Coordinates Vineyards (Hill Country)

[00:00:06] Howdy Vine Trippers, I wanted to take just a moment to talk to you about the Texas Wine Lover website and their phone app for both iPhones as well as Google devices. You can actually download this app, put it on your phone, or just go to the website if you're not an app person. And if you ever want to go visit some of these great locations that we've been talking about in the podcast, this will give you great information about the place before you go. And you'll be able to find other wineries in the area.

[00:00:33] So if you want to make a day of it, go see several other places as well. You can search by region. You can sort the listings, find ones that are kid-friendly, family-friendly, even ones that host RVs. All kinds of different sortable listings you can find there in that app and on the website. You can find other things as well in the area like restaurants, accommodations, maybe events that are going on at the different wineries.

[00:00:56] So it's your one-stop resource that goes hand-in-hand with this podcast to be able to find those great places to go visit. So check out the Texas Wine Lover website. It's txwinelover.com. Or go to their app. You can find it on the Google Play Store or the Apple Store as well. Enjoy your trips among the vines and use that app.

[00:01:17] Welcome to Texas Under Vine, an exploratory podcast to scout out the best that Texas wine country has to offer.

[00:01:47] I'm your wine guide, Scott, and I'm here to lead you on an auditory expedition to the vineyards and wineries across the great Lone Star State. Each episode will cover a different vineyard, winery, or wine-related business operating in Texas. You'll hear interviews, descriptions, and details about each location that will excite you to visit and experience them for yourself. Ready to plan a wine tour? Use these episodes to choose the most interesting spots for you and your friends to check out.

[00:02:15] Most of all, enjoy hearing about the rapidly growing wine industry in the state and what makes our wines and wineries the best. Howdy, fellow vine trippers. Welcome to episode 56 of the Texas Under Vine podcast.

[00:02:41] And I'm going to ask you to stick with me today for a little bit longer episode than normal. But I've got a really fun and exciting interview when I went out and traveled to Coordinates Vineyards in the Texas Hill Country on the Wine Road 290 out near High, Texas. And I have a fun interview with the owner, Austin Kerr. And it's very fun and educational. I know it's a little bit longer than my typical episode. So stick with me.

[00:03:10] I really think you're going to enjoy it today. So let's talk for a second about Coordinates. So the winery itself was started by Austin Kerr and his brother. Now, Austin was actually raised in a medical family out on the West Coast and thought he might pursue medicine for a career. Quickly found out a little while into it that it wasn't really quite his thing and ended up deciding to travel to Taiwan to teach English there in Taiwan and live there for several years.

[00:03:40] During his time in Taiwan, he began getting involved in actually importing South African wine to China and to Taiwan and really got interested and involved in that. And then received a call after a while from his brother about the idea of starting a winery in Texas. So on a whim, they created a business plan and moved here to the Hill Country and created Coordinates Vineyards.

[00:04:08] And they opened up their first location actually on Main Street in Fredericksburg. They had a little tasting room there. And now that was in 2022. And now they've actually opened up recently a new tasting room on the Wine Road, again, near High Texas. It's a really cool place situated in a historic house built around 1903. Used to be owned by the Dyke family there in the Hill Country area.

[00:04:36] And it has a little bit of historical significance. You'll hear more about in the interview. But just as a little sneak peek, Lyndon B. Johnson, the former president, actually grew up just down the road in Johnson City and was friends with the Dykes. Actually played baseball with them there on the lawn at their house. And there's some really fun historical things that go into all of that. Again, I don't want to spoil it all because you'll hear about it in the interview.

[00:04:59] Now, that tasting room itself there in High was actually built as a Sears kit home. And again, way back in the early 1900s. And was actually bought to be a bed and breakfast several years ago. And was actually moved back from the road a little bit from where it normally was situated there closer to the road.

[00:05:22] And it changed hands a few times as a bed and breakfast until Austin and his brother purchased it recently to end its days as a B&B. And to become their new tasting room there in High and the home of Coordinates Vineyards. Now, part of the area out front where they moved the house back a little bit. They planted a small, just a little quarter acre vineyard of Tanat. And they're managing that and growing that. It's actually now in its third year of growth.

[00:05:49] So they experienced their first good harvest on that vineyard. And some of those wines are going to be coming up soon. They're actually in barrel now. And that will be their first kind of estate wine there of Tanat that they planted in that front vineyard. And Austin, with his background as an educator, really strongly believes in education. And finding out wherever the customer is on their wine journey. Following along with the Coordinates theme. And educating them.

[00:06:18] And so when you go to Coordinates Vineyards, you're going to have an experience like no other. It's not just somebody pouring some wine for you. He and his servers really are knowledgeable. And they want to know where you are on your wine journey. What are the things that really meet your palate? Maybe expand that just a little bit and give you a lot of history and stories. You're going to hear a lot of great history and stories in the interview today. And it's just a sampling of the kind of experience you can expect when you go to visit them there at Coordinates Vineyards.

[00:06:45] Now, the name Coordinates Vineyards actually comes from some interesting travel experiences that Austin has had. And each one of the bottles actually carries the coordinates on it of the vineyard where those particular grapes came from for that wine. And they serve a lot of South African wine based on Austin's experience with importing that. And that's a lot of where his love of wine is.

[00:07:11] And he tells us that it's actually a very old wine region there going back to the 1600s. And you'll get to hear some of that fun story in the interview. But he loves South African wines and imports those there. And so they have a lot of different South African varieties. And they also have some Texas varieties that they get from the High Plains as well as elsewhere. And soon, they're going to have that estate to not coming up on their menu as well.

[00:07:36] So I recently visited that historic house location there in High Texas. Was able to sit down with Austin and hear some of his story. And it's a very fun and educational interview. We talked for a long time. And I tried not to trim too much out of the interview because there's so much good stuff here. I really hope you will enjoy hearing Austin's passion and a lot of great information about South Africa and South African wines, if you're not familiar with that, as well as their location.

[00:08:05] And what they're doing to take you on on your journey there, your wine journey, wherever you are, to put on some new milestones in your wine journey as you find the coordinates there at Coordinates Vineyard. So let's go to the interview and hear from him. Well, howdy, Vine Trippers. I'm here with Austin Kerr at Coordinates Vineyard.

[00:08:31] And it's in this really fun little house on the Wine Road 290 in between Johnson City of Fredericksburg and the little town of High. Great little location. Amazing wines and things here. And I look forward to telling you more about the story. So let's talk to Austin and see what he has to say about this cool location. So, Austin, tell me a little bit about yourself. What got you into the wine industry? Well, that's quite a story. But first of all, thanks, Scott, for having me here today.

[00:08:59] We're excited to tell our story and be able to share a little bit about what we do here at Coordinates Vineyards. So, yeah, I'm Austin Kerr. And like yourself, I was an educator for a while. But to go back to where my story kind of begins, I have to go back quite a ways. So I grew up in Oregon in Ashland, which is actually the town where Signore makes their wine early. So interesting little connection there. But I grew up in a pretty medical family.

[00:09:27] Like my brother is a partner in the business with me as a plastic surgeon in Austin. My mom was a nurse. My dad was a chiropractor. My uncle's a dermatologist. So I grew up thinking that I was going to go into the medical industry. In your blood, right? Exactly, yeah. So I studied biology and chemistry at the University of Oregon and worked in pharmacies throughout like the whole time that I was going to school with a real kind of focus on getting into med school, which actually eventually did.

[00:09:55] But before I jump on to the next part of the story, there was a moment when I was probably about 19. So maybe like my freshman or sophomore year of university. And I was in Eugene in Oregon, which is like just south of the wine lands there. And I for some reason got this bug in my brain that I really wanted to go like see what was going on in these wineries. And so one day I called in sick to work.

[00:10:25] I didn't go to school. And I just went out and shadowed a winemaker. And it was such a cool experience. Like he showed me all around the lab and I loved all the chemistry that he was doing, but I was only 19, so he wouldn't let me drink any of the wine. And he tried to hire me for the harvest, but it was, you know, it was paying like $4.25 an hour back then. And I was making so much more in the pharmacy that I never did it. But I always kind of wondered like what would my life have been like if I'd gotten into wine like so much earlier. Planted that seed early on.

[00:10:55] Yeah, it was certainly something that, you know, I have been interested in, like intensely interested in from a pretty young age, which is unusual. But wine tends to be something that people find as a second or third. Yeah, like we. Really it is. So it's unusual for someone to go to school, study, you know, viticulture and enology and graduate at 21 or 22 and go right into the wine industry without really having any experience with it.

[00:11:22] And so it kind of makes sense to me that it would be that way. But my own story just sort of had that brief moment where I was like, let me go check that out. And then, you know, I went back to what was my life. So I went back to school, finished. I did a bunch of study abroad while I was in school. I did a year in Costa Rica. I did six months in Ecuador, which sort of set me up for this life of traveling and living abroad that I very much embraced.

[00:11:49] So there's a lot of like what makes coordinates coordinates is the experience that both my brother and I have had traveling around the world a lot. But went to school with a, you know, medical focus and then got into medical school in California. And only then did I realize that I really didn't want to do this. So like anatomy was just so viscerally gross. My brother cuts people open all day. He absolutely loves it.

[00:12:19] But I, it was, it really wasn't, you know, and what I realized what I was excited about in medicine was to teach people, to educate people about how to take care of themselves. And when I got into medical school, it was, you have six minutes to see this patient, to figure out what's wrong with them, to diagnose them, write them a prescription and get to the next one without getting sued in the process. And none of that was what I wanted to do.

[00:12:50] So I left school and kind of bummed around for a little while trying to figure out what I was going to do. But when I left, it was 2008, which was the financial crisis. So nobody was hiring. And I was in this medical world, right? So like I flew to New Jersey and interviewed with Merck to be a drug rep. I looked at this job with Roche where they were going to run a trial for a new drug.

[00:13:15] But that job, 5,000 people applied for, for one job. So the economy just wasn't great at that time. How you just want to do those resumes. Man, I can't do it. They were pretty intense. Yeah. But I mean, I was, I was competitive candidate for sure. So not being married and not having any kids and not having any job, I was started looking like, okay, where else in the world can I go? I don't have to stay in the United States, right? Like I could go anywhere.

[00:13:43] Except for it's pretty tough to get a visa to like work abroad unless you have a special skill. So like you can't just go to Australia and get a job. You can't even go to Canada and get a job. But if you have something that's valuable for a nation and they're, they don't have that within their own population, then it's pretty easy. So I looked, I was like, what's the skill that I have? Really the only valuable thing that I had at that point was that I spoke English. Pretty fluently actually, which was nice.

[00:14:13] Amazing, your native language. So that is a pretty valuable skill in Asia. True, yeah. And at the time that I left, which was like 2009, it was Japan, Korea and Taiwan were sort of the big places that you could go to work with just speaking English. So as an English teacher, right? ESL language. Japan was pretty expensive. Korea was also pretty expensive. But Taiwan had a pretty good like pay ratio. But the cost of living was cheap.

[00:14:43] So I figured I could save some money if I went there. So sold my car, flew to Taiwan, basically got a job as soon as I arrived at a pretty big language school. It was full of like 700 students. So we had maybe 15 foreign teachers. When I arrived, I was the only American. There's one British guy. There's one Canadian guy. And there were like 15 South Africans who'd been there for 10 years. Oh, wow. So they became my immediate friend group.

[00:15:10] They taught me how to get a cell phone and Chinese and restaurants that I could eat at. And they were the only people who spoke English. So we hung out all the time for what turned out to be 11 years. 11 years there in Taiwan. Yeah. Wow.

[00:15:52] Oh. So I'm guessing they were importing grapes. Making them there. But anyways, yeah. So a lot of people don't think about Taiwan and wine. And it is for a good reason. But really my story when I arrived, you know, I'd never been a teacher. So I took a couple years to kind of figure out what I was doing and, you know, learn that process first. But after doing that, you know, like one morning I'm sitting there writing my lesson plan for the day. And the teacher next to me is sitting there writing his lesson plan for the day.

[00:16:22] And a South African guy. And at the top he'd written himself like a little note. It said, give Ross a million dollars. And I owed a lot of money. I still owe money for my student loans from med school, right? Like I didn't know it at the time, but the school that I went to in California was the most expensive medical school in the United States. Which was ridiculous because it was in a like converted strip mall in Pomona. So it was, they were definitely taking advantage of people.

[00:16:51] But anyways, I had all this money to pay back. And here this teacher sitting next to me is like, give this guy a million dollars. Now we're talking about a million Taiwan dollars, not U.S. dollars. But it's still a significant amount. It's a million though, I mean. For any teacher, a million of anything is a lot, right? So I'm sort of asking him about this. And he's like, oh, you know, a lot of us, we studied like at school. We went to the University of Stellenbosch, which is like a university that's a very prominent university in South Africa.

