Maydelle Country Wines (East Texas)

The trouble with it is I learned that if I make it as hot as I want it, then I lose my sweet. If I make it as sweet as I want it, I lose my heat. So mortise is about as balanced as I can make, as hot and sweet as I can get away with.

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. Do your interviews, descriptions, and details.com excite you to visit and experience it 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. Most of all, enjoy hearing about the rapidly growing wine industry today and what makes our wines and wineries the best. From noon to 1.30 p.m., Fall Creek Vineyards is hosting Vino Vinyasa Yoga. It's a fantastic way to enjoy a little bit of relaxing yoga, followed by a fun tasting of two of their wines. It's got to be the perfect way of finding your center before you take off on all of your weekend wandering. For more info and to get your tickets, go to vinovinyasayoga.com. Also, don't forget, make sure you skip through towards the end of the episode today so you can find out the wine wanderer bottle that I chose at this very unique winery that we're going to be talking about today. And for this episode, I continue my journey through East Texas that I made this summer, and I'm stopping in today at a little fruit winery in Rusk, Texas, called Maydell Country Wines. Now, this is a spot with a ton of heart and a ton of history, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by the founder, Steve Harper, and the current owner, Torrence Shepard. Steve actually got his start in the industry in a pretty relatable way. He received a home winemaking kit as a birthday present, and they kind of thought he would just use it once and then be done with it. Instead, he ended up buying the whole homebrew supply store. Now, he moved the operation to its current location in 2004 because he owned the land there, so he didn't have to pay rent. And that was the birth of the third oldest winery in the East Texas area. Now, the building where the winery tasting room is located is actually a piece of history itself. It's a 100-plus year-old railroad building that was a depot and had originally served as a home for railroad employees. All right, now, Maydale Country Wines is not your typical run-of-the-mill winery. They pride themselves on being a fruit-based winery. Now, grapes are fruit for sure, but this is a non-grape-based winery. They make all kinds of wines from different types of fruits. And one thing that really sets them apart is their dedication to quality with the fruit. And as I said, they do not use a single grape in most of their wines. Now, because they are located in a dry county, they've had to navigate a lot of legal hoops, including the one that says that fruit must be harvested locally to be able to be called a Texas wine. So they just decided to try to get 100% Texas fruit where they could. Now there are a few wines they have that are fruits that aren't located in Texas, and they would be glad to share some of those with you as well. Now, Torrent kind of had a little bit of a stint, you'll hear his story, helping out with the winery, but really firmed up his position in about 2024 to become the official owner now of the winery as things are transitioning over from Steve into his hands. It is in and of itself a true family affair. Now, even though back in 2016 Steve suffered a stroke that took his vision, he remains committed to the winery and he prides himself on being a blind winemaker, with a little assistance from Torrance, of course. And because of that, he also offers free braille services on the labels of the bottles. One of the only Texas wineries I've ever seen or heard of that's doing that. Because as Steve says in the interview, all bottles feel the same to a blind person, so it's really hard to distinguish between different varieties of wine just by touch alone. So any bottle you buy from them, you can ask, and he will bring out the equipment and braille the label so that you can easily discover that if you suffer from vision issues as well. Now, these wines are different from your standard grape-based wines in that they're meant to be drunk young. These aren't age type of wines. As Steve says, if you make a strawberry wine, it should taste like fresh strawberries. And they are truly pioneers in this particular niche, being only one of three wineries in Texas that don't use grapes. And their wines speak for themselves by seeing all the different awards that these wines have won as well. Now, Steve and Torrance have truly built something very unique right here in the woods in East Texas, focusing on what they call porch, fire pit, and poolside wines. Let's go to that interview and hear directly from them and get the story of Maydale Country Wines. Howdy Vine Trippers, I'm here in Rusk, Texas, outside or outside of Rusk a little bit, uh at Maydale Country Wines. And I'm really excited to bring this episode to you as I was just sharing with Torrance and Steve here that they contacted me my first season. And being based in Austin, it was really hard for me to get out to this location, a little further for me. But now that we're out here and I've grown the podcast, I'm really excited to come visit and share with you their story, majoring in fruit wines and things like that that they have going on, a lot of history here. So I'm gonna take my time now and turn to Steve and to Torrance and find a little bit about their histories as well as this location. So here we go. So first off, and I'll let you guys go in whatever order you would like, but I'd like to hear from both of you at some point of what what's your own history? What got you into the wine industry?

I was given a winemaking kit as a birthday present. Yeah. And they figured I would do it one time and never touch it again. Yeah. And I wound up buying the homebrew supply store. I wound up moving it from there to here because I had the land and I didn't have to pay rent here. Right. And until I I hung several amateur metals, I think Cheryl said there's 27 of them somewhere. Wow. And when they told me I could start a winery in a dry county the same as I when we passed the law in 04, yeah, nothing stopped us. Okay. We had the building, I had the knowledge, off we went. I mean, I so that's basically how we got in business. You just went from there. Just went from there. Somebody said you could, and I said, Why not?

There you go.

I got my permission.

Yep. All right. So my mom wound up helping him get founded back in 2004. My mom likes to say Mother Day, Mother's Day, 2004. And they ran the winery. They got married in 2008. But the entire time I'm just little, you know, kid running around helping my mom, helping the old man do stuff out of the winery. And I went to school in Rusk, graduated, went to college, got out of there, did odd jobs, but always I had always helped with the winery anytime they needed.

Yeah.

In 2019 is probably the best time. 2019, the old man ran on a trip with my mom, and they left me as the sole person in charge of the winery. We went to Woodstock. Oh, okay.

The 50th anniversary of Woodstock. Yeah.

And they left me here for a month, and everything was supposed to be real quiet and calm. And turns out everything hit the fan at the exact same time. Isn't that the way it always goes? And we all realized that if anyone had the potential to run the place after mom and Steve retired, it would be me.

