Warm winter makes for early wine harvest in Texas Hill Country

FREDERICKSBURG — As the rising sun cleared the mist over the Kuhlken Vineyards, Larry Kuhlken, patriarch of one of the Hill Country’s more than 50 wineries, donned his trademark work belt and set out to start picking the season’s first blocks of deep-blue tempranillo grapes.

July 14 was an early start to the harvest, the timeline pushed forward by about two weeks thanks to a fast freeze followed by an unusually warm winter. There were fewer clusters on the vines than last year and only about half as many as 2015, which was a banner year for Texas grapes.

But as Kuhlken explained it, lower yields can be a blessing in disguise. Fewer clusters mean less competition for the minerals deposited eons ago by a vast inland sea. The grapes therefore are sweeter than in most years, which should allow his son David Kuhlken to turn out a rich and flavorful 2017 vintage.

“This is Texas,” the senior Kuhlken said. “We have probably one of the best growing grounds anywhere in the world, and then we have this really strange climate.”

Wineries across the Hill Country’s rural highways are reporting similar outlooks. The Bending Branch Winery in Comfort, which sources grapes from both the High Plains and Hill Country, was one of the first to start crushing early-ripening blanc du bois and sauvignon blanc, two white grape varietals.

Spicewood Vineyards owner Ron Yates said his harvest is “definitely ahead of schedule,” which he took as a good omen considering the success of other early harvests.

“Our 2012 tempranillo — one of our best wines — was harvested on June 27, so we are optimistic about this year’s crop,” he said.

Kuhlken and his wife, Jeanine, have watched the Hill Country wine industry mature.

“It turns out this has all been very serendipitous, because when we got into it this, the Hill Country was a pretty much insignificant part of the Texas wine industry,” Larry Kuhlken said. “There were three wineries at the time. … And this whole wine trail thing has just all occurred since we moved here. We kind of go ‘gee’ a lot.”

The Texas Wine Trail now ranks second only to California’s Napa Valley for wine tourism. Tasting rooms each weekend draw visitors from around the state and country, and some wineries have waiting lists to join their mail-order wine clubs. While the bulk of the state’s wine grapes come from the same High Plains land that hosts commodity crops such as cotton and peanuts, the Hill Country has been growing its grape acreage, vineyard by vineyard.

According to the Texas Wine & Grape Growers Association, the economic effect of the Texas wine industry between 2005 and 2015 grew from $997 million to $2.27 billion and is now responsible for nearly 13,000 full-time jobs. The state now ranks fifth in the nation in wine production. H-E-B’s Central Market, Specs and Whole Foods have entire shelves dedicated to Texas labels. The Kuhlkens got a big shot of recognition in 2013, when they sent a 2012 voignier to a competition in Lyon, France, and took home the double gold.

When the Kuhlkens came to the Hill Country in 1995, it was to fulfill a dream of transitioning from the corporate suburban world of Larry’s career as an IBM executive.

“You know, we were ready,” he said. “I was sick and tired of living in the city. I wanted to get out to where the air was better.”

Fredericksburg in the 1990s already drew visitors with its German food and culture, and a cottage industry was growing around Hill Country peaches. The grape scene was still in its infancy, with only a few working wineries.

The couple spent about a year scouting sites around Texas, but Jeanine, a native Texan, was partial to the Hill Country’s rolling green slopes and neighborly vibe. They bought some acreage 11 miles north of Fredericksburg and transported grape plants from West Coast nurseries. The idea was raise grapes to sell to the existing wineries.

Little did they know that their pursuit would become a family affair. David Kuhlken was finishing up his bachelor’s degree at Rice University when the first Kuhlken vines were planted. By 2005, he was tiring of the cutthroat computer software world and had earned an MBA. His sister, Julie Kuhlken, and Swedish brother-in-law, Fredrik Osterberg, were on board, too.

They built the Pedernales Cellars winemaking operation and tasting room in 2008, and David learned the vintner’s craft by taking courses at the University of California, Davis and working apprenticeships with another Hill Country winemaker.

It didn’t take long to learn that some of the industry’s marquee varietals, such as Bordeaux and cabernet sauvignon, weren’t going to flourish in the conditions of Central Texas.