[00:17:21] And just outside of Cape Town. And major wine countries there in South Africa. Stellenbosch is the center of the wine region. So for us, that university is kind of like UC Davis, which is where a lot of people would study viticulture and enology. But obviously at UC Davis, you can study other things too, right? So like my friends had studied English and PE and went on to be educators. But they went to school with a bunch of people who did viticulture and enology and went into the wine industry.

[00:17:46] So it turns out they were like buying wine from their school buddies, you know, that had gone into the wine industry and bringing it to Taiwan and selling it little bottle shops and things. Which I was like, oh my God, that's awesome. Distribution network. Right? Like I've always had this thing about wine. Like this is perfect. You know, I want to get involved. Like how can I invest? That seed that you planted years ago was starting to germinate and come forward out of the ground. Yeah. And so they're like, well, how much money do you have?

[00:18:15] And I was like, well, I have $200. $800. Like $800. That's all the money I had in the world. And he's like, well, that's not really enough to do anything. But, you know, leave it to me and I'll account with it, with my like investment and we'll do it that way. And so slowly that, you know, turned to, I think my $800 turned into $1,200. And then we were able to kind of roll it over and do it again and do it again. And after a couple of years of that and adding more money into it, I had about $20,000 saved up.

[00:18:45] Which was a significant amount of money that I could have used to pay back my student loans. That's not exactly what I did with it. So this was maybe like three years into being in Taiwan. And I had met a girl upon arrival that, well, pretty close to arrival, that ended up being the girl that I married. So I was married when I was in Taiwan for about five years there. But when I met her, she was like working in an office and she really wanted to be a flight attendant.

[00:19:14] And so I helped her with her English and, you know, all these other foreign nationals that were there. Like we all wrote letters to help her for her thing. Anyway, she ended up getting hired for Cafe Pacific, which was based in Hong Kong, but a huge international airline. And so one of the people that she like did her training with, they hired, you know, 500 girls from Taiwan at the same time and trained them all in like big groups. So she went through like a three month process with like friends that she'd made, you know, during that.

[00:19:44] And one of the girls ended up retiring at the age of like 27 to marry a guy in Beijing. And I think she met him on one of the flights or something like that. But he was a pretty, well, he's the son of a really prominent like construction magnate who'd built the 2008 bird's nest for the Olympics, like the swimming pavilion, like a huge, huge. And they just finished a big construction project at the new Beijing airport.

[00:20:14] But like to be that level in China is very different than it would be, you know, member of the Communist Party, like 20,000 employees, like different, right? Yeah. So anyway, she married this guy's son and he really wanted to prove to his dad that like he didn't have to take handouts, that he had kind of his own business sense and could build his own thing. And so they had this property in the Olympic Village and he wanted to do like this coffee shop.

[00:20:42] But as you probably know, China is not exactly like a coffee culture. It's very much more tea than a coffee. So he, people drink coffee, obviously, and there's Starbucks there and stuff now, but it's mostly like early, early morning. And by noon, like nobody's drinking coffee anymore. So he wanted to take the property and have like a wine bar that would be like a coffee shop in the morning and then flip into a wine bar and then back and forth. Okay, yeah. Repurposed.

[00:21:10] Yeah, like a pretty good concept to try and make use of the space. And he knew an absolute ton about coffee, but he didn't really know much about wine. Yeah. So he started reaching out through his network, like who's in the wine industry. And then through like the girls, right? It goes, oh, it's like this guy's involved. So he comes to me and he says, hey, can you source wine for China? And I was like, yeah, I can do that. I can do that. I've got some connections. No idea how to do that. I had no, like my investment was $800. That was it.

[00:21:39] But I knew it was a great opportunity, right? So, you know. Latch onto that. I said, absolutely, I can do that. And then I had to go figure out how to do that. So I went to the guys in Taiwan first and I asked them like, hey, you know, do we expand to Beijing? This is going to be amazing. And they sort of like thought about it for a little while and decided to pass on the opportunity, which floored me. I couldn't believe it.

[00:22:02] But it left me with kind of the only option was to take out the investment money that I had with them, my 20 grand, and to fly to South Africa to figure out like who I was going to get to supply that wine for. Interesting. Which was a step that I don't think most people would have taken. Yeah. It was a risk and it was a lot of work. And at first it was a lot of rejection and a lot of no's. And it was a lot of puzzles.

[00:22:31] And I find that being an entrepreneur is kind of like that. That like whenever you don't know how to do something, it's just a puzzle. And once you know the steps to solve the puzzle, then the next time you encounter it, it's much easier. Right. The problem with being an entrepreneur versus being somebody that goes to work and does a job every day is that the puzzles are always changing. Yeah. So you have to really enjoy solving puzzles. Sometimes you unlock one puzzle and find out it's part of a bigger puzzle. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It opens a rabbit hole of other puzzles.

[00:23:01] So it's a battle of energy and resources to apply to like the most immediate puzzle that needs to be solved. And sometimes it's hard to know which one that is. But anyways, we ended up solving that puzzle and finding the right wine to send to China. And then I spent about seven years doing direct shipments from South Africa into Beijing. And it was going great. I mean, it's hard to understand what 1.4 billion people looks like.

[00:23:31] I mean, stuff would just disappear. It would just disappear. It was amazing. Sure. And then the pandemic hit. And by March of 2020, everything was gone. Like the whole business that I built, everything, the ports were all locked down. Nothing in, nothing out. Lockdowns in China were intense. There was nobody drinking wine at home there. If they could go to the supermarket once a week, maybe. So it was a different world. So I went back to teaching for a little while thinking, wow, that was the craziest wild ride I've ever been on.

[00:24:00] That was fun. But, you know, throughout the pandemic, one of the things that you think about is family. And, you know, I'd been away for 11 years. So I was talking to my brother, actually, for his birthday. He was at Signore, which is just down the street here. And, you know, it was just like, hey, happy birthday. He's like, oh, I'm at Signore. I'm trying to get a bottle of wine. And they're out of white wine. I can't believe they're out of white wine.

[00:24:26] And it was like June, you know, of like 2020 or 2021. I think it was June of 2020. Might have been 21. Anyways, you know, it sounded to me like he'd been drinking. I was like, okay. He's like, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. We got to open a winery in Texas. And I was like, what? He's like, you have amazing wine. Your wine is so good. There's nothing like that here. Like, why don't we bring that wine to Texas?

[00:24:57] And I was like, like, okay. Like, I'll talk to you later, man. You know, he's like, he's just. You were drinking. He says, just put a business plan together. And then like, hang that. Well, all right. That easy. I've never done a business plan. I have no idea what's involved with that. Yeah. So that was the first puzzle was to figure out how to write a business plan. And, you know, it was surprising. We looked at kind of the numbers. We looked at the industry. We looked at what was around.

[00:25:23] We looked at the model from some of these other places that are doing very similar, if not exactly the same thing. And I thought, you know, why? Why not us? Like, why not? You know? Oh. And so. That's a true entrepreneur heart right there. Yeah. I guess so. But it just felt like something that I could do. Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of conversations had to happen after that.

[00:25:51] You know, I had a whole life in Taiwan, a career. I'd built an entire science program for the school that I was teaching at that I had to have somebody come and take over. Sell my car. Talk to my wife about moving from Taiwan to America, which she agreed to do. And she came with me to Texas to start the business. She lasted about two and a half months. So she's back in Taiwan. We just finished our divorce, actually.

[00:26:16] And that, you know, I think more than anything was kind of the hidden cost that I didn't know was going to come with it. But I think looking back on it, like, would I have changed it? Would I have not done it? And I think that this is really what I'm meant to do. And I don't think it was what she was meant to do. So no hard feelings. You know, it's a difficult transition from Taiwan to Texas. Yeah.

[00:26:44] It wasn't the right place for her, but I think it is the right place for me. So yeah, we're still friends right now. It's good. Okay. Yeah. So that was a little bit about kind of my story and how I got started in the wine industry. It's really cool. And it, you know, gives you kind of a preview of how we got to South African and why we have South African wine, which I've been working with for about 10 years now, even though I myself am not South African.

[00:27:08] But to me, when I look at the world of wine and both my brother and I have traveled to every major wine region and most other regions in the world. When I look at South Africa, the things that stands out to me is the history. So they've been doing wine for 365 years. So they're the oldest place outside of Europe to make wine or the oldest new world wine country by like a lot.

[00:27:37] So the history, the tradition, the story of wine in South Africa has always fascinated me. But then they've had such a difficult time, particularly with their economy and not just with apartheid, but, you know, the pandemic and everything else. So they have this amazing, like truly amazingly beautiful geography to be able to grow wine.

[00:28:02] Like they're just lucky in the Mediterranean climate that exists there and they can grow a lot of different things. They have the traditions, the experience and the ability to produce these beautifully handcrafted wines. And their economy is still tough, like really tough. So you get amazing quality and incredible value. And I think it's the best quality to price ratio of anywhere in the world.

[00:28:29] So I've really been looking for somewhere else. I think Spain is getting real close to nipping on their heels. I'm really interested in going to Spain. But that's one of the things that Malin, my brother and I, have really focused on with coordinates, with divinery, is that we want to bring and produce wine of exceptional quality at a great value. Like wine, expensive wine or wine that is expensive can be great.

[00:28:55] But you can have amazing, great wine that doesn't have to be terribly expensive as well. Yeah. So. Finding that high quality at the low value. That's kind of. High value, but the low cost. Yeah. I mean, the personal history, the experience of being there, of course. But I really do feel like South African wine is some of the best value of anywhere in the world. Wow. Speaking of which, should we try some? Yes. Let's do. I would love to see what we got here. So I pulled out a couple of bottles here. Cool. This one is open and one of our most popular wines.

[00:29:23] So this is our Sparkling Brut, which is a sparkling Sauvignon Blanc coming out of Robertson in South Africa. So Robertson is kind of a more mountainous area within the country. So this is coming from a slightly higher elevation, our colder vineyard site. And typically colder weather in wine is going to help preserve the acidity behind it, which is really important for sparkling wine in particular.

[00:29:50] So this is a sparkling Sauvignon Blanc, and you don't see that grape as a sparkling wine. Not as often. Pretty much like ever, really. A lot of that has to do with France, right? So they have particular rules within Champagne on what grapes they're allowed to use to make sparkling wine. If you use anything else, you can't call it Champagne. South Africa has some rules and regulations. They don't make Champagne, but they make MCC, which is Methode Cap Classique, which is their style of Champagne.

[00:30:19] And there's particular rules and regulations around that, like how long does it need to be on the leaves in the bottle and all sorts of things. But they also have the ability to experiment a bit more. So this is a forced carbonation. It's Sauvignon Blanc, which is quite unique. And when you smell it, I mean, you get those Sauvignon Blanc characteristics. Just, I mean, it's so clearly Sauvignon Blanc, which is lovely. And then the bubbles just make it so refreshing and bright. So cheers. First, one of our most popular wines.

[00:30:50] Ooh. And you get all that flavor there from the Sauvignon Blanc too. We're so lovely to have, or so lucky to have partners in South Africa that are making wines that are this beautiful. Wow. Well, tell me a little bit about the genesis of Coordinates Vineyard. So a little bit about your background and history. So you put your business plan together and you decided to make an investment. What did that look like? How did that all transpire? Yeah. Yeah. So, gosh, how did we get started?

[00:31:18] Well, we started with the business plan and then really the first piece of that, and a lot of that has to do with how things are permitted in Texas, is that we had to find a location. So in Texas, in order to get a winery permit, you have to have a location first and then you permit the location. So the owners don't own the permit, the address owns it, right? So we had to look first for a place.

[00:31:46] And we looked for a while for something just like this, you know, sort of a farmhouse, a place on T90, something that had vines perhaps already. Something you could reappropriate maybe? Yeah. Yeah. We always had kind of a bent for historical properties and things like that. But at that time in 21, when we started looking, property values were crazy, particularly in Fredericksburg.

[00:32:14] Like that was the height of people buying to turn into Airbnbs because they were still at home. They weren't back working yet. Everybody was staying in Airbnbs. That was those passive income opportunities. Oh yeah, right? And there were some great opportunities there for a minute, right? But we got really lucky actually. So we found a building on Main Street and in Fredericksburg. It had been empty for three years. So there wasn't anybody in there at all.

[00:32:42] Like the first thing I had to do when we got into the space was mop like six times. So it had been empty and it was kind of on the further end of town. So it's just before the Nimitz between Elk and Washington Street. And it's a beautiful building. It's all stone. It was the first blacksmith shop in the city of Fredericksburg, in the town of Fredericksburg. So it was built in 1879. But it's tiny. It's like 860 square feet. But lots of historical significance there.

[00:33:11] Historical significance, beautiful pictures of like the owners and a ledger from the blacksmith shop in there. So it's really a special building. Once we found that space and were able to lease it, then we had to go through all the permitting process and everything that would allow us to even begin to start doing wine. So that took a little while, maybe about six months or so. And then we opened our Main Street location on 2222. Okay. Just for fun, right?