Okay. That's what he did that week. We left him here.

That's his first medal. So for context, I the old man has his name for it. I call it First Solos.

Okay.

Basically, when we make wine, at some point everyone's going to make a wine all by themselves. No help from anyone else, not a team effort. They have their own wines. The old man's first medal from 2003, 2004 is up there. His grapefruit. My mom's lime wine from I can't remember when, but it went off to international competition in California. Okay. And my 2020, technically my 2019 Rue's Rue, Rue for Red, and Rue named after my sister. Okay. Went off to competition, got me a silver. Nice. Unoaked, sweet Merlot. We don't normally deal with grapes, but like I said, everything sort of fell apart that month.

We wasn't supposed to get any grapes. One of her comrades in the wine business says, Steve, can you handle a ton of Merlot? We got too many grapes. Oh no. So we're gone. Here he is. TJ, can you handle a ton of Merlot? Yes. Yeah. I'll figure something to do with it. Can you handle a ton of pears at the same time? No, it turns out.

Well, partly. You got distracted by the grapes. Yeah. Did the pears go by the wayside?

And that was my first real uh run of running the place. Yeah. In 2020, between the years of 19 and 22, I was uh working at a brass foundry and only really coming out here if I was really needed to. I wasn't even affiliated with the winery during that period, but someone else was going to buy the winery and take over. And then that deal fell through. 2022 comes by, and mom looks at me and says, I don't know what we're gonna do. Probably sell the winery, quit. I don't want to do this for the next 50 years. I ain't gonna make it 50 more years. And I say, you know what? I remember 2019. I'll do it. Yeah, I'll take over the winery. I mean, as long as y'all want to keep working here, I'll make sure you get a paycheck every week.

There you go. So, do you know what LLC stands for?

Oh, yeah, Limited Liability Corporation.

Lovingly lefty children.

Oh, there you go. Get that inheritance going down.

Yep. That's the way it went out. Yeah. Uh 2024, I think, was really when uh because the uh anniversary was in 2024. I came back, started working at the winery pretty much full time.

Okay.

Uh, and since then we've been in the process of handling titles, handling paperwork. I'm training to take over all the paperwork that gets sent into the state.

Yeah, all the governmental stuff now.

And and at the same time, taking over his responsibilities and also producing wine.

Okay. So that kind of gives us a little bit of the history, but I'd like to dive a little bit more into the history of Maydell Country Wines. So, Steve, when did you start this location?

Oh, four. We are the third oldest winery in East Texas.

Oh wow.

Keepersall and the one in Pittsburgh, Los Pinos. Yeah. Okay. They started before we had the constitutional ballot in 03. Okay. So they did it when it was legal but not constitutional. I know my luck. Yeah. If I'd have got really crazy about it, then you'd have been the one they came for. I would have been the one that they said no, you can't do it. So I waited till it got through the system. Okay. And as soon as we could, I threw the wife on the paperwork. What?

And And he ran and went from there.

At a hundred plus gear old depot building. This used to be the uh employees Gandhi Dancers house over in Anderson County for the Missouri Pacific line. Wow. They just they brought it to Maydale and it was the depot there for, I don't know. And in the 50s it got bought by the Lust family and brought out here, and it's been a residence for three or four different families. Yeah. And then mother looked at me and I looked at mother and said, Can I have my inheritance before y'all die? And she said, Yeah, what are you gonna do with it? I'm saying, I'm gonna make a winery. Remember that wine kit? Yeah. So that's what we did. I had the land, I had the building. Yeah. I had perfect neighbors. Okay. To the right of me is a state forest. Yeah. To the north of me is a state forest. Okay. To the east of me is a state forest, and to the south of me is the state highway. Oh. And the railroad. And the railroad. Well, people got a way to get here. Yeah, there's they they come in every 15 years and tell me we're gonna cut trees. And I say, okay, don't run over my cats and dogs when you come down the hill.

Yeah.

And then I don't see my neighbors for another 15 years. I mean, I got great neighbors.

They haven't been bugging you too much. They don't bother me. Nice and quiet. Well, so you you've started this. What got you interested in fruit wines?

The fact that nobody was. Okay. My grandfathers made it through prohibition by either making beer or making wine out of what they had, which was everything plums, pears, grapes, sugar, whatever had sugar. If it had sugar, they they fed their family when they wasn't supposed to. And somehow I guess it jumped a generation because my mama tried several times to make wine. And after a few years my father looked at me and said, Son, why doesn't your wine explode like your mother's does? But you know, it it it may apparently skip mama and weird to me because yeah. All right. I knew how to do it. And then you decided to pick some fruit to I decided why not use what's here that nobody wants. I mean Yeah.

So you you saw a a niche there as well. Uh a gap in the market that you could uh utilize. Maybe it's a it's a silly question, but we know a little bit about the history of the building and your own personal histories, but why did did did you choose to call it Maydale Country Wines? Why what would why'd you pick that name?

Where I am, what I make, and what I do. Okay.

So the big town of Maydale, population six and a half if I'm in town. Okay. It's actually got like the city limit sign says what, 53?

There is no city limit sign. There's just a marker. It says Maydale, says the same thing on the other side, son.

But the town's named Maydale, named after our fair lady, Miss Maydale Campbell.

Okay.

Uh country. We're out in the country.

Because of the state forest all around.

And it's wine.

Yeah. Okay. Like I said, it may have been a simple answer, but I was always curious about how people choose their wine, their name. So very literal.

And a lot of them use creeks. Yeah, and waters. There ain't no water. Near thing I got's a nature's river, and it's 20-something miles away. Okay. This is this is a dry side of the mountain.

Okay.

Yeah. Lots of trees, but no.

