"I blame all those cowboy movies, people think we drink whiskey from the bottle in Texas."
I get the feeling the bloke pouring me wine in Becker Vineyards' tasting room spends mostt of his day convincing travellers Texas really does make wine.
"What people don't know is that Texas is the fourth biggest producer of wine in the US, and this region, the Hill Country, is the second most visited wine area in all of America behind the Napa."
And while we're at it: Texas is also where the first wine in the US was made (more than 350 years ago). And it was Texan grapevines which saved the European wine industry from ruin when the phylloxera epidemic destroyed almost every vine on the continent in the 19th century.
But who knew it? That Texas could be such a wine heavyweight is an American mystery as perplexing as how a reality TV star became president. Few international wine experts have even drunk a Texan chardonnay, or a Hill Country cabernet sauvignon, and a quarter of Texas' 254 counties ban the sale of alcohol. And yet, somehow, this region produces a large proportion of America's top quality wine, and if you believe US wine magazines, such as Wine Enthusiast, Texas' Hill Country is one of the 10 best wine travel destinations to visit in the world.
And it's all this that makes a visit to the Hill Country so darn enticing. Your neighbours have probably been to Napa, California, but I bet they haven't been to Fredericksburg, Texas.
It's much prettier here than I'd imagined. Fredericksburg sits in a huge valley beneath limestone and granite outcrops, among spring-fed streams and rivers. In spring, the countryside glows every colour of the rainbow as the wildflowers bloom. The town has the usual stores, though there are fancy cafes and restaurants with European-sounding names, but its unusual mid-19th century German origins dominate the streetscape.
However, it's the unmistakably Texan things that make Fredericksburg stand out to me. After a day at the tasting rooms of wineries on the fringes of town, the driver of the wine tour I'm on takes us up the road to the most iconic cowboy music destination in the whole of Texas.
At 4.30pm daily (coinciding nicely with the closing of tasting rooms) guitar pickers, old and young, form a circle under old oak trees by a slow-moving river and play their songs of woe for free. Luckenbach, Texas, was a trading post in the mid-1800s, but it's now one of the world's premier country music settings. For years, Texan legend Willie Nelson played here every July 4th – with Waylon Jennings, he wrote a song about this place that became a global smash. Somehow, I can't imagine Nelson playing in Bordeaux or Burgundy.
There are more than 150 shops, boutiques and art galleries in town but I prefer to escape into the great Texan wilderness. My favourite restaurant is the Hill Top Cafe, billed as "inconveniently located in the middle of nowhere", and it is; try as I might, I can't seem to find the place a second time. I love its home-spun comforts: set in a Texas roadhouse serving up Louisiana crawfish, shrimp gumbo and southern fried Mississippi catfish. It is still owned by the same couple who came here fleeing the city in 1980, using just a two-burner hotplate to feed their customers. Out here among the rolling hills, nervy white-tail deer and 19th-century sandstone German homesteads, Lance Armstrong used to train for the Tour de France. I follow his tracks one day on a cycling tour.
There are more than 30 wineries in Fredericksburg – you'll find two-thirds of all the wineries in Texas in the Hill Country. They're not far from town either, conveniently located for day tours. On the fringes of the region, wineries like Sister Creek Vineyards stand alone in tiny historic settlements of 20 or so locals, built within old cotton gins beneath columns of centuries-old oak trees, and beside pasture land where cattle stare back at you without blinking.
Chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon are the best varieties here (the soil is similar to that of the Coonawarra), although these days they're growing everything from sauvignon blanc to zinfandel (there are 21 varieties of wine available in Texas). And whereas they used to tell new wine growers to give up because no one wanted Texan wine, now there are four new wineries opening up every quarter. Texas is even beginning to export its wine to the world.
"The next 20 years, you mark my words, people are going to know a lot more about Texan wine," Nichole Bendele, from Becker Vineyards, says. "They're even serving it at the White House."
But, for now, I like it here, sampling wines better than they ought to be, in a landscape gentler than cowboy movies had you believe and in a town where locals holler greetings from their wide, shady porches.
TRIP NOTES
MORE
traveltexas.com
traveller.com.au/usa
FLY
Qantas flies daily to San Antonio or Austin via LA with codeshare airline, American Airlines. See qantas.com.au
STAY
Sleep in the heart of Fredericksburg close to restaurants, bars and cafes at Cameron Inn. See travelmainstreet.com/cameron-inn
EAT
Discover a little of old Texas in the Hilltop Cafe, see hilltopcafe.com; try Fredericksburg's best Texan-German fusion cuisine at Otto's German Bistro, see ottosfbg.com; for a wholesome bar meal with local beers, try Fredericksburg Brewing Co, see yourbrewery.com
Craig Tansley travelled as a guest of Travel Texas
Comments