[00:33:41] Yeah. So we worked there, or I opened that place, worked there for about two, two and a half years. And then we were trying to renew the lease for our Main Street location. And the owner was thinking about selling the property. So he was kind of being hesitant to renew the lease with us. And after doing this for a couple of years, we realized how important it is to kind of have a forever home. Yeah. So you can't be in this kind of a business and have to move around.

[00:34:11] There's really too much involved. And particularly once you get grapes, like you can't be moving grapes, right? So we started kind of just looking again, just to see what was out there. And I came across this property. And it was really everything that we'd been looking for from the beginning. So it's not a large property, which is nice. It's only about 2.4 acres. It has the farmhouse.

[00:34:36] So this house is a Sears Robux kit house that was, we think it was built in 1903. It was the home of the Dyke or the Dyke family that lived here. They were kind of famous in the 1920s for living here. And we can go into their story a little bit more. But just about the property, it's got the vineyard in front, which is a pretty small but manageable vineyard for basically an owner-operator like myself. I have to take care of everything on my own.

[00:35:06] And it's a quarter acre. And let me tell you, that almost killed me this year. That's what I've heard. It is so much work to be out there. So we have the vines. We have the house. We have the beautiful oak trees around that provide shade in the summer. And I mean, it's just a fantastic property with these porches up and down. So we have a lot more space here, which is something that we really needed.

[00:35:30] We can do about maybe 40 to 45 people on the covered porches, about 65 inside, and probably another 80 on the picnic tables outside. So we have the ability to do a lot more people here right at the time where wine seems to be kind of slowing down and collapsing worldwide, which is interesting as well.

[00:35:51] And one of the shifts that I think is happening is, well, I think that there's a really important question right now that younger generation is battling with. And that question is like, why should we drink wine? And I don't think as an industry that we're doing a very good job of explaining that.

[00:36:17] It's a hard thing to explain to somebody, why should you drink wine? I mean, you can talk about the history and how it's been thousands of years of us cultivating and making wine. But does that mean that they should drink it now? Or we can talk about the flavors and the intensity and the things that we get. But I don't know that that's something that they can't get from a Truly or from a Seltzer or something else that they're having.

[00:36:47] So for me, when I think about why wine? Well, wine comes with a story. It comes with more than what you get from a soda or something that comes out of a can. There's real people behind it. There's real work. There's labor. There's sweat and tears.

[00:37:17] There's a lot of water. There's a lot of water. Craft, right? That's exactly what it is. It's craft. Yeah. like there is craft in wine and there aren't like there's craft in cocktails in some respects as

[00:37:46] well but that's that's different right like that craft is happening over 15 minutes as they're making a beautiful you know elaborate drink that they light on fire for you but okay wine is a craft that takes generations yeah and i think there's value in that but i also think that it's really difficult to understand from the outside and so when people come in to coordinates one of the

[00:38:12] things that that i'm always trying to do and you mentioned this sort of wine journey right and i think that people that are in the industry that that have experience with wine we understand that there is a journey and that we're on it and even if we haven't finished it we can kind of see like the tracks right where where it's going the problem is if you're not even at the station how do you have any idea what that journey looks like you know and and so i personally feel even if you've never had

[00:38:40] a glass of wine that you're on that journey you're just at the very beginning of it yeah so as folks come in what i want to do is i want to quickly try and figure out where they are on that journey and then give them a piece of information or a few pieces of information that's going to make the experience that's going to make the journey more enjoyable for them along the way so how do i give

[00:39:06] them something of value in education right it's not about the value in in the wine necessarily it's about that educational piece that the next time you go wine tasting it's going to be even more fun it's going to be even better you're going to enjoy it even more and it's just about helping people along that journey one of the things that i think is the most beneficial for people's health around

[00:39:36] wine is that wine is very rarely a drink that you have by yourself wine is about bringing people together absolutely and the entire reason why wine comes in a 750 milliliter bottle is because it is something that can be easily split with two people over dinner yeah so it's not necessarily about the

[00:39:59] benefits from what's in the wine but the social benefits of bringing people together and one of the reasons that i ended up coming back to texas is my mom's getting older my family's getting older when we look at older folks one of the most important things for keeping them out of the hospital

[00:40:21] and keeping them healthy for a long period of time is companionship so i think there is a piece of the pandemic that changed the way that we interact with people and the the connection that we used to have and the the camaraderie that we used to share that changed a lot and i see that the the people that

[00:40:45] were most affected by that were the teenagers right as an educator you saw that too like to be home and isolated from your friends at a very impressionable time so i'm hoping that when those kids become 22 23 24 that wine becomes a mechanism for them to get together because what we're finding is that these younger kids they're they're drinking trulies and they're drinking things like that too they're drinking less

[00:41:12] wine necessarily but it's not that they're not drinking at all it's it's and it's not that they're not spending money on wine they're just drinking less alcohol overall but if four people get together and split one bottle of good wine and have an amazing conversation as the social lubricant or as something to discuss intellectually breaking bread together yeah but also the notes of the wine and the

[00:41:42] region that it comes from and there's more in wine to talk about to experience to relate with to have an emotional connection to share than there ever is going to be with you know a seltzer or yeah you know even a lot of like mass-produced things so i think that that wine has a place in society not necessarily because of the health and the benefits that we're thinking of as far as like this is

[00:42:05] medicine but as far as the social fabric that that helps to hold us together sure yeah well let's um kind of swing back towards so you've got your um you've got this this setup now here on 290 tell me a little bit about this location some of the history of it and you mentioned it was a sears robot kit house which i mean i'm not a diy-er i wish i was my brothers are i'm not um and so just looking at this

[00:42:33] amazing place and thinking even from a kit i don't think you could build something like this um but it's so beautiful so tell me a little bit about it uh it's an amazing property so i found a map from like 1890 that had daiki the the family that lived here and they had about 500 acres as like a homestead out here so if you've ever been to win chris which is just through the trees over there they started in a daiki family farmhouse as well so that would have been part of the property

[00:43:03] across the street would have been part of that as well and of course over the generations it's been broken up into smaller and smaller lots um but this piece here would have been kind of like the main family homestead okay so in 1924 the daiki family they had 11 kids that all lived in this house the crazy thing is the house was actually located a lot closer to the road so about eight

[00:43:26] years ago the first owner that turned it into an airbnb moved the entire house back and renovated it yeah it's uh actually deanna she runs longhorn so i know deanna she's amazing uh so she did all the hard work she put in the commercial well the metal roof the electrical and the plumbing was all updated they added uh everything behind that wall was an addition so you can see the roof line is

[00:43:50] different on that side but beautiful home it's just hard to imagine that you know without the five bathrooms that they put in to imagine in 1924 i mean no electricity that was before lbj brought the perdenalis electric company out here probably no running water though we did find the old well when we built the parking lot um so outhouses and all and all those things but the the family was quite

[00:44:15] lucky because if you had 500 acres to take care of then you needed a lot of labor to do that and even today like nobody lives in high this is an unincorporated town there's a post office and three wineries that's kind of it and the pipe store uh but so you had to have a lot of kids like a boatload of kids so they did they had 11 kids and they were pretty lucky because of those 11 kids nine of them

[00:44:43] were boys okay and if you have nine boys in your family that is enough to start your own baseball team so they did the dike brother baseball team really and it became like national news like they you know wrote about it they it was quite unique so every jersey says the same says dike with a different number uh and then they found another all brothers baseball team in chicago so of course

[00:45:10] you gotta have the rivalry game of course right uh now this was like literally there were like news reporters that like followed them on the journey and like wrote a book about it and i still to this day i don't know who won the game because like in all the interviews the only thing that they talk about is like it was the first time they'd ever been in an automobile because they drove them from here yeah to kansas which is in the middle um to play against each other yeah and they drove them there

[00:45:40] in two model t's uh which took them a week to drive to kansas i mean i just imagine like blown tires and sleeping on the side of the road and dad are we there yet and cans of beans and you know all the things yeah i mean it was probably even before are we there yet you know just like what are we doing what is there buckies on the way why is this horse making noise so really kind of interesting that there's that historical piece to the home and the cool part

[00:46:10] about it is right that the the way the birth order of the family is like boy boy boy boy boy boy boy girl girl boy so like the the youngest brother was too young to play on the baseball team for a while and so they had the neighbor boy help him out okay and that would have been lbj oh really he was from johnson city which is not far from here and knew the brothers and played together on the team until the

[00:46:34] youngest brother was old enough to play with him so not only is he like he was a pinch hitter exactly right and like he's been in on under around the house where the vineyard is right out the window here that's probably where they would have been playing baseball most of the time so it's just incredible that um you know to to have this area be so associated with lbj but to have that kind of clear connection he mailed his first uh letter at the high post office across the street and then

[00:47:03] named the postmaster general when he was the president there oh so he's you know a very very important person for the area and i just love that like this house has that specific connection to him so to all my history buff listeners out there uh use your the google or whatever you need to do to research we want to find out who won that game uh there in kansas city between the dikey brothers baseball team and the team from chicago so i sort of have a feeling that like the dikey brothers

[00:47:30] probably didn't win because it's kind of pushed under the rug we don't talk about the score i don't know this is also why i haven't researched shit maybe if you go to chicago you'll find it there because they're rug guys yeah history is written by the winner exactly wow that's really cool so you've got a lot of lbj historical actually all of the things everything in here except for my guitar uh was all in here when we bought the property so it was an airbnb it um you know deanna had started it and then she sold it to

[00:47:59] someone else i think maybe four different people tried to make it work as an airbnb before we got it but by the time we did when we when we bought the place we bought it with everything in it so all of these lbj pictures were actually under this chair and uh you know very early days of getting in here it was like i found you know 50 sets of sheets that i don't need and a thousand towels and you know airbnb stuff but but under this chair there was an ice bucket and i was like well that's something i

[00:48:26] can use right like i need an ice bucket and i pulled it out and it was full of like 50 photographs like eight by tens of lbj which i was kind of surprised about and then somebody came through and told me that he like really loved to give people like eight by tens of himself and he would like have a guy follow him around and be like hello and then they just hand you it i'm the photo guy that just hands out the pictures so it's just it's nice to have that historical property that connection

[00:48:51] to the area of course we have our own vineyard outside now so this is all to naught that we're growing now it was the third year for the vineyard so we we harvested for the first time this year in august got just under a ton so just over 2 000 not bad for a third year yeah and it's small right so we're only a quarter acre so that was more than i was expecting quite a bit more uh which will be enough for about 500 bottles uh some limited release of state wine yeah 14 months

[00:49:21] or so to kind of get us all in barrel and stonewall right now um but super excited about it to not such a great and vigorous variety for the area so it's it's fun it's challenging to have your own grapes in the ground it is a tremendous amount of work if there's anybody out there thinking about starting a vineyard don't uh no seriously though worldwide we're at huge oversupply there's all sorts of growers even in texas dropping for that yeah i've heard a lot about that this year

[00:49:49] it's been a really weird time to be in wine um which kind of loops us back to the one of the things that we were talking about so i think uh as i look at kind of the state of the industry and most difficult time in wine since 1967 sales of literally every kind of wine falling off a cliff uh so why why why buy wine why why purchase wine why are these young people doing that well i think

[00:50:13] it's about the stories the connection the uniqueness the the value that comes with wine that doesn't come with other beverages and it's about that experience that you have when you come to a vineyard so if you just want to drink wine or alcohol go to the grocery store it's so much cheaper like it is they have way more options than i'll ever be able to provide you right but when you come here

[00:50:41] yeah it's an experience yeah we talk we tell stories we share we learn it's more yeah than you would ever get from the grocery store i had i literally had a guy in here yesterday that was talking about the lime museum in bordeaux um because they just visited bordeaux had been there like in april or something like that and as he was leaving i'm telling my stories throughout the tasting and stuff

[00:51:07] he goes i learned more in the past hour and a half than i did at the wine museum in bordeaux and i was like wow would you put that in a review exactly right oh and it's it's really just about stories as an educator you know people learn through stories we always have and and so i use stories to kind of explain the wine and the history and what's going on in a way that makes it relatable and and emotional

[00:51:33] and if you can do that right like if you can if you can tell a story about the wine while someone is experiencing the wine then literally their experience of the wine is better yeah than if it wasn't right like if i tell you the wine has got strawberries what do you taste strawberries whether they're there or not right but i can like incept your mind into having a great experience with the wine just by

[00:51:58] providing a great environment yeah for you to be experiencing the wine in and i know i've talked to other people as well i've experienced this where when you are with people especially like at a tasting room or something like that and you're tasting wine it tastes oh this is so great like this and this and this but then you take the bottle home and you're by yourself and you taste it it doesn't quite taste the same there's something about that experiencing it with other people and things