Not not a lot of water on this side.

Water on this side, though.

So ain't even any fruit up on this hill except for that pear tree out front. Yeah. Used to be a peach tree across the road, but the pine trees choked it out, I think. Well, that leads me then to my next question. So uh where do you source your fruit from?

Anywhere I can. Yeah? So my peaches come out of Fairfield. My pears come from a nice lady called Inez out. Where is she? Oh. Way out east. Okay. East and Accadotes. Keep going east. Yeah, big can't are. I can't even remember what her name where her place is.

I don't think it's quite the center, is it on the other side of the center? It's center, isn't it?

May we call it center? Go to center and see Miss Inez and get something. Okay.

Something like that, yeah. But the deal is, and then Steve can tell you specifically where all of our fruit comes from, but we're in a dry county.

Okay.

And that means we have special rules we have to follow. Right. And one of those rules is the 75% rule. In order for our wines to say Texas fruit wines, and I'm sure I've got one here that does. Here's a good example of not. Okay. This one says American fruit wine. Okay, yeah. And this one says Texas. Okay. In order for our wines to say Texas wine on it, 75% of our fruit must come from Texas. So we kind of skipped that rule and said 100% of our fruit could come from Texas, unless I can't get it from Texas. Right. Like for example, Mayhaws, they grow up in Arkansas, Louisiana. They need water. They're like cranberries. Okay. So you can't grow cranberries in Texas. Or I'm sure you could if you tried, but we're carding up. But so that's our rule. That's the rule of dry counties. Almost all of our fruit comes from local farms, local farm uh orchards, things like that. As much as you can. As much as we can. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes we can't, like pineapples. And those come from further afield, but each of our bottles tells you exactly what's in it and exactly where it's from because we're in a dry county. Yeah. Dry counties, I don't know if it's the same with wet counties, but they're definitely different with wet county. But they have us jump through so many hoops. We have to tell everyone everything we do.

Yeah. So I'm familiar with the winemaking process with grapes, but I'm not as familiar with the winemaking process for fruit. So how does it differ? What does it look like?

It it looks like the same thing. Okay. Instead of you taking a machine to crush the grapes with, you take a machine and you grind the fruit with it. And then instead of that pulp goes in the tank. Yeah. There you go. And then you put your yeast in there and put yeast in there, you will have to put some water in there because well, grapes have got enough water and pears really don't. So you gotta get some more juice.

Okay. Pretty much there's four ingredients, and the process goes. You take your fruit and you process it, however, it is like berries. A lot of people have problems with uh like frozen bear frozen fruit. But the deal is the only real problem with them is nutritional value. We don't care about nutrition, we care about the flavor, the taste. So we will freeze our berries and you get more juice out of them. So frozen berries, crushed up berries goes over in a barrel. You add water, you add a bit of sugar if you need like a higher alcohol content, and then you add the yeast. Okay. Grapes naturally contain a form of yeast, so they don't need you to add it, but pears don't. But you would want to anyways because you don't want to make wine out of wild yeast.

Yeah, most people will add up.

You can, but and we use premier cuve, basically champagne yeast. And we'll throw that over in the barrel. The fermentation process means it pulls any natural sugars out of the fruit and helps break them down. So we get more flavor, more juice, and any of the added sugar, that as well gets broken down into alcohol. Yeah. Because that's and after that, it's basically the exact same process. Yeah. Um, some grape wineries will sell their wine dry. If we had a dry wine, we could sell it, serve it right after that. If you want it sweet, you have to, you know, fix the problem of the yeast, and we use. Use filters. Okay. Paper filters.

So you stop the fermentation early to keep the wine sweet? No. No. Okay.

We let it dry finish. Right. And then add a little bit of sugar. Paper filters are fine enough, about half micron. They're fine enough that they will actually get each, all the yeast spores, all the yeast uh cells out of the wine. They'll also get all the uh fruit product as well, leaving only the juice, the water, and the alcohol.

Okay. And you only make sweet wines. You don't do any dry.

We do uh dry wines, but the old man doesn't. I do the old man doesn't.

Yeah. He's become the dry winemaker. I never thought there would be any need in drinking, you know, dry pear juice, dry peach juice. It didn't ever sound good to me. Right.

If you ever had an unripe peach or an unripe strawberry, you'll know that those types of fruits don't taste good without the sugar. Right. Lemons, uh, there's a fun bit of trivia, and I've been saying this for decades, and I don't even know that it's true anymore. But the joke goes, by sugar content, the sweetest fruit in the world is a lemon. Really? Also, by acid content, the sourest fruit in the world is a lemon. And the two of them make cancel each other out. That's part of the reason why lemonade has so much sugar in it. Yeah. But even with that, if you took all the sugar out of a lemon, all you'd be left with is the sour. If you took all the sugar out of a blackberry, all you'd be left with is just the tart.

Yeah.

You need a little bit of that sugar, sugar. Exactly. Balances it a little. But I've been experimenting. Yeah. I have a dry elderberry. We didn't mean to make it. Yeah. But I have a dry elderberry that doesn't have the natural medicinal bite of elderberries, but it also doesn't have the sugar in it either. So not only does it have medicinal properties, but it's also diabetic friendly. And I've got an experimental batch going fermenting of an apple. We make two sweet apples. So I'm wondering, hey, what if you got a less sweet apple? Right. I mean, there are dry ciders and things like that. So the old man doesn't like that stuff. And the old man wouldn't make anything he doesn't want to drink anyway. It's not my job anymore, you see. That's your job. That's right. So and you process all the everything here on site? Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't the best way to say this, I don't go out to someone else's winery and get their fruit wines. Yeah. I may get fruit from someone else. I may get processed fruit even from someone else. Very rarely. Yeah. But all my fruit ends up here, and here is where it turns into wine.

