Red Caboose Winery (Central Texas)

How did they make wine before electricity? Right. How did they make wine before computers? How did they make wine before sophisticated chemistry labs equipment?

Welcome to Texas Undervine, an exploratory podcast to scout out the best that Texas wine country has to offer. 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, details. We'll 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. Some have done better than others. You'll hear more about that in the interview. But he really believes on being as minimalist with things like that so that the grapes really follow their natural life cycle. And so when he was first getting started, he sought out some books on how wine is made throughout the years, way before we had electricity and modern chemistry and things like that. What's the really old school way of making wine? And as part of that philosophy, he basically says that if a winemaker doesn't know what to do with the wine, then don't do anything at all. It's a very old school philosophy on the way he tries to handle his wines. And as part of that, they do not filter their wines. They use a slow racking process that really helps to preserve the natural colors, the flavors, and the viscosity that nature intended in those grapes that will become that amazing wine. And as part of that same philosophy, they don't use any kind of pumps or things like that when they're taking wine from the barrels and bottling. They use a gravity-based system and they use some siphons to be able to get the wine from the barrel to the bottle. They want to reduce as much motion as possible because Gary really believes that that is a major enemy of wine. So he wants to reduce anything that could harm the wine's natural development. And as part of their commitment to sustainability, they're the only lead-certified winery for sustainability in the state of Texas. And Gary is using the power of geothermal energy, solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and things like that to be able to make this winery hopefully stay completely off the grid. His goal is to eventually, the next two years, to put enough in that they can completely operate totally self-sustainable. And they really believe in long barrel aging. So Gary likes to leave the wines relatively untouched as much as possible in the barrels for anywhere from six to twelve years, even to be able to allow that wine to really reach its peak and to hit that point where it tastes best. So you're not having to age the wine on your own after you buy it. It's already ready to go at its best state. Now I got to sit down with Gary and talk to him a little bit about his love for architecture, sustainability. He really has a passion for trains, and that's where the name caboose came from, which you'll find out later. And his dedication to producing old-world style Texas wine. All right, here's Gary McKibben, owner and winemaker at Red Caboose Winery. Howdy Vine trippers, welcome to Red Caboose Winery. And I'm here with Gary McKibben, the owner and winemaker, and we'll find out about architect in a moment, of this particular winery. And so we've got a lot of really cool and interesting things to share about their vineyard, about sustainability, and about this winery itself and what they've been doing here. So without further ado, let's turn our attention to Gary and find out a little bit about his story. Gary, tell me a little bit about your history with wine. How did you get started in this crazy industry?

Well, that's a good word to use. It was kind of a crazy start. I bought a ranch just to get out of Dallas on the weekend. And my son uh was away playing hockey, and he decided to come home. And I said, Well, come down to the ranch and help me. And we toured around the ranch and there were just mega grapes and all the oak trees. So we just decided, well, let's just for fun plant some grapes. That's how it started. Okay. 20,000 vines and 19.6 acres later, you know, we're we're here where we are today. Wow.

20 acres. Yeah.

Yeah. That's now some of them we're having difficulty right now because we practice sustainability. So we don't spray pesticides, we don't spray harmful toxins. So uh the vines just go through a natural life cycle, and they lasted a little over 20 years. And so now next spring we're gonna be in a replanting mode. So but we've what the the interesting thing about that is we found out we had 13 varietals when we started. Okay, and we found out which three varietals are the strongest in this particular terroir. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty pretty interesting.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, so you've got almost 20 acres of grapes planted here. Do you suffer? I would think so. Here we are in meridian. Do you suffer from a lot from Pierce's disease here? Is that what attacks the vines the most? Or what is it?

We haven't had any evidence of Pierce's disease. We did have anthracnos in our Blanc de Bois, and we ended up taking those out because we have to spray too many chemicals in this area right here to keep those healthy. So we we kind of narrowed it down to the varietals that that sustain themselves naturally. And that was a very good exercise. It took us years to do that. But uh a lot of things, the heat is really tough. Grapes, grapes don't like it when it's really hot, and getting enough water to them is really important. And of course, you know, just using using natural sprays. We spray oil. Okay. We don't spray, we spray spray stylet oil, and that it has been very beneficial, but you have to stop spraying that when it gets 95 degrees because it'll burn the burn the vines otherwise. But but though we've had really good success with spraying oil. Interesting. Yeah, and it's it's natural, so it's uh I mean you can spray it the day before you pick, and you could probably you could probably put it on your salad, it's a natural product, yeah.