[00:52:23] that i think really um sets wine apart and makes it really i don't know it really enhances the flavor the the mystery the experience of the whole thing uh so that's actually one of the things that the guy who was here was talking about he's like hello why do i buy wine you know i go and i experience it somewhere and then i get home and i try it i don't like it and it's interesting because like i said there's so many things about the environment that you're in and that physically change the way that

[00:52:51] the wine feels to you i mean if you're you're tired if you're angry if you're with somebody that's pissing you off if you've got you know smells or stress or all of those things will actually take your focus of what you're experiencing in the wine and change it right yeah so wineries are hopefully designed to be the best possible experience of that wine right it's the best people

[00:53:17] with the most knowledge and the best environment with the soft music and the you know the beautiful grapes to look at and the connection to the place the terroir and and all of it is designed to be the best experience that you can and ideally for me this is what i focus on is like when when you go home and you pop that bottle again smell is just so intimately connected with memory right like our

[00:53:42] olfactory bulb is located right next to our hippocampus which is a memory center in the brain and so when you smell particular things it will bring yeah just right there memories for me like the one that always gets me is every time that i smell uh like mothballs it takes me back to my aunt's attic in portland like like i'm visually there like i i can feel it you know and if you do

[00:54:08] like a good enough job of building that emotional and memory connection together then when you go home and you pop that bottle and you smell that wine it should bring you back to the experience that you had the first time where you're you're experiencing the same emotions and joys and the flavors and things so while yes it can be the other way we're like oh this tastes worse at home then why doesn't it taste

[00:54:33] as good as well in there if it can also be like oh my god this you know this brings me right back to where i was uh when i had it that very first time and and i remember the stories and i remember the experience of doing it and so it can it can work both ways right yeah it can it can happen both ways interesting you know we talk circles back because we were talking earlier about the craft of wine but i think we're talking about the craft of wine in the craft of making the wine sure yeah but

[00:54:59] there's a whole craft into serving the wine the experience that you craft here uh around the tasting of the wine and the sharing of that with the guests to really make that experience something that connects and it i think the people that do it the best right they're doing both yeah they're doing both because when i talk to people that come through the tasting room uh particularly like somebody that might be interested in joining a wine club or something like that there's really three things that

[00:55:28] everybody's looking for one the wine has got to be good uh not just like the quality of it but i personally have to enjoy it so if i like the wine and then two is the place it's um ideally going to be beautiful uh but at the very least it has to be clean right because if you feel like you're in a dirty place then what's the wine yeah you're going to associate negatively so ideally you're you're in a place with uh you know good wine a beautiful environment and then the third one is the people

[00:55:58] uh you have to have a good friendly experience right because if you walk into somewhere and somebody treats you poorly or or they don't respect you or in a way or you know even they make you feel bad because you don't know about wine or whatever it is all that is going to affect how the wine physically tastes wow so it's all got to play together and if you can get those three right like the the wine and the place and the people then that is a place that that i want to join the club

[00:56:27] like that's a place where i want to come back to i want to experience it um and that's that's really we spend a lot of time on trying to make sure that we have all three of those things in place in place and it's tough and the people is the hardest part about it yeah um i mean i feel like we have great staff amazing staff right now but it's so hard to transfer 10 years of wine knowledge to somebody else so um we do our best to make sure that everybody has a great experience and sometimes that means

[00:56:56] talking about the wine and the science and the geeky stuff and sometimes that means talking about your life and your experience and all the things so relating that yeah it's just about providing the best experience that we can because that's the only difference right coming to a vineyard you have an experience going to the grocery store yeah you don't you have a bottle yeah you know you don't understand what's in the bottle well you kind of touched on it a little bit earlier but just kind of

[00:57:23] going a little further to we have the name coordinates vineyard yeah so unsurprisingly we talked about your wanderlust there's a story about that uh it's a story that i get asked about a lot and i think it's kind of an unusual name uh in a lot of ways we do get we get like a lot of pilots we get a lot of military we get um you know people that you would use gps coordinates kind of in a regular everyday life they kind of pick that out um but really like the name comes from

[00:57:51] that very first trip that i did to south africa so i had taken my money out of that investment and i cold called and emailed and tried to find a bunch of people to help me like source wine in south africa my wife at the time had a flight to south africa in like two weeks so i was really rushing to try and get something together and i found a guy that was willing to work with me that um he's like okay you know i'll pick you up at the airport and take you around to a couple places that i think might work

[00:58:18] and so i'd land at the cape town airport and you know this guy shows up in a three-piece suit expecting this chinese businessman and yeah this guy here you go he was like yeah okay sure let's go right uh and so we spent you know a good portion of my like 24 hours to make this deal work going to huge amazing beautiful vineyards in stellenbosch and in in south africa right around cape town

[00:58:47] but they were enormous they were already in china they were already in america and i had twenty thousand dollars like exactly if anybody had twenty five thousand dollars they were going to outbid me on price and you know i wouldn't be able to compete and so i told him this you know sort of halfway through the day and he's like well i wish we would have talked about that ahead of time we could save this but he said i think i have um a place you know friend of mine he's a fifth

[00:59:14] generation winemaker who's been making wine from the grapes on his family farm for 150 years i was like try and find that texas right but it does not exist uh and i was like that sounds amazing like take me take me to his winery it doesn't have a winery it's just his house like he just sells the yes out of his living take me there right you know that's exactly what i'm looking for so it turns out that his uh place was in parl which is the next valley over from stellenbosch

[00:59:42] everybody knows stellenbosch but parl is kind of a it's if stellenbosch is their napa parl is their sonoma okay so also a very important wine region and to get there you have to drive like over the mountain range into the next area so i was there in august which is actually their winter so it was like slightly raining so the most beautiful waterfall i've ever seen in my life like a river just fall off a

[01:00:05] cliff and the the name parl means pearl in africanus and it's named after this like giant boulder that's like stuck onto the side of a mountain i mean it's been there forever right but it looks like somebody just like stuck it onto the side of the mountain and it's covered with like bird shit sorry if this is a no you're good so when it rains it kind of like shimmers like a mother of pearls

[01:00:31] and so it's named parl after this like mountain okay but we go over like the wine you know the region into the winelands and it's more of a like rural part of south africa and so there there aren't always like stop signs or street names a lot of dirt roads like it's kind of hard to know where you are right and so we're driving down this road and we think we need to get to a road that's parallel to that but there's like a vineyard in the middle of it and so we're driving down we're driving down it's like pretty far and there's no way to get across and then we see that there's like this tractor

[01:01:01] road like through the the thing we're like okay we just take that we'll get to the other side it'll be fine so we're driving in his like 94 civic right and it's amazing that he had a car because again south africa is economically challenged you know so he's driving in this civic and we get onto the traffic road uh the tractor path and we're kind of going through the grapes and then the the path just stops it doesn't like connect to the other side well it's kind of a now we got to back all the way up

[01:01:26] back to the road or we can try and like like turn yeah right 80 point turn yeah well literally so as we start doing that like he backs up to kind of turn around and as soon as we get off like the compacted dirt where the tractor was it was all alluvial clay for the grapes so just immediately like stuck in the mud like really stuck in the mud so i'm you know i'm young and i'm on a time crunch

[01:01:51] you know okay i'll push you steer like let's go you know so i pop out and i'm on the back you know pushing like as hard as i can and the tires are just spinning right and so i'm speckled with mud for like the nipples down like it was because my face is protected this is nice civic was low right and he's pushing as hard as he can and trying to steer and like literally explodes his foot like out of his shoe like his dress shoe into the mud and it's just like oh my god like this is this is so embarrassing this is not what i want so everybody's like back in the car

[01:02:21] it's raining and you know it's just like calling the winemaker and it's like listen man you gotta come save me this is not going well like this is not how we wanted the day to go we've got time like this is he's turned into me he's like let me take you back to the airport i'm so sorry like yeah we can try again and i'm like there is no try again another time this is it right how do we how's that uh literally like there are no numbers for this guy's house like i've tried to send him

[01:02:48] thank you gifts and i if i try to mail it from the u.s like they won't accept it but if i do something within south abriga it's like they know that the postman like knows where these people live and so like we can't navigate there and then finally robert the winemaker is like well i just had a survey done let me see if this works and he gave us the coordinates to his house and this was in like 2014 so i had no idea that you could actually like navigate by that like you can put it into

[01:03:16] google maps and stuff but i'd just gotten an iphone sure like it was early days for that yeah yeah so we put it in and like sure enough the house was you know five minutes from where we were and it was winter time so we broke off some of the the branches to put under the tires it got us out of the mud and we arrived at this guy's house and he duct taped anton's shoe back together so that he he kept walking and i sat down at his at his living room table and he served to me the most

[01:03:42] amazing pinotage that i've ever had in my life and that was the first wine that i ever sourced for china so like literally none of it would have ever happened yeah without the coordinates wow you never found it no so we now we put coordinates on everything uh kind of show people where we are so like this bottle is uh our chenon blanc which is one that uh south africa is quite famous for their chenon so this one comes from robertson and then you can like literally look up where the coordinates

[01:04:12] are um it's we didn't intentionally plan this but as you know most wine in texas comes from the high plains yeah and so when i look at those like coordinates for the vineyards up there they're mostly at about 33 degrees north okay and when you look at south africa yeah you can see that they're actually at 33 south 33 degree south so we didn't plan it just happens to be interesting side of

[01:04:36] the world uh which makes it really difficult sometimes to source and get wine to texas but it is uh beautiful so you put the different coordinates on each bottle based on the location of where that fruit comes from exactly so you can always look up and see oh where it is i like that that's really cool interesting so that became your name coordinates yep nice well let's talk a little

[01:05:01] about some of these wines i mean that sparkling was amazing i really enjoyed it um so all of the wines that you have are you solely south african or are you bringing other things in i mean obviously we have our own vineyard so we do south africa and texas uh we'll work with some different partners in the high plains in the hill country always looking for great texas wine but as you know texas is not producing a lot of wine so it can be difficult to find you know quality grapes and

[01:05:29] quality wines and things available to offer them so whenever and wherever we can find those we're always looking for new partners to work with so there's anybody out there listening to the podcast please reach out to us if you think you can help um but we do mostly south african with like the texas here and there as soon as we can get we're working on building that out and then would like to bring in you know spain and oregon and california as well

[01:05:51] what the idea behind coordinates is is that we can choose wines that represent those coordinates right yeah like those regions amazing wine regions yeah so i want to have you know an amazing example of a chen and blanc from south africa i want an amazing rioja from spain i want a beautiful cabernet from napa it's challenging and very time consuming to to get all of those things in place and actually the rules

[01:06:21] around alcohol in texas are quite difficult so it's very hard for us to bring on harder than we expected to bring on new suppliers but south africa being where my personal history with wine started will always be kind of the foundation for it and then texas of course being here we want to represent the region we want to have our own grapes in the ground and i think there are some amazingly beautiful things happening in texas we just had james suckling come through and give some incredible

[01:06:49] awards to some of our neighbors around here so allowing reviews yeah texas is doing some incredible things it is just a very very challenging region to grow wine you so a little bit more difficult here than it is in south africa or california absolutely the weather volatility and things are just so we do you know kind of a mix of both i think at the moment we have four or five from texas and about um 11 or 12 from south africa uh typically the south african things are more

[01:07:17] popular mostly because it's it's just unique right like if you're going wine tasting around you texas texas texas all around and you get to south africa that's that's different yeah um we do tastings glasses and bottles we have a few things that are in limited supply so they might be wine club specific um actually both of these bottles the shenan and our high-end uh bubbles the

[01:07:42] mcc those are both wine club only uh which is a new thing for us but our wine club is super accessible we just do three bottles three times a year comes with free tastings and glasses and all sorts of things so if you come in for a tasting and you're like two of the bottles you can basically leave with a third bottle and pay less money if you join the club which is an incredible deal um and we allow some aspect of customization in all of our clothes so you can choose the bottles

[01:08:09] which i feel like is important too when you absolutely when you join a club you should be able to get the wine that you like um so that's our focus kind of for the next year is to to work on building our wine club to help us kind of manage the the supply and and what we need to forecast sure this last order that we just got from south africa that took about eight and a half months to put that order

[01:08:32] together which is significantly longer than it's ever taken in the past and so we're trying to get ahead of that and and make sure that we don't run out because it's it can take us a long time to get a new supply from south africa or any other place in the world there's just a lot a lot of paperwork that is involved awesome cool so uh i wanted to share with you our new chenon blanc okay uh this is

[01:08:58] one of the wines that i'm most excited about um about having right now this comes from robertson as well which is a higher elevation site um comes from a vineyard named erin sig which is not a very old vineyard within south africa it's about 25 years old which would be quite old for texas right but in south africa there's a lot of places like i think we'll do the mcc bottle that we had that vineyard was