This is the spot. So, what would you say is one of the single biggest challenges that you face for making these fruit wines? Figuring out how to do it.

I mean, you want to go starting with carbon paper. We had to go hunt down carbon paper because that's the only way they would have taken our permits when we first started. When we first started, the state first started, and they didn't have a clue how to do this. Yeah. But we were supposed to figure it out for them. Did one thing led to another? Uh fine. It took us 40 years to finally get city water over here. Which involved punching under the highway and under the railroad.

Which caused its own problems.

Yeah, so there was interesting.

That took a while, but so everything before that had to be well based. We did. We still do have a well back here, but we don't have a uh pump run to it, and we don't pull from that well these days. I mean, city water. There's like always the question of water quality. Yeah.

Everything we ever hurdle they put in front of us, we've either jumped over to found a way to walk around them. Found a way not that big a deal.

Yeah.

Like the water.

Like, well, water wasn't that okay. Here's a story. Here's a story. When we first started, all of our water came from that well. And now this was 22 years ago. Things have changed a lot. But for example, we do all of our wines in 50-gallon batches. Okay. Usually. Usually. I don't see much reason to change it unless we wind up with like a ton of peaches. Sure. But we wound up doing everything 50-gallon batches. That well produces no more than a hundred gallons a day.

Oh, so you're limited there. It didn't work perfectly. Boop ba-doop boop. Two batches per day. Yep. Unless you need to clean anything.

If you're gonna break it on. Which is very important. And clean it up.

Cleanliness is a very big thing. Absolutely. So I was actually going to say that the most difficult hurdles we've jumped through are things like the actual production of the wine. But no, he is absolutely correct. I'd always thought the actual act of winemaking would be difficult because I mean that's what winemaking is, right? It's making wine. But no, it's all the legal stuff. Making sure I have permits for every single place I ever want to sell wine, making sure I have the permits for that wine. I have three different agencies I have to jump through in order to produce a single bottle of wine. Yeah. And that's for every time there's a change on that bottle, like the label, the materials in the wine. I have to send formulation, there's cola, there's a headache. There's so many hoops. And you'd think it's just go in the back, make wine. You can.

Yeah.

My friends like to joke, you can.

Are you? Do y'all do your own bottling, hand bottling and everything?

Okay.

We uh bottle it ourselves, cork it. Uh well, that's part of bottling. Corks, uh, capping, labeling, and racking.

Basically, since 16 I had a ischemic stroke and lost most of my vision. I don't drive anymore. I can't read anymore. But I can still make wine. Yeah. But he's gonna he's gonna be the one that drops a hydrometer in it and says, it's done. And then he's gonna have to filter it and bottle it and do that part. And still make it, but what I make is ugly looking.

And then he finishes the process. And then he tape makes it pre-wine. Yeah.

There you go. Do fruit wines age? Do you spend time and bottle with them?

Are they ready to go once you're I'm ready to go with it? I mean, lemon it should taste like lemon the day it comes out of my fermenter. Okay. Or four years from now, it shouldn't get any more complex. It's only got one thing in it.

Grapes have an aging process. Right. They turn into raisins. Yeah. Lemons have an aging process, they turn into rotten lemons. Right. And that's the way it goes for almost all of our wines. Is that's one of the big differences between us and a grape winery is nothing here ages.

Yeah.

There is no process for sitting it down and letting it age in the barrel or age in the bottle. Right. The moment it's done fermenting, you're not gonna get anything else out of it. It's fruit wine. Yeah.

You start with strawberry, it should finish strawberry, it should taste strawberry years down the road.

And it's ready to go.

It's just strawberry. There's not much more complicated flavor in it, but strawberry. Yeah.

Honestly, the longer you let it sit, the more you try to age something, like a fruit wine, the more likely you are to ruin that bat. Okay. So it's better young. Better young. Yep. There's also the question of, and it's only tangentially related, but there is the question of uh the age of the wine and whether wine goes bad. Okay. My old man likes to joke, and I like to say it too. All wines go bad. Right. You know your wine has gone bad. Doesn't matter if it's 200-year-old bottle under the Vatican or if it's um Boone's Farm. Yeah. Doesn't matter if it's Vatican or Boone's Farm, that wine goes bad. Sure. And when it goes bad, it'll turn into vinegar. Right. There's also worth keeping in mind the question of sulfur. Older wines, particularly dry reds, uh wines that are uh professional winemakers. I mean, we are professional winemakers, but you know, the bigger wineries, I like that. All wineries typically have sulfur in their wines, which is a health hazard. Uh my mom's a good example. People with uh sulfur intolerances get massive headaches, they get dizziness, nausea, right, and that will be caused by the sulfur in the wine. But that sulfur also prevents the wine from going bad. It's preservative. So what we do instead is because I make all my wines for the old man, I make all my wines for my mom, we use less sulfur by an order of magnitude, less sulfur in our wines. It means they aren't as shelf stable. You can't leave it on a lemon wine on the shelf for 20 years and expect it to still be good. But it does not have enough sulfur in our wine to trigger sulfur intolerance. Okay. So it's kind of a trade-off there. Sure. If we added more sulfur, then I guess we could age our wine, maybe. I don't know that you get anything out of it. Yeah, and so what's the reason to do that? So but I makes sense. Since I don't have to deal with that whole process, I can help my mom. My mom gets horrific headaches, and it helps her.

Okay. Yeah, that makes all that sense. So if you're not going to get anything from the aging, then why not that in to do it? Exactly. They're just meant to be drunk young.

Okay.

My mom says the wines, because of this little reduced sulfur content, my wines will last five years. Yeah. I typically say I don't want to hold on to any of my wines more than a year. Yeah. And especially if you open it, keep it in the fridge no more than a week. Okay.