So yeah, well, I'm sure that you didn't start off by saying, Let's plant 20 acres of vine. So I'm sure it probably grew over time.

Yeah, first year we planted a hundred vines just to see how they did, and they did very well. Okay, did very well, and of course I still have my practice, I'm an architect, I still had my practice in Dallas, so I was commuting back and forth, so I didn't want a big obligation down here right off the bat. Right. So it's a lot of work, yeah. It really is, especially in this rock. We're primarily rock. Okay. Um, and so we gradually added to that. It took us about five years to get up to 20 acres. Okay, but it was a good process, and my son was helping me with that, and then that was really good. Good father and son project, a lot of work, but uh anyway. Two 23 years ago, you said? Yeah, 23 years ago. So about yeah, oh three. We did it in 03. Yeah, and then we've we opened to the public in 05. Oh five, okay. Yeah. So we uh we've done we've done real well. We grow, we've grown all our own grapes up till now, and uh that's been very benefit beneficial. So we know we had to practice sustainability. Well, our winemaking is a sustainable process, our growing grapes is a sustainable process. We don't filter our wines, okay. So therefore, we don't want to spray pesticides or we don't want to spray toxins on our vines. So we use a natural process. Some of these wines here, in fact, we just pulled out nine barrels here last week and they were 12 years old. Wow, they were in oak for 12 years. I still got 2011 and 29 in uh in oak right now. Really? Yeah. Now, the good news is it goes through a natural process and it becomes very good wine. The bad news is we lose half the barrel because we seal the barrels, we don't top up. Yeah, and we've lost about half of them. But man, the 2010 that we pulled out was unbelievable. And we just bottled that.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know Dan at Robert Clay Vineyard in Mason, but in my interview with him, he talked about how he had read somewhere from France, I think it was a winemaker in France, who talked about how he said there's something magic that happens with a wine in the barrel at the sixth year. If you can wait to get to at least six years, something really magic happens with the wine. And he said he talked to people about that, and everybody was saying, six years, you can't leave it in there six years. It's crazy. And he said, he kind of dug his feet in the ground and said, No, I'm gonna do this. So he ages all of his at least six or seven years. He's got long aging, long barrel aging as well. It sounds like you're experiencing some of the same thing.

Yeah, we don't bottle anything, we don't take anything out of the barrel before six or seven years. In fact, we're pouring 07 Syrah right now. Wow, we still have 07 Syrah. In fact, I've got some barrels of 09 Syrah right around the corner here. That's cool. And it's the the interesting thing about not topping up is it creates a vacuum in there. And when you pop the bung, it just goes, you know, you can tell there's a vacuum in there because it's le it's losing oxygen. And the wine is becoming more and more mature and it's marrying up. The longer it's in there, the better it gets. Now, the only time we've had a real incident was with some, it was with Syrah. Also, I bought used French barrels. Okay. They'd been used one time for one year out of California. I'll never do that again. And uh the that wine went bad, but it really, but it took seven years for it to go bad. Interesting. Yeah, and uh uh we're gonna we take that. We have it all we also have a distillery, so we're gonna distill that. Okay. Distill that wine. Yeah. So great spirits. Yes. Yeah. It does make great spirits. We're just we're we're small school, we're family owned, we're old world, we're just we're just basic. Yeah. And we we said we we decided early on, let's try this and let's let's let's learn the basics, and then we'll evolve from there. And we really haven't evolved very much. We got we went through find something that works. Yeah, well, you can see on the barrel there it says profile. There's like 50 or 60 different profiles on toast. Okay, yeah. The way that the way that your barrels were toasted. And so we went through a couple dozen different ones with the same varietal over a period of years to find out which one gave us the same flavor or the best flavor that we really enjoyed. And we picked one profile and we stuck with that profile. Yeah, yeah. That's been a worker for you. It's been it's been a worker, it works really well. So um that's that's that process. The other thing that we do is we don't pump our wine out of our barrels because you know, in layman's terms, the the tannins, phenols, polyphenols, all of that, they marry in the barrels. And motion will disturb that. Okay, it will undo to a certain degree. If you're gonna pump it out, it doesn't like to be pumped. It when you pump it out, it disturbs what actually happened, and we're leaving it in there for six to ten, twelve years. Why would we want to disturb it? So we siphon it out. And I've made a little siphon that's really cool. It works like a champ, and we can we can siphon it out. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that's something that we do that's different. And again, that adds that's kind of a flavor-added process without adding any chemicals or any any anything to the wine. It's just how you handle it, how you process it. Yeah. And you know that there's four things that'll ruin wine, and one of them's motion. And when we when we put it, when we bottle it, we don't pump we don't pump it in through our bottle or either. We we put our tote up high, so it's gravity. Okay. So we gravity bottle fill. But even though we do that, it's squirting it through the little injectors into the bottle, and it doesn't like that. Yeah. And so that's why it goes through that bottle phase. But our bottling phase or bottle shock phase is very minimal because we treat our wines very, very gently. Gently, yeah. And it takes time, takes money, you know, to do that, but it's the right way to do it. It's a very old world style. It's old world style, it's been working for thousands of years.