[01:09:25] established in like 1668 um and there's a lot of history there um but shenan is the grape variety that south africa was kind of built on uh it was called steen for a long time there before it was like rediscovered in the 1960s that it was actually chenon blanc um so a little bit about this vineyard site erin sig they're up in the mountains and the site that the shenan block is on is in like on a steep

[01:09:54] hillside where like the sun rises on this side so in the morning it's in the shadows yeah and i just imagine these grapes like waking up so gently like not having that direct sunlight and just warming up like really slowly throughout the day and then getting the afternoon sun that they need to like power all their growth and and the sugar production and all that but um i just imagine this as like

[01:10:20] such a soft gentle awakening and you can taste it on the wine actually it's such a soft and beautiful wine so these guys are all about like as little intervention as possible uh we don't even use any commercial yeast for this so just the natural yeast that they cultivate uh cultivate in the winery and they in the ambient air which intentionally so is trying to express that terroir that sense of place so they don't want to influence the fruit by by having a yeast that might import grapefruit flavors

[01:10:49] or something you know specific and then it does go into oak but just neutral oak barrels so we're not trying to impart any flavors from the oak as well and then one of the things that i just absolutely love about these bottles is the hand-dipped uh wax capsule at the top so it's something you see very often it's it's not anymore um it used to obviously be like the main way that they would do it and the capsules are interesting they used to do this so that it would cover the cork so that you

[01:11:16] wouldn't be able to tell if it was a corked bottle or not like you can see sometimes runs along the side that would indicate that maybe there was a problem there so this is actually not designed for consumers like the intention was to be able to hide any mistakes that were there the wax capsules work pretty well as an oxygen barrier right so there's nothing that's coming through this uh although the

[01:11:41] corks typically would allow some micro oxygenation so usually there's a foil capsule that sits over the top and you would use something like this uh at least in a in a winery these are so much faster than trying to use the the little knife that comes on the keychain so we'll typically use a foil cutter for the foils but for wax capsules you don't use those yeah and so i'll just show you real quickly how we open a wax capsule in case you ever do get one of these bottles or something else and it's actually quite quite

[01:12:10] easy so um if you're not using a waiter's key this is the only way that you should ever open a bottle of wine you don't get rid of those rabbit ear things and all that other stuff this is all you need uh it's the most efficient way to do it so we're just going to take our corkscrew and pretend like the wax isn't even there and we're just going to go right through the wax and screw through and then as we remove

[01:12:37] the cork it's going to create a little perfect circle in the wax that will be uh all that we need to pour the wine through oh yeah so it just comes out oh wow that's really cool it's just attached perfectly yep so i'll pour you a little bit here and uh we'll talk a little bit about the story of chen and blanc within south africa beautiful yeah so this is that zero intervention

[01:13:04] or little intervention as possible uh in every way true expression of south african chen and blanc so let's talk about chen and blanc and about the history of chen and blanc in south africa and to understand this we have to go all the way back to the 1600s uh which is just how old we are talking about these things yeah that's just it's just lovely it's starting to open up a little bit it's a little bit cold so as it warms up a little bit

[01:13:32] we'll get more of the aromatics but the variety of course is known for having this kind of honey or honeysuckle flavor to it um beautiful bright fruit fruit tones yeah i get things like yellow apple pineapple um some tropical fruit in there as well it's just a beautiful expression of what south africa does okay so 1600s if we look at europe in the 1600s there is one clear winner for the

[01:13:59] first part of the century okay and that is the portuguese yeah so the portuguese was a great seafaring nation and they had figured out a way to build ships that were strong enough for them to be able to sail all the way around africa and get to india for the spices yeah and they became very good at this journey and for about 50 years they had kind of a lock on this spice trade which made these

[01:14:25] portuguese monarchy exceptionally wealthy yeah exceptionally wealthy so everybody else started getting jealous right uh and they wanted to compete but they had trouble doing that because of the the extreme cost and expense and risk involved in in seafaring in the 1600s so they had done you know some like columbus had already gone across the atlantic and things like that but the hard part was to get

[01:14:51] enough money to build the ships and pay the sailors so the dutch were the ones that ended up solving this by creating the world's first corporation the dutch east india company so in the 1600s it was like 1650 something around there it was the first time that you as a citizen of any country were able to purchase

[01:15:16] shares in a company and participate in the wealth that that company made huge innovation and then it was amazing and so they all of a sudden had enough wealth to be able to build big seafaring ships that would be able to get around africa now they didn't end up going to india like the portuguese did instead they went to indonesia and in indonesia they had the peppercorns so if you ever go today

[01:15:44] it's just amazing i've been to indonesia a couple different times you can go to old dutch forts that were built in the 1600s that are still you know there and you can pick the peppercorns and and and they're amazing and bring them back so it's clearly that the dutch was very involved in indonesia at that time but they had a problem okay a lot of the sailors that would go on this journey uh they'd be okay

[01:16:08] until they got to the long ocean voyage between south africa and india uh indonesia and what they found was that these guys were losing their teeth going crazy and dying well they didn't have any idea i was uh and so they did what anybody would do they hired a doctor they hired a dutch surgeon in 1652 who um

[01:16:34] was basically a guy with sharp tools that that was their understanding of medical science at the time uh but his name was jan van rebeck and he is considered the founding father of south africa so they sent him on a boat uh with about 80 men and eight women and they brought with them you know seeds for everything that they possibly bring you know uh horses and goats and sheep and yeah all the

[01:16:59] animals and pigs that they could fit on the boat with them okay and they sailed to cape town which was this beautiful natural harbor in in south africa they took apart the boat um to build their houses but also so nobody could leave they planted all the things that they brought with them including chen and blanc from the loire valley yeah so they brought it from uh its origins in france to south africa and planted it at constantia which is the large vineyard at the base of table mountain

[01:17:28] and still but still there today very famous vineyard um it's amazing because they have the captain's logs from all of this so they have you know the notes from like this is when we planted and this was our first vintage and and all of these things so they have all of that but basically the reason that they started and and established the nation of south africa which is very weird it's never been a corporation that has established a nation any other crime in history uh but they did that they did that

[01:17:57] as a resupply post for the sailors right so they wanted to have a place for them to rest and to get the the vegetables and things and food that they needed for the voyage across the ocean okay and what they found was you know when the sailors were at port uh or had fresh fruit and fresh vegetables that they were okay but when they were doing the long ocean voyages and surviving on like salted pork and fish and things they were they were not yeah um so they had them eat the grapes and the grapes seemed to help

[01:18:27] and it turns out if you take those same grapes and make wine and you put that wine into an oak barrel that the the the barrel will protect the wine so it can stay for a significant period of time without going bad and the sailors could of course drink the wine which was no problem for them and it turns out that there is just enough ascorbic acid vitamin c left in the wine to help protect the sailors from yes

[01:18:52] scurvy which was the issue so if you were british you probably had limes on born which is why they're known as limees uh new zealanders known as kiwis because that's their source of vitamin c on their ocean journeys and uh south africans well we don't really have a name for them but if we did i guess it might be drunks winos winos exactly yeah exactly well and the wine barrels also interestingly provided

[01:19:17] um ballast in the ships as well for those long journeys so it's kind of a double i mean monohulls are pretty rocky thing right yeah anything that you could kind of help to do that uh but it's just interesting that like really the the history the story of south africa began with wine like it was the intention um of starting it there and chen and blanc has has done exceptionally well in south africa

[01:19:42] it is the world's largest plantings of chen and blanc are in south africa so while france does of course a lot more wine overall south africa does about twice the volume of shannon making them the world's leading producer of shen and in south africa you'll find it dry you'll find it sweet sparkling fortified into brandy in a lot of ways it was the workhorse that sort of built south african wine and uh right

[01:20:09] around the 60s or so we started to get this shift away uh from bulk wine into more quality productions and they've really taken shannon and made it the star of the show which is which is really beautiful so one of my favorite wines overall uh and a lovely example of what south africa does and and the

[01:20:30] history and that all of it wrapped up into one glass yes it's beautiful well question about fruit and sourcing when you import your bottles um i presume you're working with several different you'd already mentioned a couple of them uh locations there in south africa and these other places that are then producing the wine they're harvesting the fruit they're producing the wine bottling it doing all the barrel aging all the 70s we've done the bottle and they ship you the bottles

[01:20:59] and then you apply your labels to them okay sort of so most of the guys that i work with i've been working with for 10 years around there now every once in a while we'll bring on new suppliers but it's few and far between and that's because of the licensing process that we have to go through in texas so any buddy that's making wine for the texas market but is not physically located in texas

[01:21:24] still has to have a license what they call a non-resident sellers permit to be able to produce wine for the texas market so it's challenging and expensive and there's monthly report it's a lot to bring on new people um to do that so we could work with a lot more people but we can't the challenges are there yeah so we have to focus and be really cheery about who we work with and we want

[01:21:50] to have partners that are in it for the long haul because to do one shipment with one producer it it like it doesn't make sense because of how much it goes into it so we really look for people that are working for us in the long haul that's actually a better model for us anyways because we can produce things through a custom crush so where they're making things specifically for us from their fruit yeah

[01:22:16] everyone right now that is doing south african wine is doing it the same way where we're bottling it labeling it and bringing it over palletized from south africa to texas the reason for that is that it's the safest or the least riskiest way to do it because it is a 45 to 55 day ocean journey to get here over the equator and so there's a lot of things that could go wrong

[01:22:45] um i think and i've been working on this for a couple of months now with the threat of tariffs which are very likely coming our way um that is a direct hit for us and i think that there's going to be a difference in the tariffs applied to bottled finished wine versus bulk unfinished wine

[01:23:12] okay and so i'm trying to solve this puzzle yeah another one of those puzzles on how do i bring over bulk wine from the same produce the same wine right just not in a bottle but in in not in a barrel but in like a thousand liter totes how do i bring that over safely yeah and it's a puzzle right because one of the things that we're worried about oxygen exposure volatile acidity there's a lot of chemistry

[01:23:39] that's happening that we won't be able to intervene with while it's in a shipping container for sure things out of your control so i don't really have a solution for this yet but i've been working on the problem for a while and i think if i can solve it it's going to give us a huge advantage uh one of the issues that we deal with right now is that you know maybe this one has a wax capsule but this one doesn't yeah we don't have the consistency across the brand because we are using different suppliers to do

[01:24:09] it but if i can bring it over and have control your own bottling then i can make branded corks and have the capsules all match and the same kind of bottles so they fit nicely on the shelves and you know to have more brand unity sure um so one of the challenges there is that whoever bottles the wine assumes the liability for it okay which is interesting yeah right so even though it's our brand uh you know

[01:24:38] if someone else bottles it for us they're assuming that liability so a lot of people don't want to work with wine that they're not familiar with because they don't want to assume new liability for that so it's been challenged for us to find the right people that are willing to share that risk with us and really like it's our risk you know but technically they have to assume it to do that so it's a lot of puzzles a

[01:25:04] lot of puzzles um but i think if we can figure out how to do it in a thousand liters because it already exists for like 40 000 liters right like the big guys in california they're making stuff from a chili and argentina like it shows up in a giant milk truck and it's all just liquid you're right um but i can't do 40 000 yeah you're trying to scale it down so i need to do what i call mini bulk

[01:25:29] mini book and it's uh it's a challenge right now but we'll we'll get there yeah well some of your i mean we talked a little bit about your tonight uh but other things that are you doing a custom crush here in the hill country or so we have um like some consultants that are they're helping with us so it's even a little bit more than custom crush um because we have like a a winemaker that's working specifically with us so it's he's producing it but he's following sort of you get to put your influence

[01:25:59] there yeah absolutely uh so actually we're working with uh pebble rock out of johnson city so if you know rob and lydia oh yeah i did they were my fifth episode of the podcast i mean incredible people yes they are and exceptionally knowledgeable so lydia has been helping us with the vineyard this year and then her husband rob is uh the winemaker so he's helping us to do the wine and it's been a great experience i've learned a tremendous amount from both of them yeah lovely people good people yes

[01:26:26] well there's a lot of good people in wine oh absolutely absolutely all right so that's interesting well what what then would you say we've we've already you've already introduced me to two great wines here um what are some of your just from your perspective we'll talk about customers in what do you sell produce that you sell that you're doing selling here so that's a hard question because it changes okay yeah your palate changes well just you know the weather what i'm eating who i'm with like

[01:26:56] i'm an equal opportunity wine enjoyer and that um i don't have a specific one that i always kind of need to turn to but i but i do have some favorites uh and so one of one of our favorites one of my favorites um certainly is pinotage so you know a little bit about why you've done through like the wsc uh-huh pinotage so pinotage is typically like the trick question that you get on a lot of those uh

[01:27:24] those tests and it is because it's so uniquely south african so pinotage was created in 1924 25 by crossing pinot noir with senso yeah and senso is a grape that um we see here in texas it makes a very lovely rosé but outside of texas it's much more commonly used as a blending grape yeah because