So what uh are some of your favorite fruits to make wine from? What are your favorite ones?

Sure, one favorites.

There is one at the top of the list. Yeah. Lemon, simply because it's the one that kind of founded us back in 2004. We started with our citrus lineup of lemon, lime, and grapefruit. And people still asked about the grapefruit. The old man also, that lemon has gotten us invited to a lot of places. Oh wow. And then banned from those places. Okay, I gotta know the story of that.

And he has grabbed the exact little trophy. Okay. The People's Choice Wine Tasting Classic, Texas Best White Bridal Suite, Lone Star Grown, Internationally Known at Grapefest 2008.

For stresses and nine, they banned fruit wines from Grapefest. Wow. And the only fruit winery to had one.

Wow. So they won this award uh in 2008. It says um September 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th at uh, let's see, Great Fest. And it says Lone Star Grown, Internationally Known. People's Choice Wine Tasting Classic, Texas Best White Varietal Sweet. So they won this as the very best wine in 2008 for sweet white wine. And then the next year they banned fruit wine from the competition. So go out on top is what I say there, huh? Mm-hmm. And this I'm seeing is Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2018. We sent ghost pear.

This is version 1.0. Okay. Ghost pear is a mix of our normal pear wine, but we added ghost peppers to it. Ooh, a spicy sweet. Now there's two things every winery in Texas does. They make a muscadine wine and they make a jalapeno wine. Okay. And we refuse to be like anyone else. Right? No grapes, and muscadines are close enough to grapes. We ain't even gonna bother. But no jalapenos. We said if we're gonna do a spicy wine, we're gonna actually make something new. Okay. We wound up getting a bunch of the old man says he got a bunch of a bag of peppers and oriental spices, and he wanted to make something he called the screaming Buddha. You know, the jolly fat man. He wanted the label to have him looking there, sweat dripping down his face, steam coming out his ears, you know, something to finally break the comb, something hot. We put 25 peppers in 25 gallons of wine, and the old man said, Nope, that's too hot. And we uh dialed it down over the years, but that first batch we made, the first time we ever make a wine, we have a rule to send it off to competition to compare it to how our other wines did. You know, we have the wall of awards, we have all sorts of medals all over the place. So we know we make good wines. We would just want to know how the wine compares to stuff we've made in the past. Yeah. That one went to the Houston Livestock Show in rodeo, yeah, came back with that medal and the belt buckle, which was best in show. Best in class, yeah. Best in class. Yeah, reserve class champion. Reserve class champion.

Wow, and that's a big one. A lot of wineries covet that belt buckle.

We didn't feel the need to send it back. It's kind of like uh this medal here. It's one of those cases of I've already got the best award you could possibly give me. Why would I go back for you to tell me it wasn't as good as last year? I know it's gonna be as good as last year.

And so that ghost pear has continued on because I'm seeing it right here. So you keep that line going. It's been successful for you.

But you can see it changes a little bit. Yeah. Our style has changed a little bit over the years. Sure. The way we make our wines change and uh how much of each ingredient we add. So, for example, that first one, yeah, I think it ended up with 50 gallons of wine with 25 peppers. Okay, yeah. Our latest version of it is um five peppers in 50 gallons of wine. So it's only got like a little bit of a bite. I'd say like a one out of ten on the heat scale. Okay, but you get that little contrast, but it's just enough, it's just enough to be so good. And so the logos have changed, the labels have changed, the recipes even changed, but it's still got that great flavor. And that's the way it is for a lot of our wines, is we're proud of what we did in the past, but if you always stuck to what happened in the past, yeah, you'd never make anything new.

So there's always change coming through, different wines, different mixtures and experiments with things, and so forth. So if somebody has come, say, five years ago to Baydale Country Wine, then they need to come again so they can see the new offerings, the new things they've got going on here. Exactly. Constantly changing.

I uh often tell uh customers, customers will come in and say, Oh, uh, three years ago I came in, or last year I came in, and I had this particular wine, and it was so good, and I'd like to get it again. Yeah. And I said, You need to try it before you buy it. Because even batch to batch, we do all of our wines in 50-gallon batches, or finish them at least in 50-gallon batches. And because of that, every single one of those is slightly different.

Strawberries. That that's a good example. You know, you you've got strawberries that are nice and red and beautiful and have no flavor, yeah. And then you get the ones that are slightly pink and the and the strawberry flavor will knock you to your knees, but the color's bad. Well, yeah, there you are. Okay.

Since we use the real fruit, no artificial flavors, none of that extra junk. Yeah, since we use the real fruit, if we're beholden to the harvest, you gotta go with what it gives you.

Oh, I like that word.

Beholden to the harvest, you don't like that? I like that. Oh, you do like that. I do like that. I hadn't thought of that.

Yeah, interesting. So, yeah, so even you know, uh grape growers and they deal with whatever you know the weather gives them, what the fruit is, and then all that. But in the same way, you got to go with what the fruit that brings you, like you said, sometimes it may be full of flavor, sometimes it might not be as much. And so season to season and bottle to bottle could be different. Mm-hmm. So, what are some of the different wines that that you have? We talked about the ghost pear, we talked about lemon.

What are some of the things lemon, lime, peach, blackberry, elderberry, raspberry, huckleberry? That's a new one, several variations with honey. We make a lemon honey, we make uh a raspberry, uh mocha raspberry.

That one's brand new as well.

Honey apple, raspberry, uh, blackberry, uh mortise. Mortise. Mortise. I'm gonna make more mortise. Uh I don't even have the pepper came first. Okay. But then I said, how hot can I make? Can I make this to where it's almost like the little rooster stuff at the Chinese restaurant?