So, okay, so you start this vineyard, and then a couple of years later you decide, okay, let's go ahead and we got all this fruit, let's go ahead and make some wine, and let's go ahead and open up a tasting room. That was your next step in the process, huh?

Yes, yeah. Right. We we we experimented that first year in making wine, and we were real happy with the results, uh-huh, my son and I. And so then we uh we decided, well, let's let's build a small winery. Well, it wasn't a small winery, we built a pretty large building, and then we added on to it the cellar we added on later on. Yeah. But uh, yeah, we're all we're we're about sustainability and and old, we make old world style wine. Yeah. In fact, interesting story. When we first got into this, okay, right after we planted our first hundred vines, we decided we need to learn from the experts. Okay. So the symposium is in Sacramento, okay. It's every year. So we decided, let's go out there, spend a week out there, go to the symposium, talk to all the experts, learn a whole bunch of stuff. So we go out there, we had fun, and we learned a lot. Okay. We learned a lot. That's good. But then I got over our head. We're just we're just newbies, we're just starting out in this. And uh, so on the airplane coming back, we had these bags full of all kinds of information. And I go, son, how much of this did you understand? And he said, Some of it. What are we gonna do with all this? So we're flipping through there. I go, look at this word. I it's this long, I doesn't have very many vowels in it, I can't pronounce it, I can't spell it. What does it mean? So I go, let's go back even earlier than this. So I got home, set all that information aside, yeah, went to the half-price bookstore, and I went in there. I said, I want the oldest book you have on analogy, winemaking, viticulture. I want the oldest books you have. Yeah. Because how did they make wine before electricity? Right. How'd they make wine before computers? How did they like make wine before sophisticated chemistry, labs, yeah, equipment? And so we wanted to know the basics. Yeah. Okay. Now we learned that the in Russia, not too many years ago, they discovered vats in the ground, and they estimate that the wine that was stored in there was 7,000 years ago. So wine's been around a long time. And we wanted to know the basics, and we learned that you go with what nature gives you, and that's what we do. We grow the grapes, we grow quality grapes, that's the key. We make wine, we don't put anything in it except for yeast. That's it. And so our wines are very old world style wines. And when people come here and taste our wines, they recognize that. Okay, they know there's something different about our wines. First of all, the viscosity, our wine is thicker, it's not flabby, it's it's not thin wine, it's it's old world style wine. And uh, we've got right now I've got 12 barrels of port that have has been in port since uh 25 2005. Yeah, it's been in there, so it's been in there for 21 years for 21 years, and it's great. We tasted I did some robbing for our last wine club, and they loved it. It was it was it was unbelievable. So, old world style, you don't have to be, you don't have to have all the bells and whistles to produce good wine. And we do it the old, old-fashioned way, and we we advertise it, we make old world wines.

So, did you in 05 when you opened the tasting room? Was that the time when you decided, okay, I need to retire and do this full-time, or uh were you still working both ways, living in Dallas and coming back and forth doing farming and the tasting room?