[01:27:49] it'll really beef up a wine that feels a little bit thin now this isn't a blend it is 100 percent pinotage and the same way that like a kid is not exactly 50 mom or 50 or bad like it created its own kind of thing you know taj um so it's quite a distinct grape it's a little bit like a more full body pinot noir but there's a smokiness to the grape it's it's known for the vibrancy and its color

[01:28:16] and distinctly south african so i know there's a few people like maybe in california maybe even here in texas that are trying to grow pinotage but i never in my life have seen a bottle of pinotage that didn't come out of south africa so it's really only commercial production in south africa it's a really interesting story it's kind of like a legend of how it was created with uh i believe the winemaker's name was abraham pernall okay um he was the first winemaker ever tapped to to bring wine

[01:28:46] into the university system so he was the guy who literally wrote the textbook on how to grow wine in south africa uh but he was really into it was kind of like this mad scientist a little bit like you know a lot of winemakers are like kind of small quirky quirky individuals they've got their own things that they're into so this guy was really into genetics in 1924 which was like i mean their understanding of genetics was gregor mendahl as you're you know i have a red flower i have a white

[01:29:13] flower it makes a pink flower like that was their understanding uh but he decided to take the the two grapes and cross them and it's not easy to do because grape flowers are tiny right so he's using tweezers and taking the stainels out of them the male flower and rubbing it onto the female flower of the senso and then tracking that flower to turn into a specific grape and then using those four seeds to

[01:29:35] to plant to get started um i often talk about in my stories how wine wine takes time um like nothing happens quickly in wine so they created this in 1924 he literally gets to work writing the book on how to grow wine in south africa and gets kind of overwhelmed with that so i say that it's kind of like a big fish story because there's multiple different i'm sure yeah that the story has been told but in one of them

[01:30:02] he like plants them in the university garden and the other one he plants the the vines at his home which is next to the university in both of them he kind of neglects it for like 20 years in one story he retires and another one he dies but is always the second professor that comes through and sort of saves a kvinotage vine so literally in one of the stories whatever route we take to get there yeah he's like riding his bicycle past and he sees they're bulldozing like the house that he lived in and there's the vine peeking out and he literally saves it out of the dirt and then the other one is like

[01:30:32] he dies and then the the grapes are planted in the garden and he's like looking through boxes and boxes and boxes of like rough drafts of his book until he finds like a map of the garden with with senso and uh pinot noir however it wasn't senso actually at that time so in south africa the the grape senso when it was first brought to the country was named after the place it came from because it came from france and they never everything after the place not the grape yeah so it came from hermitage

[01:31:01] yeah and hermitage very famous because that's the name hermit and comes from that it's like a knight who went to the crusades and came back and didn't want to talk to anybody and lived on top of the mountain now it's my understanding that most of that mountain is surrounded or hill i guess is surrounded by syrah but it's not the only grape that's planted there so somehow they grabbed one of hermitage when it arrived so uh there's you know a lot of confusion historically and naming things for

[01:31:29] the place instead of the grapes um but anyways they called it hermitage and pinot noir so that's where the name pinotage came from uh that second professor slowly started to propagate the mines so that we could have enough for like a planting they did some testing with different root stocks to see what would be a good combination and it wasn't until 1959 that the very first planting of pinot noir was ever harvested

[01:31:56] so we went from 1924 to 1959 before we ever got like a vintage of it yeah which is quite late and that producer was bellevue which is a very famous place in south africa still making amazing pinotage there today and it slowly slowly started to kind of catch on you know and by the time that pinotage became popular within south africa they started going through apartheid yeah so apartheid is uh when south africa is

[01:32:25] basically cut off from the world stage for a significant period of time so no olympics no international wine competitions and no trade with like a lot of nations so their wine industry struggled with that there's a lot of things that we need in line for the technology and trade to make that work but they persisted on and pinotage is growing growing growing in popularity during that time in 1994 nelson mandela is released

[01:32:51] from prison 95 he becomes the president and hey it's how i was back you can go to the olympics so you can do the wine competitions you know all the things uh so i think it was like in 95 or 96 they sent pinotage off to like a big competition in singapore or it's a big competition today i don't think it was a big competition in 1996 but there's only two free ports in asia hong kong and singapore so now like when they have the huge southerby auctions and the chinese billionaires come like it's always

[01:33:19] in those places where they do it so there's a lot of like a lot of money in line going through those places but in 1995 it wasn't that popular anyways they send off the wine and they win like not only best winemaker in the world but best wine for the pilotage and literally like sommeliers in london and new york yeah like what is this i've never even heard of this green like how can we not have that like

[01:33:42] we want it right and and so in response to this huge spike in demand they plant a ton of pinotage and today one in every 12 vines in south africa is a pinotage vine so it's it's a significant number of the plantings and a lot of it happened in that like 95 96 97 late 90 that was their own judgment of paris their judgment of singapore in a way okay because while the judgment of paris put

[01:34:10] california on the map and really like signified that they're here to stay south africa fumbled the ball oh no so in order to meet that demand right because all throughout apartheid like they're producing pinotage for domestic consumption not for international right distribution so they need to plant like a ton of it and as you know young vines do not make great wine yeah so they were

[01:34:36] harvesting like year two when you know where you shouldn't be and they were making wine and oaking it for like three months because the demand was there and they needed to get it out now at the door so the very first pinotages that arrived in london in particular i mean the notes are the rubber bands and burnt tires and band-aids and bananas and i mean these are real wine notes but they are not the ones you want out your wine you're looking for right and so their first experience was this is horrific

[01:35:05] and no we don't want yeah thanks anyway yeah so they didn't order a lot of it and particularly in america we never we never had it like yeah you know the first the first impression was terrible and so it never caught on well all of those vines stayed there and and have now aged 30 years and are producing world-class because you're dodge again and i think now the world is is ready for those kind of like weird grapes that pop up every once in a while from different places people are ready

[01:35:34] to experiment in texas we have a lot of varieties that we grow that are not the ones that are you know most places in california and new york are grapes that people would would think to ask for uh so we do a lovely viognier we we don't have a chardonnay from texas uh we have a sauvignon blanc from south africa doesn't do that great here um so there are other grapes that we grow and then

[01:35:59] i think that the texas wine drinking population is is willing to experiment yeah and you know they're they're familiar 10 years of okay this is something new i've never had that before let me try it you know and for us once you try pinotage it's it's such an exceptionally well-crafted wine is so unique uh it's so beautiful and wait i can't get this at atb or even at specs or total

[01:36:23] wine oh so i think it's the rarity that that drives the popularity of it as far as the sales go but pinotage is probably three to one our best seller we have both the standard and the reserve pinotage that is wine club only um but just an exceptionally beautiful rare wine that's i mean we don't trade with south africa like for anything right so obviously atb like there's california there's italy there's

[01:36:51] spain there's france there's a few texas but there's nothing from south africa if you go to specs or total wine like there's you know 400 from france 300 from italy 200 from spain 200 from california maybe like 10 from texas they're trying but they're struggling you know and by the time you get to south africa there's usually like three or four yeah and most always almost always it's going to be grapes that you'll recognize because south africa itself is already the risk right so it's like what does a south african

[01:37:22] cab taste like and like i was gonna buy adam who's a manly street manager um a beautiful bottle that they said they had listed on on the website and then i showed up and they didn't have it of course but um they had three bottles all from south africa all cabernet all looked identical one was 13 dollars one was 50 dollars and one was like you know 20 quite a range right but it was all like the same stuff you know because logistically it is the furthest place on the planet to try and bring

[01:37:51] wine to i mean there's a lot closer to go to chile or argentina or even europe yeah so it's quite challenging to get wine from south africa to the states and that's why most people don't do it yeah that's the the least represented wine region on the u.s market well i love this uh it's interesting because it it's opening up more over time as well it seems like every time i taste it i'm getting a different note a different flavor coming through as as you should

[01:38:20] with a well-crafted yeah and so it's it's starting to evolve we just opened this bottle as well it's a 2021 so it does have a little bit of age to it the reserve is a 2020 so we're starting to pick up some of those like tertiary notes and things too in the wine so you know about primary secondary tertiary notes i might be interesting for your listeners a lot of people think that that would be the first thing you taste the second thing that you taste and the third thing that you taste but

[01:38:45] it's really more about like where those flavors develop during the winemaking process so for pinotage uh like if you're trying that wine and you went out into the vineyard and you picked a grape you would taste some of that red and black berries kind of note um you know so fruitiness right that's also in the wine so if the flavor is found in the grape and in the wine that's a primary flavor

[01:39:10] secondary means that it develops during the winemaking process so like you taste it in the wine but it doesn't exist in the grapes and there's a lot of chemistry that happens during those first couple weeks of fermentation so not surprising that that happens but interesting all the same and then tertiary flavors only develop as the wine has been stored in bottle and typically that takes three to five years so one of the ways i like to explain tertiary flavors is like the difference

[01:39:37] between like a fresh strawberry like a strawberry and strawberry jam if there's like a caramelization of the sugars that's happening it becomes more complex but also more subtle right so it's not that oh that's a strawberry like the brightness right it's more of a yeah you know like oh there's strawberry but there's almost like is there vanilla in there or like caramel or a fresh fruit versus a dried fruit yes yes yeah yeah exactly um so it's just kind of more interesting and typically a little

[01:40:05] bit softer as we go along and these these ones now now that we're you know 21 so we're at the end of 24 now we're just starting to see those tertiary flavors develop in the in the standard and in some of them like we have a few 2018s that we still have on the menu so those are exquisite examples of tertiary flavors and you can't really find uh typically like you go to the grocery store you know it's this year or the previous year but it's very hard to find vintage bottles uh grocery

[01:40:35] stores don't want to store them that way and it's very difficult in texas to store wine properly at home so it's kind of unique when you can buy an old bottle somewhere yeah well what are some of the um most popular wine selections that you have with customers were the ones that you have a hard time keeping in stock because customers i gotta try that gotta get that you know it's um it's surprising we

[01:40:59] have a we have a range of different things um like last wine competition that we did was the san antonio rodeo yeah we sent 10 wines and we got 10 medals back oh nice so we really focus a lot on trying to have every wine be representative of its variety right like be a good example of that represent the place where it comes from but also be delicious so we have kind of something for

[01:41:26] every everybody we've got three different bubbles at the moment we've got five dry whites we have um six dry reds we have some sweet wines as well some some texas like moscato and more vedra as well as a south african sweet red blend and one of those bubbles is white so we can hit kind of the whole palette yeah any anywhere that you're looking for whether you're a big bold red drinker or you're

[01:41:53] more of a crisp white drinker or you're into bubbles we we'd like to think that we have something that everyone will find something they'll enjoy while they're here what i wasn't expecting like the intention was for everybody to be able to find one what i'm often finding is that people come in they'll do a tasting we've got a couple different tastings of four wines and they're like oh my god i like all of them yeah and as somebody who goes around and does tastings that's not always the case

[01:42:22] right like usually you do tasting you're like oh this one is fantastic or maybe i like these two but to like all four is quite unique yeah um so some of our most popular ones have been the bubbles um that mcc the the beautiful bottle we actually have a three liter so double magnum of those that we just got in so those are big impressive bottles that i think everybody wants but of course they're expensive so those are hard to find uh but pinotage my personal favorite at the moment is this cab blend

[01:42:50] which is basically a bordeaux style okay a left bank bordeaux so 50 cab 30 malbec and 20 petit berdo oh okay beautiful well-structured wine at age for 10 to 15 years it's just gorgeous pinotage because of the the rarity on the market i think is is one of the most popular ones of the new whites that chenon is just spectacular um but there's really something for everybody yeah well what about

[01:43:17] the let's talk about the location here for just a moment um you talked about your space and the amount you could hold inside outdoors you get outdoor space of the balconies and all that the decks um do you ever hold like events or things like that here what types of things yeah so we opened up just in march of this year at this property so not even a year into it now uh we've had a number of events like we did one for the eclipse we had one for industries or welcome to them with the property

[01:43:43] one for our wine club members when we first got it starting then of course our pickup events and parties that happen out here so we do uh kind of three big events a year with the pickup parties where we have music and food and pairings for all those things and then other events that we kind of try to put together some of the things i would love to do would be to bring in like a christmas market next year and do that underneath the trees but i find like we have two locations and four

[01:44:11] total employees yeah and i'm i'm spread too thin to really plan a lot of those things so if there's anybody out there that is looking for a venue that would love to do a particular kind of event whether that's something related the wine like if you have a group of people that want to come and do you know experience we can cater to that or if you have a corporation or like a business that wants to come and bring like a you know kind of a sort of like a bond or team building kind of exercise uh something

[01:44:40] like that where it's just kind of fun and relax dinner stories yeah you know team dinners we don't do a lot of food here um so mostly focused on the wine but yeah any kind of like group activity if you're looking for a venue and you think that this would be a good experience for your team or for your family or whatever it is like you know reach out to us we would we love to talk to you about the opportunities that are available here all right um so some of the ways that people can reach us