I mean, can I go? So we toned down the heat for the ghost pepper over the years. But as we did that, just as the old man, you know, was also thinking, hey, let's make a hot one, we also got customers who kept coming in and saying, Oh, this ain't that hot. This ain't I'm macho man. I need to prove I'm not sweating. Yeah. So we made two additional wines, one of which we still make today, called the mortis. It is Blackberry and Carolina Reaper. Wow. Honestly, that one's about a four out of ten on the heat scale. Still, you know, hot, but not as hot as we could have gotten. Right. And that's about the limit.

You want to still get some flavor in there. Sometimes you go too hot, then you don't get the flavor that's involved.

So the trouble with it is I learned that if I make it as hot as I want it, then I lose my sweet. Yeah. If I make it as sweet as I want it, you lose the spice, I lose my heat. So mortise is about as balanced as I can make, as hot and sweet as I can get away with.

Interesting. And that's one of the weird balances like that, or things that keep coming up in the winery. For example, honey and uh acid. If you have, like, for example, a honey linen wine. Okay, if you add a drop of honey, it drops the sour. Right. But if you add a drop of citric acid, it drops the honey.

Okay. Yeah, because they balance each other. So you can't.

Same thing with the heat and the sweet. They balance each other. It's all that happens to a few of our different wines that we've had to uh work with over the years.

Yes. And experimented to find that right flavor combination and balance there. Interesting. What are some of your most popular wines with customers?

The top two are always going to be lemon and ghost bear. Okay. We occasionally make new wines that rival them, but nothing has ever come close. My lemon, uh, I can turn it out if I was to run with it. I could turn it out in about two weeks, a month at most.

Okay.

I have consistently these last two years sold out of lemon within two weeks of me making it. Really? It sells out faster than I can make it. Wow. The good news is we also wound up with a bunch of ghost pear as well.

Okay.

I haven't had to make more, except now I am sold out of it. So now I do.

But I'm waiting for the pear harvest. I was about to say, you have to wait for certain times to get the fruit at different times of the year.

And there is something that has hurt us this year.

Okay. That tree should be covered in pears. Yeah. And that coal that we got, that coal cold. I ain't got a pear on it. Yeah. I don't know what the people around me have, but come fall, the phones will start ringing. You need some pears? And I'll take them. Yeah.

I know that in Fredericksburg, which is the home for peaches, uh, I've heard that they're gonna have any peach harvest this year because of that late freeze and the dry winter and everything that we had as well. Well, there's not a good year for fruit.

Peaches also need 40 days of sub-zero temperatures, right? Or is it sub-freezing? So it was below 40. Below 40. Okay. They require so many days of it. To to go down.

So many hours of it.

Yeah. And we have had we had the sudden freeze, uh-huh, but not the extent. Consistent. It's extended phrase. Our primary peach provider who provides us with peaches, white nectarines, white peaches, uh, he provides us with some of our honey too. He told us that he had lost um up to 75% of his crop. And he himself is one of, if not the largest peach farmer in Fairfield. Yeah. Freestone County, named after peaches. And they're a rile peaches. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about when customers are getting excited. So maybe some of my viewers and listeners now wanting to try that ghost pear or mortise or some of these lemon and these different wines that you have. What does it look like when somebody comes in for a tasting? Do you do a traditional style tasting or what what can they expect?

Mostly they'll find either me or him here. Mostly I'll be here if he's here. Okay. Or they'll find uh Chuck. He runs our Saturday store. Okay.

If I'm here by myself, I'm gonna open that refrigerator up, I'm gonna lay everything out on that bar, and I'm gonna hand you a glass. Okay. Because I can't see what you're pouring yourself anyway, so you get to serve yourself and I'll tell you about it. That's how we do it when I'm here by myself. Rest of the time I put a salesman on here.

If I'm here, what I'll do is I'll pull everything out, basically run a lineup of my light wines to my dark wines. Right. And it's worth mentioning a lot of people fall put wine into two broad categories, and that's reds and whites. Right. They also make the distinction for sweets and dries, but we don't need two here. Sure. Reds and whites don't actually apply to our wines because they describe the color of the juice from the grapes. Yeah. No grapes, not red or white wine. Yeah. But our wines do come in different colors. Shades, right. So I'll start with what the light wines, my lemon, my lime, my peach, stuff like that, and go down, probably ending with my blackberry and my elderberry, my dark ones. Right. And as we go through, I would tell you about the history of the winery, the building itself, the history of the wines if they have any particular fun interest, like for example, about the lemon or the ghost pair. Yeah. Some of those stories we've already been talking about here. I, you know, show people around, they take their glass with them. I, you know, talk about this, talk about that.

Yeah.

Really just, it's a show. Chuck called it a a play almost. Okay. He runs the Saturday store on Saturday because I'm normally out of town. Steve's here, but he's blind. Show. And Chuck had the honor, he called it the honor of watching me perform one day. Okay. And he said it was like I was this was a circus and I was the ringmaster.

He saw the master at work, huh?

He he got intimidated. And that's what I do is I show. I it's a big show. Okay. Well, how much does a tasting cost for a listener? I'm the owner. You come in while I'm here, it's always free.

Oh, wow. Okay.

The sign says five dollars, and I leave it up to whoever is here, whether or not they actually charge that. Generally speaking, if you're gonna buy something, tastings are gonna be free. If you're not a jerk, right? If you are a jerk, all of my c all of my behind the bar people are encouraged to charge five dollars per person. Okay. But as long as you're showing interest in, you know, you enjoy yourself. Everyone walked away having fun.

Tastings are free. You can't beat that. All right. Well, do you are you family friendly if people have kids or dogs or things like that?

Animals. I will say uh we have five animals out here, and I told you about them before, but might as well get it on the record. We have five animals out here. Three cats, uh, plus I think there's a gray cat that wanders around occasionally, but three cats uh pepper, bell, and verbal, okay, and two dogs, which are Minka and Blue. Okay. Uh all the animals are very friendly to people. Minka doesn't always get along with other dogs. Okay.