So they focused on varietals that could.

David made a big bet on the tempranillo grape, a black grape that makes a hardy Spanish red wine and is known for adapting to different soils.

Grapes for the Pedernales Cellars viognier, a white grape native to France’s Rhone Valley, comes from the High Plains-Panhandle area, which produces about half the grapes used in Texas wines. The Kuhlkens also have been experimenting with albariños, a variety from northwest Spain and Portugal.

“People are focusing on varietals that make a little more sense,” David said. “We’ve gone from trying to make a cabernet and ideally trying to make one that is comparable to like a Napa cab, to trying to make a tempranillo. … And it’s good because when you do compare them with tempranillos from other places, and you generally evaluate them for their own sake, they’re good wines.”

They’re heading in the right direction, said Jim Kamas, a Texas A&M University viticulturist who is just starting a yearly harvest on some of A&M’s own experimental varietals.

“If you draw a line with the latitude from Bordeaux over to the Western Hemisphere, you go through Toronto,” he said. “We’re really not Toronto. You take a line from the Hill Country and you go east, you end up going through Cairo and Tehran. ... So they’re absolutely right. It’s the Rhone varietals, the Spanish, the Portuguese varietals, that are proving to really do best in our climate.”

It’s a refrain heard by specialty crop growers around Texas. Unlike California, which has a Mediterranean climate and is sheltered from arctic blasts by the Rocky Mountains, Texas has a continental climate that is extremely unpredictable.

“No seasons are alike,” Kamas said. “Our averages are made up of extremes.”

Kamas’ assessment of this year’s Hill Country crop is that some areas suffered some early winter cold damage, but because the remaining winter months were warm and there was no spring freeze, 2017 should make for a good year. As a bonus to the early harvest, there’s more likelihood of grapes being off the vines before the remnants of any late-summer tropical storms blow through.

“There’s always an inverse relationship between quantity and quality,” he said. “You do pay a quality penalty for more yield.”

Justin Schneider, another A&M viticulturist, said growers in the High Plains also experienced early bud break and a jump start on the harvesting season.

“We’ve had nice weather, especially in comparison with the past two years,” he said. “We had some spring rains, and the summer’s had some pretty dry ripening conditions. ... So far, so good. Everybody’s pretty excited about the potential for high quality.”

Debbie Reynolds, executive director of the Texas Wine Grape Growers Association, said High Plains growers were out picking feverishly.

“This is a very busy time, with many working around the clock,” she said in an email. “The Texas High Plains is expecting the largest harvest in Texas wine and grape history.”

Back at the Kuhlken vineyard, the daily harvest wrapped up around midmorning, and bins holding a ton and a half of just-picked grapes were trucked gingerly out behind the Pedernales showroom in Stonewall. There, they were run through a mechanical destemmer and hand-sorted by staff standing along a conveyer belt.

The cellar at Pedernales, named for the river that runs through the Hill Country, is actually a giant freestanding shed. The Kuhlkens invested about $250,000 in the “green” geothermal cooling system that keeps the cellar at optimal temperatures for making and aging wines. There are tanks able to hold as much as 5,000 gallons of fermenting wine, barrels made of American and French oak, and cases of the final bottled product piled high in a storage room.

The Kuhlkens have assembled a team of folks who, like them, started out in other fields before deciding to make a career and lifestyle change.

Joanna Wilczoch, the vineyard manager, came from a nonprofit in Austin, as did Marissa Contreras, the marketing manager. Katy Buchanan, the event coordinator, was a health care administrator who started pouring wine at Pedernales on Saturdays and found that she looked forward to that more than her high-dollar job. Both Wilczoch and Demi Matar, David’s assistant winemaker, have been able to take coursework through Texas Tech University’s viticulture certificate program’s campus in Fredericksburg.

Clem Villars, the cellar master, worked in Air Force intelligence before opening a Hill Country home beer brewing shop. Word of mouth got him into his current gig operating the winery. While his first love remains beer-making, he said he loves the challenge of helping turn out prize-winning wines.

“This ain’t beer,” he said. “In the beer world, you’ve got an infinite amount of variables to play with: different malts, different hops. ... In the wine world, we’re trying to take what nature gave us in the vineyard and help it express itself.”