[01:45:06] if they wanted to do that of course we have a website that's coordinates vineyards.com so c-o-o-r-d-i-n-a-t-e-s vineyards v-i-n-e-y-a-r-d-s all one word at uh or dot com so if you want to email us it's just wine at coordinates vineyards.com which is a great way or of course you can give us a ring and uh

[01:45:33] just call us up when we're open that number is 830-307-7400 perfect so reach out to us anytime uh email is probably the best way to to reach me directly and i it comes straight to my phone i respond to all those um so if you're interested in doing an event or setting up a tasting you can make reservations online or just send us an email and we'd love to talk to you well listeners are getting excited they want to come check the place out so let's talk about what a tasting might look

[01:45:59] like sure yeah so uh you mentioned a little bit about it four different wines what is a what type of wines do you typically do do you have a set flight that people choose or do the customers pick the wines they want to taste we have two set flights uh at the moment they rotate so they're not always the times they're the same so if you've done a tasting with us before it might be different when you come back um typically a tasting is built to kind of like start with the lightest and move towards the

[01:46:25] heavier wines right um so that's all designed for your palate to to be able to experience each of them uh so i i feel like a curated tasting is very different than just picking stuff that you want because we can actually build it to be the best experience that it is so for both of our tastings at the moment we start with our bubbles either the reserve mcc or with the sparkling brute which is that first one we just find that's a great way to get people started it's it's light it's refreshing

[01:46:54] it kind of cleanses the palate from whatever they may have had before that uh gives us an opportunity to introduce them into the space and find somewhere that they're going to be comfortable for those tastings kind of build a rapport with them while we've got something fun and light and then we go on into either our mixed tasting which goes through our uh vignette and then into the pinotage and the shiraz from south africa or our reserve line which is all uh red so we've got a pinot noir uh the

[01:47:23] pinotage and the reserve cab blend we're pretty flexible with that so like some people show up and they say you know i love reds but i just don't like bubbles so we'll substitute one for the other one there and you know like we want people to have the best experience uh but i wouldn't necessarily just throw in like a random red there i have an intention on how i want to build your pathway yeah your pathway so that so that the experience that you have is like oh this is even better than the last one right you

[01:47:49] always want to build it that way it also lets us save on glassware so we don't have to do glasses all the time and i know a lot of places that you walk into they'll do like they'll pour all four of your tastings and give you some board yeah yeah and maybe there's some descriptions about it along the way but uh i find that we always use one glass um the tastings are built to build upon that right so that the the wine that's in the glass is never going to overshadow the next one that's poured into

[01:48:17] it so it's intentional there but it gives us a chance to come and and have a touch point and tell the next story uh and i think that it's it's really too much all at once and that you you have to experience it while you're tasting the wine and then it does physically change and enhance the experience that you have to to do it well to do it properly uh so that's why we run our tastings

[01:48:40] that way mixed tastings around 25 our reserve tasting is about 35 both of those become free if you join the club at any point or free for members we also do free glasses uh for them when we see them and things like that different levels of the club of course we have a three a six and a 12 bottle club again with different discounts and different levels and things as well but um our goal is really to make it the best experience that we can for everybody that walks through the door whether they're

[01:49:08] interested in the wine or not people that come in and just want to hear about the house and we go for a little tour and tell stories and can people sign up for your wine club um online or do they do it in at the location or both or uh you can absolutely sign up for it online you can order things online we can ship to about 33 states um so use wine cub for that but uh like most places that are doing fulfillment here in the hill country so you can sign up online but i would recommend to anybody

[01:49:36] don't sign up for a wine club even the first time that you go somewhere yeah go two or three times and make sure it's a place you want to go back to and make sure it's somewhere that you're going to enjoy the wine not just the first time but every time and i think that that obviously is detrimental to me to say that that you should go and experience it a few times but the wine club members that i'm looking for are the people that are going to be with us for years to come like that we spend a lot of time we spend a lot of effort in our wine club members we really take care of them and i think

[01:50:05] it's a very different experience here than it is at some of the other bigger places and so the wine club members that we have we really we intend to to keep them for a significant period of time and hope that we can provide them extended value over that time you know you're building that community and the family around and actually that's one of the things that i talk about a lot like our pickup parties are amazing not only because of the food and the wine but because of the people that all come in

[01:50:31] like everybody has the same shared experience that they've loved and i cannot even count the number of times people have come up to me and said that they've left a party or an event with new lifelong friends and that again right like the focus is about wine and using wine as a vehicle to bring people together in the built community so like that to me is even more valuable than you know i came in i had a great wine that's great but like if i came and i left with lifelong plans like that's

[01:51:01] that's a more powerful experience yeah so our wine club events are pretty amazing and we really focus on trying to draw in like the the i i work all the time like i i run two locations this is my this is everything it is all that i do all the time uh so for me these events are like the one time that i get to have fun and like you know hang out with everybody yeah and uh so it's really

[01:51:29] like it's pretty neat to to have this experience where it's i feel like it's you know all my friends are coming over and they're you know they're having fun so it's it's like a it's like a big party at somebody's house with a little bit more organization and we just have such a unique and special group of people like i'm really impressed by the the people that have chosen us to be wine club members and they're amazing and we all get along so well and it's it's just such a cool experience to to come and

[01:51:59] hang out with that group of people when you mentioned a couple times two locations we talked a lot about this you still have your main street location absolutely yeah so we um remember we were looking for this property because the owner was selling that one yeah so it was bought by the uh by the scripps family which has been amazing they're incredible humble and remarkable people within fredericksburg we're so lucky to have them as new owners so we were able to renew our lease

[01:52:24] there for the next three years so now we definitely have that one and we absolutely have this one cool so that way if you're in the city directly you can go there or you come out here to it's actually so main street operates more like a like a wine bar like we do a lot of glasses we do a lot of tastings but most people are walking around main street they only carry bottles and particularly not cases and stuff around so it's it's really unique that you have like the true vineyard experience

[01:52:49] here you can come out you can get all the education you can do all that stuff and then using your same membership right like you can go into town if you're in fredericksburg you can get a glass of wine at you know eight nine o'clock at night because we're open late there so you can go out to dinner and still use your membership for that or you can come out here and experience the vineyard and and have that so it's it's kind of they're quite different experiences with kind of a similar

[01:53:16] feeling or like thread that ties them together okay and it's it's different not everybody has multiple locations like that what about your operating hours yeah so we do 12 to 7 um kind of as a base okay so main street is going to be 12 to 7 wednesday thursday and sunday okay with friday and saturday staying open until nine o'clock so 12 to 9 those are our like winter hours so

[01:53:44] typically we've been open from 12 to 9 and and 12 to 10 on friday saturdays okay out here it's been a little bit slower like this summer was not what anybody was expecting and so we ended up changing wednesdays and thursdays to be reservation only and that allowed me time to like take care of things in the vineyard where i wasn't sure when people were going to come here and all the time so it started

[01:54:09] to be you know knee deep and mud and wubs and all that all all of it right so it kind of lets me plan my time a little bit better do big projects like building the big billboard that we had out there or taking care of the weeds around the property all sorts of stuff but always happy to have reservations for those times and then we run friday saturday sunday uh 12 to 7 here as well so we'll be open until seven o'clock tonight on sunday as well and i'm working right now now that we have the new wines um i'm

[01:54:37] working on kind of a pairing project um to bring those wednesdays and thursdays to not just be a reservation because this is a little different than a typical wine reservation but to be like a i want to call it like reservation with the owner okay uh and so it's just just us small groups like one reservation at a time not multiple things going on and you come in you know maybe you have

[01:55:04] two maybe a four maybe a six maybe eight something like that but small groups with pairings with the new wines with the stories that come with them the experience that we have and make it two hours of storytelling and wine and you know the food that comes along with it but really about the education and the experience and spending that time together and really being able to focus on one group and one reservation and elevate that experience so we'll be rolling that out uh we're

[01:55:33] going to do it through our wine club first and when our wine club members come and experience it and give feedback from them and then we'll be rolling that out to kind of the general public probably in the spring okay and then the reservations can be done on your website yep absolutely yeah so what reservations for any of those days can be made online right now and when we get to those elevated kind of reservation experiences we'll add that as an option so for the moment it's not listed

[01:55:58] but you can make a reservations for um we just call it like a tasting experience um so you can choose upon arrival which tasting you would be interested in and uh you can make it for either location so either for main street or for here and high and yeah and lots of different options for whatever people are interested in and when people load up their minivan come out uh family friendly pet friendly

[01:56:22] tell me about some of those things absolutely all of the above so um family is a really big part of why we're doing this like my brother and i working together but uh we we really understand that it's valuable to be able to bring your family and and have that experience together one thing like if you're bringing younger kids we cannot let them drink the wine um there is some rules in texas where like if

[01:56:47] you're over 16 and you're with your parents then you are allowed to consume alcohol that's great please do that at home yeah for us it's it's not a liability issue something you can control yeah i don't know if you're the parent i don't know if you're the legal guardian and i have had people trick me before uh so it's something that we're not willing to assume the liability poor the risks are just too high sure you know it doesn't make sense for us to do that and we're all about educating people but

[01:57:13] i don't think we need to be educating 16 year olds about alcohol right um so family friendly for sure but and we do have some like games and things to keep kids busy i would find i often find that there is a kind of a younger kids are are fine usually with like a tablet or something that parents bring with them and they're they're fine or outside we've got a lot of space they love to play with rocks and

[01:57:38] sticks and things like that the group that i find is difficult is like the young teens so maybe like 11 through 13 they get bored quickly they they run out of things to do fast they you know they know all the games and things that we have available for them so more than welcome to bring them involve them in the tasting let them hear the education or besides involve them like not giving them the wine but let them participate in the experience as an educator i do well with kids um the hard part is when when

[01:58:07] people come and they expect to be able to have a tasting as if they didn't have children and expect us to take care of them and i i really i don't have the time to to be able to do that we don't have enough staff for that uh so as long as people are expecting to be in charge of their children while they're here more than welcome to bring them let's make an experience and involve them in it you know dogs as well we've got a lot of property here a lot of space so we can do dogs it is a issue with

[01:58:36] the health department to have them inside so they're always on the porches or in the picnic tables outside but we have a lot of lovely covered comfortable seating areas outside for them nice what about food options do you provide anything like that or can people bring their own food uh we do have some options we work with a company that's just out of dripping springs is these beautiful little cheese spreads um so we do have them but during the slowdown over this past summer

[01:59:03] they've stopped delivering as frequently so we are running out of them kind of kind of often uh there is some liability issues with bringing in food from outside to home other license too uh well we can do it as long as people bring it in but they have to understand that like you know if you bring food and get sick from that that that is like i have nothing to do with that you know uh so i think it's it's fine for people to bring stuff in be mindful not just here but anywhere that

[01:59:29] you're going that if you're bringing things and producing a lot of trash that's you know things that people have to take care of for you or if you need plates and stuff like that so if you're self-contained and you've got little munchies and it's not a problem or disturbing other people like that's great you know i'm all for it i love it and i think food is an important part of the wine experience and so if you have things that you enjoy or if you have dietary restrictions you should absolutely be able to bring something along we do have some snacks and things available

[01:59:56] because we know that like we want you to be able to feel safe particularly to drive and we offer water to everybody that's here the issue is that we don't really have like a full commercial kitchen and we're not busy enough to be able to do like charcuterie boards where we're going through and cutting and preparing a lot of things ahead of time yeah so i did those on main street for quite some time maybe about six eight months and we were just throwing away like sixty dollars worth of brie

[02:00:23] every five days because of the regulations around it so what i would love to do is to get to the point where we're busy enough like we have enough people coming through to have a food truck on site that can service all of those people and provide food that pairs with the wine so if there's anybody out there that has a food truck that's looking for a home uh we would love to to host you we love to have somebody on site and again it's just you know like i personally don't have enough time to be designing

[02:00:50] recipes and preparing things but i i would love to have more food i think the entire corridor here needs more food throughout the area um and would love to bring some of that in so we're going to start with kind of those elevated tastings that'll have some simple options we always want to have like a few little simple things here and there welcome to bring simple things as well and typically i find like anywhere that you want to do that just ask ahead of time you know like it's it makes such a good

[02:01:17] thing it's like hey i brought a little snackle box if you've ever seen them they're amazing it's like a charcuterie board and a tackle box it's called snackle box they're amazing i brought something is it okay if i enjoy that yeah yeah absolutely would you like some water do you need some plates you need that's very different than i walk in and there's cheese all over the floor so it's just about being respectful and kind and aware of those things and for the most part our experience here is pretty