But to their surprise or she's blind. Right, yeah.

So while we are family friendly, we're pet friendly, disabled friendly, all of that stuff, keep in mind there are a couple animals here that may or may not get along.

I will put Mink on the leash when the customers come in and give her a snack. She likes she got to where she knows when the we got an alarm. Just the drill. When the alarm goes off, she will either know it's him coming in and I take her for a walk, or she'll go right there and sit. No. And know that I'm gonna hook her up and give her a treat when it's done. So we get along good.

Do you prefer reservations like people letting you know they want to come in or just walk in?

Don't even bother. We are our normal hours 10 to 4, Monday, uh Tuesday through Saturday. Okay. I hold the policy of if you call ahead, you tell us when we're gonna be here. Yeah, I will make sure someone is out here two in the morning on Sunday night. Right? I guarantee if we know someone's coming, someone will be here. You're gonna cater to it. My folks live a hundred yards up the hill. On the property. I tend to be out here up to midnight most days, anyways, working on various stuff.

Sure.

Just because those are our hours doesn't mean that's you know, we're strict about it.

Right, right. And then do you and I see you got a slushing machine over here, you got all these great wines. Do you offer any kind of food type of things, or can people bring their own food if they want to bring it up?

Your own food if you like. We don't a lot of people ask us things like, Oh, would you pair your wine with a steak, or what would you pair it with? And the only thing I have to say to that is, I don't know. Pair it with a pear. Pair it with chinos. Yeah. I often say in experience. Okay, but the deal, the point of that is though, that we it's wine.

Right.

I ain't a chef. My sister is, but I ain't a chef. So if you want something to eat, I can point you out a few great places and feel free to bring it in if you like.

Okay. Gotcha.

But nothing here.

Yeah.

Uh on the topic of being kid friendly, we absolutely love having kids out here. I miss the days of the great big stainless steel refrigerator because the old man used to homebrew root beer. Wow.

And that's what the wooden box is out there. And as soon as you get your new man trained, I'm gonna put him on keeping us root beer on tap in that little cooler right there by the door. Wow. That's why I moved it out there.

We used to have root beer on tap for the kids. Freshly made. Fresh brewed root beer. And uh, I've got a new guy coming in, Jacob is his name. He lives down in Accadoches, and he's uh been absolutely he started uh he homebrews mead, but he can't get it to work right. So he approached me one day and said, Hey, y'all get a winery, y'all do fruits, y'all do meats. Yeah, I do mead. Can I come work for you and y'all teach me how to do this? Yeah. And he's been so enthusiastic about everything. He's been helping us a lot. Wow, that's awesome. I about again, about the um people coming in, non-alcoholic stuff, foods and stuff like that. We've tried it occasionally. Uh, we back in what was it, 2008, 2012, when we had the bands out here? Yeah, we throw it out there. So events or things like that. We used to do stuff like that. We don't anymore though. Yeah. Uh there was a remember when it was five dollars a gallon for gas? Oh, yeah. No one wanted to go anywhere. Right. So having people out here sort of fell by the wayside. If we couldn't get consistent foot traffic, it's hard to keep that up.

And you see how much parking lot, I guess. Right. How many people can I possibly put in this building at one time?

Sure. So we while we do a whole lot of work here at the winery and we encourage people to come out. The big thing for them is they should also come meet us where we are. Okay. We do events like we do at the farmers market in Nacadoches in Dallas. Okay. We do um Wino events. The Wino does pretty much everything in the diamond, as I call it. It's Dallas Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Galveston, and Shreveport. Okay. Now they cut out the Shreveport side of things, but they do events every single weekend somewhere in that diamond.

Okay.

So we might be there. And we specifically cater to meeting us at weird places because our webpage has a calendar on it showing and telling you where we're going to be. Oh, okay, cool. I might, for example, be in Arlington, mom might be at the Dallas Farmers Market, Shane would be at the Nack Doches Farmers Market, and Chuck would be here.

Yeah.

I gotcha.

So you take those wines out to different places.

If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. Okay. So we go.

Well, so do you do and do you have like a wine club that people can join?

Or do you okay? I don't know much about it, I'll be honest. I'm still learning that sort of thing. My mom, Cheryl, she'd know the most about it, but we do, in fact, do a wine club. We also do um online shipments as well. That was gonna be my next question.

Yeah. So how can people uh find your wines if they can't get to this location? So they can buy online. Online?

And I'm just going to hand one of these to you as well. But we got a phone number on there, a web page, and an email. Okay. And all three of those work. Yeah. And the web page, not only does it have the calendar showing where we're gonna be, but it also links to a Venoshipper webpage. Uh, I think Venoshipper, right? Uh you wouldn't know. So why am I asking you?

Why are you asking the blind guy? I ain't never seen it.

But it shows what states we can ship to. In fact, it even shows what countries we can ship to, I think. And it shows what we have in inventory so that we could ship it to you. Right. So you could also send us a direct email. Yeah. For example, if you send us an email, get us on the phone, say, hey, I'm in Nacky Doches. Right. I'd like a bottle of blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. That's within 30 miles of here. I'll probably put it in the car, drive over, and drop it on your front delivery. All right. We're going right by there. All kinds of options. All kinds of options. Our big deal when it comes to sales is why make it difficult for you to buy something from us.

Right. You're trying to sell wine. And I see that you got it even at some places like Longview, even Fredericksburg, Texas wine cellars. So a lot of options there for people to find those wines.

