers of the Texas High Plains AVA are small acreage farmers who irrigate their vineyards because of the 18 inches of annual precipitation (txwineregions.tamu.edu). Due to the vineyards small size and varying ownership, there is a tremendous amount of variety in row spacing, trellising, and alignment to the sun. Because the wine region is still growing and both grape growers and vintners are still experimenting it is difficult to gauge a stylistic or regional type for the entire 8 million acres (E. Hellman, personal communication, 2016).