[02:01:41] intimate it's it's pretty small it's relatively quiet it's not the crazy bachelorette groups and so the experiences that we have with our customers are amazing they they are really smart and intelligent and interesting and kind and uh i love the experiences that we have with people do you have any maximum group sizes since you've got a kind of limited boy you know anything that anytime you're going to show up to a winery with more than 12 people always make a reservation make a reservation

[02:02:09] absolutely like you should warn people that you're coming um i've done groups up to about 25 on my own um which is intense at times like if you're doing a tasting you're basically it's a lot of pouring and starting over again and starting over again uh so it gets kind of difficult as far as the space here goes i think we do we have like a little table room that that does great for like eight to twelve so that works excellent for like a group size we can do 20 or so in the main room the

[02:02:39] problem is it just gets with groups that big it gets real loud and nobody's really focused on the same time so we can absolutely pour you wine but it's a very different experience to show up with with 20 than it is to show up with yate you know it's just a different experience so it depends we can do all sorts of things depending on what people are looking for but i find that the kind of that ideal size is somewhere between like eight to twelve just works great where if you have more than 12 then

[02:03:06] maybe some people aren't paying attention or interesting or don't feel like they get a chance to ask questions uh but that's that's kind of a good number for us cool what do you think um are your busier slower times what's the best time for somebody to come visit uh well the best time is to come when it's slow right because then and then you get a more intimate experience um so typically in the area like we have this saying where january june and july that's all the j's january june and

[02:03:31] july are kind of the smoke slowest months of the year so fredgersburg in particular is quite popular during the christmas season so then right in january we start to see a dip off um from that it'll pick up like around february or so starts warming up starts warming up valentine's day and wildflowers spring break and then kind of off through the summer but it gets pretty hot this year actually we never really reached those 100 that's all september yeah it was beautiful this summer in

[02:03:59] the hill country but typically it can be quite hot and oppressive and a lot of places don't have a lot of indoor seating so that can be tough as particularly if you're in the sun trying to drink reds um so like those kind of are the slower months for the for the season i mean i think the wildflowers are so incredible the that is just a gorgeous time to visit the area just go drive around and experience that uh in the fall when the leaves start to change and the temperatures drop it is also fantastic

[02:04:29] uh like we have a family ranch that's about an hour from here and i remember that first day in october where it was like cool enough to sit outside all day and we did we just sat on the porch all day and you know had wine and had food and like we kept like getting snacks and but nobody wanted to go inside because it was so pleasant to be outside so i think the shoulder seasons are kind of the most pleasant time to be here uh but christmas season is is also fantastic and depending on what you want

[02:04:59] to see with the vineyards what experience you want to have like there's always a different time of year is always going to give you a different piece of the puzzle um so even in a time like this there's still things to learn in the vineyard cool so what kind of plays do you have for future growth out here yeah that's a great question um well already we've we sort of taken a step with this second location that was growth that i i personally don't know if i was ready for that like uh it was a

[02:05:26] lot of new puzzles right away when i feel like i just got my feet kind of underneath me on main street um so a lot of like the growth comes from my brother who's a plastic surgeon but also intimately involved in the business and he sort of can see the bigger picture from further away than i can and so he says he likes to manage the the forest not the trees yeah and it's my job to kind of manage the trees so

[02:05:51] core growth i think there's a couple of different things but um initially when we started on main street i thought we maybe had like three to five years to kind of reach a place where we would be kind of comfortable and um and and have consistency enough for the club and things like that to make it stable um i think we're still three to five years from that goal so so even though it's been three years like things have changed dramatically sure uh and we're getting kind of towards there so we're focusing on

[02:06:21] on growing the club and and keeping club members to to provide us with consistency and forecasting for what we need for supply uh but for where we see ourselves going i would love to bring more production in-house uh we have a guy working for us now who produced an amazing uh texas white blend uh while he was at brenham and i would love for him to be our full-time white maker but we don't have a space for

[02:06:47] that yet so then we got to think about okay if we build a production building uh like what kind of capacity would we do need for that if we're going to do our mini bulk we would need some sort of bottling aspect to be able to like we'd at least have to have a truck come up and park there if we're bringing in things in pallets we need space that is temperature controlled we want to store barrel storage exactly i want to be able to take people through there as part of an educational experience maybe we have lab uh space in that building so what does that building look like how big

[02:07:17] is it what is it going to cost to build that what does our production need to be at to be able to make a return on that investment because it's going to cost a significant outlay to buy all that stuff and right now we are tiny like even smaller than small we're boutiques so we less than a thousand cases a year uh which is probably not the time to build that building right so we need to get to a

[02:07:41] point where we're doing maybe five to eight thousand cases a year uh where we can put in that production facility building for growth we think we have a place on the on the property to be able to do that and then beyond that so one of the historical pieces of the property we think we want to put the production building kind of next to the road there uh and also be able to use it as like billboard and signage of things you know so people can see us and maybe use that to block some of the road noise but then

[02:08:10] the the other the second meadow on the property uh leads up to this pile of stones now which is the first cotton gin in the air so it's built in 1890 it's the boiler for the cotton gin and i would love to take those stones and repurpose them into like an outdoor bar and market kind of like joanna's market where you could get you know a glass of wine but also a sandwich or something from the market without having to come all the way back into that so cool so we kept everything close to the house right now just for

[02:08:38] service and we you know only running one or two employees a day so we don't have a lot of people that really head out there but once we do pick up and get busier particularly if we have buses coming quite often i think that would be an excellent area for expansion the family ranch that we own that's about an hour from here is towards mason so it's in that curry sands or the lano uplift which is a really interesting avia it's all these little islands right so we live on a granite outcropping

[02:09:08] kind of behind enchanted rock from here which would absolutely be a part of that and we've looked at like we had uh atlas come out uh jackie mancuso to to look at putting in grapes there the thing is it's so expensive right like the the capital outlay to put in the grapes you know three years ahead we're looking at you know 30 35 000 an acre plus maintenance costs and where the ranch is located it's like two miles down a dirt road so yeah we're just we're not nobody's ever going to see it you know

[02:09:38] so does it make sense for us to to plant those grapes there or should we invest you know there's there's all sorts of puzzles all sorts of those puzzles um but i would love to see more texas wine on the menu i would love to have more control over that and to have more consistent style i'd love to bring in other countries like spain um new zealand that are bringing or making wine that is truly the best representative of that place of those coordinates so that we can express them just kind of in the

[02:10:08] brightest and and best way that we can so hopefully we'll be bringing in even more wine from other places but making more wine in texas and and doing the best to bring the best wine at the best value that we can cool yeah well there are a lot of great places for people in texas to go get great wine um and coordinates now here in high as well as then on the main street you have um those two great locations so what do you think really sets coordinates vineyards apart from um a lot of other places

[02:10:37] that people would say when i go out to to try some wine i've got to go to coordinates and check it out yeah uh i mean it's a great question it's a really important question for the area particularly with how the industry has changed a lot over the past couple years um so when we started on main street there were kind of two things that i thought differentiated us one was that we had south african wine which is the least represented on the u.s wine market i feel like the south african wine that we

[02:11:03] have is exceptional like it's really a exceptional wine uh and then the other one was that we're open later than most people so staying open until nine ten o'clock at night um since then i think there's even more things that make it different uh that make coming to coordinates difference and and more important than than than all of those things and that is that we really focus on the experience

[02:11:29] on the customer experience so when you come in here we want you to have an experience that that is not only going to be fun and enjoyable but valuable like it really has something that you can take with you uh and it will be useful for you later in your life and so that's about the educational piece the experience piece of it and so we've really been focusing on that over the past maybe six seven months

[02:11:57] and working towards creating like the best possible experience that you can that you come in and it's something that i hear from people more than anything else so it started with people telling me like oh that was the best experience or or being on a tour and saying i wish we would have come here first because it would have made all the other ones more enjoyable so i think the difference between what we do and what a lot of our neighbors do is that we really spend a lot of time and work really hard to

[02:12:24] make sure that that experience and that educational piece is is valuable and useful um but yeah what i think makes us difference uh makes the difference when you come to coordinates is well the wine the place the people all work together to provide an experience that is it's it's more than educational and it's more than fun it's it's valuable cool and i think that right now that's what people are looking for in wine is that they want they want the experience more than anything else so that's that's the goal

[02:12:53] to provide the best experience we can and that experience that austin talks about can become a mile post on your wine journey when you go to visit coordinates vineyards their wines and their educational experience that you get when you go there will broaden your horizons and you can now

[02:13:18] add that as a new coordinates on your wine journey after experiencing that with them oh and i found an interesting little tidbit after the interview i went and did a little research and found out more about that dike family baseball game that austin talked about in the interview and they went to kansas to play this team from illinois and this other brothers team and unfortunately though they fought valiantly they did lose that game 11 to 5 there in kansas there's actually a great article

[02:13:47] on the texas historical commission's website that goes into details and talks a little bit about the game and the people in it and so forth and so you can read that find that link in the show notes down below okay so be sure to check out their website before you go visit them it's www.coordinatesvineyards.com and on their beautiful website you're going to find things about those wines that they have the south african wines being an importer of those south african wines it's one of the few places you can

[02:14:16] actually find a pinotage outside of a specialty wine shop and you can order those wines right there on their website you'll find more information about their name their events that they have going on at coordinates more info about some of those great wines that they have you can even make a reservation for your visit and even join the wine club there uh right there on the website and as always don't forget when you go see them make sure you tell them you heard about them on this podcast texas undervine

[02:14:43] after we finished the interview as you saw and heard i got to taste a few of those wines there as part of the interview process but when we were done i got to go into the tasting room and try a few more of those fantastic wines they have their coordinates and of course the time came for me to pick the one that i wanted for my episode wine library for episode 56 here and i did a first so i picked a wine that

[02:15:09] i've never picked before a type of wine uh in the history of this podcast i picked a sparkling wine so that cordet's sparkling brute which was the very first wine that we tried in the interview this is a sauvignon blanc that is sparkling from south africa really really really interesting wine really tasty you get those great aromatics that sauvignon blanc is known for as in the flavors but you

[02:15:34] also get the balance of the creaminess of the bubbles coming through it was really unlike almost any other sparkling wine that i had tried before i was so taken by that that i decided to make that sparkling wine the first sparkling wine of my episode wine library for the texas undervine podcast so you've got to make sure and try this when you go it's their sparkling brute all right and you'll probably get that offered to you as one of the first wines when you go to taste wines there in coordinates vineyards

[02:16:01] well i've got a lot more coordinates on my map for other great wine destinations i still need to go visit and so it's time for me to move on from this longer episode here of the podcast and go visit some other great places but before i do would you consider leaving me a rating and review wherever you get this podcast it's been a little while since i've got a couple of ratings and reviews and i would love to see what you think plus it really helps me move that podcast up in the computer algorithms

[02:16:29] to be seen by even more wine lovers and people who need to discover texas wine and while you're at it share it with a friend no one likes wine like you do and like your friends do so share it with them so they can discover the great richness of our texas wine community and really see that industry grow as we grow together and rise all those ships together so leave me that rating and review it only takes a couple of minutes of your time and it's free also if you're watching this on youtube make sure

[02:16:57] to like follow and subscribe the podcast and leave a comment down below telling me what's your favorite thing if you've been to coordinates vineyards either on main street or at their high location what's your favorite thing about coordinates or if you have not been yet but now you're getting excited to go tell me what's the thing you're most looking forward to visiting or seeing when you go there and with that my time is up so don't forget subscribe to my socials and follow the podcast to be

[02:17:23] notified anytime a brand new episode is released and until then happy trails and bottoms up y'all thanks for listening to texas undervine we strive to provide you with the best information about wine businesses all over texas be sure to check out our website at texasundervine.com and follow us on our socials at texasundervine to stay up on all the upcoming episodes please email us with any suggestions

[02:17:51] or feedback also contact us if you're interested in donating sponsoring or advertising on the podcast just to help us cover our expenses and bring even more great info to you in future episodes above all travel safely and most especially drink responsibly howdy vine trippers did you know that i

[02:18:19] now have a merchandise store for texas undervine i only have a handful of limited items but you can go check those out and wear your texas undervine swag if you'd like to tell all your friends about the great wine locations we have here in texas and maybe get them interested in the podcast as well so there are things like t-shirts there are there's a hoodie there's a beanie a ball cap things like that but one of the most exciting things i have right now is my limited time offer t-shirt that's

[02:18:44] my season one t-shirt so this is your tasting through texas texas undervine season one t-shirt it's only going to be available for a little short amount of time on the back it has all the different locations like a band tour t-shirt uh so this is a limited time item and you can go out and get it now and one of the great things about that t-shirt is a portion of every sale goes to support the texas hill country winery scholarship fund so you know that by buying that t-shirt you're also investing

[02:19:11] in the the growing and flourishing of an amazing wine industry here in texas and all of those people that are going to come and make it even better check out that merchandise store it's on my website at texasundervine.com just go up to the top you'll see the link for the merchandise store