Third-party store inventories can be quite limited. For example, I know the place in Fredericksburg, Texas Wine Cellars, has what, three of our wines, maybe. If you go to them and ask for them, they'll probably get more from us. Gotcha. Uh, Big Papas and Little Mamas in Longview. They uh I haven't heard anything from them recently. Okay. Uh, but I'm pretty sure they still keep us in inventory. Yeah. Instead of putting it in the stores, so we're not in a whole lot of stores. We specifically focus heavy on call us. Yeah. I will bring it to the streets. Direct to consumer. Direct to consumer is 99% of our sales, except for Cooper's Farms. Because we love Cooper's Farms, they have a wall of wines. Oh, and we help produce a lot of those wines. Good partnership there. Good part. And they also provide us with a lot of our fruit as well.

Specifically peaches, because they do peaches, but well, so as you get ready to transition into this role, as you're you well, getting ready to, you're already in the middle of it. But uh, do you have do you have ideas and thoughts? So Steve kind of set the foundation and got things going. Now you're kind of taking over. He has LLC'd it to you. Uh do you have plans for future growth or things that you'd like to see that you'd like to do?

We started as a buy-the-bottle wines. And I don't see that changing. Okay. In that particular case, I've been looking around and I've been looking for what I call contract work. Places like Cooper's Farms, they play, they we make deals with them. Yeah. We get the fruit and they get a lot of wine from us. Yeah. It makes up a significant portion of our uh operating costs. Sure. It covers the our ability to do stuff like this, to have a tasting room out here. But by and large, buy the bottle wines, I think, is really what we're gonna stick with. Well, maybe your business model. I enjoy the contract work, and like I said, it helps cover the costs of buy the bottle, but at the end of the day, we're not keepersol estates, we're not Messinahoff, we're not Bud Light.

You have your identity, and you found this is our idea, who we want to be.

We're just a bunch of country boys living out in the woods making wine because we wanted to.

Yeah. And we're not really restaurant wine either. Right. We're backporter fire pit wine.

Country summer. Cold wine by the pool. Yeah. Out by the barbecue pit, out of the lake. Something for the party wine. Not quite that far, but I get told often by when I'm at an event, oh, someone will come up and they'll look at our wine and they'll look at us, me, and say, I don't, I don't like wine. I'm not a wine drinker. And I'll say good. Yeah. I don't make wines for wine drinkers. I make wines for people who want something good to drink. Yeah. It just happens to be wine. Yeah. Open your eyes. Let's see what we can do here.

Mm-hmm.

Labels braille on request. Okay, cool. The old man lost his vision or started losing his vision back in 2016 with the uh the stroke. With the stroke. Yeah. It only really has affected his eyes. He hasn't lost, you know, mode function, all that. But he's been learning how to live life blind.

And if I get blind customers, you can't tell the difference between a bottle of lime and a bottle of blackberry unless somebody marks it. Okay. Yeah. I will mark it for you if you would like me to.

Wow. Interesting. So any custom bottle you can go in and braille the label.

But do and stick it on there. I've got the tape and uh the machine to do it.

Oh, yeah. As far as I know, Steve is Texas's only blind winemaker.

That's interesting.

Just now the blind wine finisher.

Yeah. Oh yeah. So there are a lot of places in Texas that people can go to drink great wine. But what is it about Maydell Country Wines that you think sets yourself apart as different that would make people say, I want to get there as soon as I can?

Fruit.

Yes.

There are only three wineries that we know of in the entire state of Texas that do not use a single grape in their wines. We are the oldest. And about a decade ago, maybe half a decade ago, a new winery called Florvino opened up. They do flower petal wine. They do things like peach blossoms, cherry blossoms, stuff like that. And very, very recently, within the last two, maybe three years, the final, final other winery popped up called Moose and Goose. Yes. Or was it Moose and Goose?

No, it's Moose and Goose. I've done an episode with that.

Oh, okay. They showed up and uh we become good friends with them. We didn't know they were doing stuff. They didn't know we were doing stuff. But of all the wineries in Texas, the three of us are the only ones that don't do anything with grapes. Wow.

It is truly a special experience to experience a winery that stays so dedicated to the pure and honest flavor of Texas fruit without ever feeling the need to rely upon a single grape. Now, you can find out more about their offerings at their website, www.maydellwines.com. And that resource is going to be your go-to spot for finding out places where they're going to come to you anywhere in that Texas diamond that they talked about in the interview. Browse their online inventory to see about maybe having something shipped to you, or look into maybe even joining their wine club. And don't forget, when you go see them, make sure you tell them you heard about them on this podcast, Texas Under Vine. All right, now, as promised, it's time for the reveal of my wine wanderer bottle from Maydell Country Wines. And the one I had to pick is one of their most solid foundational wines from the start, which is their lime wine. So this is a really interesting wine with really great lime flavor to it. It is a citrus floored bottle that perfectly captures the tart and crisp essence of a lime fruit, and it's exactly what you want to be sipping on one of those hot Texas afternoons. Make sure you try this one when you go to see them there at Maydale Country Wines. Alright, it's time to pack up my glasses and leave Rusk and the East Texas area behind as I move on in my travels, and I'm keeping my eyes on the horizon for our next great Texas wine destination. And remember, if you would like to support the show, please check out our Patreon page. You can subscribe there and get extras that no one else gets. Some fun bonus stuff, and it really helps me pay for all the expenses and bringing this great content to you. And if you're not watching this podcast, did you know there's a video version? So you can find us on our YouTube channel. And while you're there, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe so you'll get all the notifications of the new episodes. And I do love hearing from you. So here's a prompt for the comments down below. If you were visiting this fruit winery there in East Texas, which fruit wine would you be most excited to sample first? Leave it in a comment down below. And with that, my time is up. So don't forget, subscribe to the podcast and follow my socials to be notified any time a 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 Texas Undervine to stay up on all the upcoming episodes. Please email us with any suggestions 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.