Yeah, I've still been an architect all these years. Wow. And I I moved down here, I think in 05, I moved down here, but then I still commuted to Dallas. Sure.

You were the original remote worker at that point in time.

Exactly, exactly. You know, and then the computers really got more sophisticated, so I could work here and you know, okay, do things, do things online. But there in that process, when I went to the old to the half-price bookstore to get the old books, I learned really cool little tricks and and and quotes. And one of the quotes that I learned that I'll always remember if you don't know what to do with your wine, don't do anything at all. Okay. And I think that's where winemakers, especially in Texas, winemakers want to fix their wine. Yeah. You know, they want to filter it, they want to add things to it, they want to keep filtering it.

Adjust for acidity, adjust for all we don't do anything.

We don't even filter our wine. And Benedict used to test all our wines, and Benny's just great. She's really, really fabulous. And when we told her we weren't filtering our wine, she goes, What? You're not filtering your wine. It's like, oh no, no, we're not. We rack them three or four times. Yeah. So it takes us 90 days to get to the barrel or more, is we rack them a minimum of 30 days per tank. And that's the clarification process that we go through. And we know before we put it in oak whether it's going to be a good wine or not. Uh, and uh we we we focus primarily on on red wines, red wines, and then then there was another quote that I really liked, and it's it's perfect for here because it said, because of the pH and the the soil terroir is so different and all over Texas, but here we're rocky and uh very alkaline. So they said, if you can plant corn, don't plant grapes. And I thought about that, and this is old timers, these are old timers talking like this, and that was one of their quotes that they use. So, because the soil conditions are completely different, water and pH, pH, everything completely different. So, anyway, we kind of live by those standards, and we're we're basically lazy, so well, you know, why hurry?

Yeah, well, I gotta know, did you ever go back to that all that stack of materials you got at the symposium and go back through and say, oh, that's what they meant? Or did you ever review those, or did they stay stuck in the corner?

The only time we used those was to find uh uh suppliers of like equipment, okay, barrels, things like networks connections for things. Exactly, exactly. We needed when it came to the point where we had to start barrels. In fact, the first thing, this was really interesting. We do a linois temper neo, it's a 50 50-50 blend. I think we were probably the first ones in Texas to do that 20 23 years ago. But the reason we did that is we had Tempranillo planted, we loved it. We had Lenoir planted, turned out that's the that's the strongest varietal I have for this area. Yeah, and we got 25 gallons of each when we made that wine. And we go, what are we gonna do? Right. Oh barrels, we can get a 53-gallon barrel if we just put them both in that barrel, not really knowing the principle of wine making. We just said, let's take a shot. Let's take a shot at it and see how it comes out. Came out fabulous. We've been making it ever since. Really? Yeah, that's become a standard. It's become one of our standards. Uh oh, what do we do? Yeah. I love that. So anyway, yeah, it's been it's been a learning process, but yeah, it's it's a basic process if you keep it basic. You can make it as complicated as you want, but it doesn't have to be.

Yeah, I like that. So is your son Ryan? Is he still working with you here with the winery?

He doesn't work so much here at the winery. He's got another job in Dallas and he's got a family, but he does my compliance and all my okay, all my uh government work and re reporting and all that. And he comes down and you've been talking to him. He schedules, he schedules everything for me. So I don't have to do that, and that's a huge help. Sure. It's absolutely a huge help. So yeah, he's still a family operation. It's a family operation. Yep. We don't have any investors. We're just we're just poor.

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That was another accident. Okay. I've had a lot of pleasant accidents along the way. Yeah, those are great. Uh well, I bought the ranch and I'm a train buff. I've I collect trains and I've had I've had trains since I was three years old. And uh so I've always wanted a caboose. When I was five years old, I got to ride on a caboose.

Yeah.

It because the train tracks went through our our ranch, and the depot was actually on our ranch. And so I got to long story, but I got to get on get on the caboose at the stockyards and ride up to the to the depot. That left a lasting impression in my mind. And I said, Someday I'm gonna own a caboose. And so when I bought the ranch, I go, perfect, let's get a caboose. And I looked and looked and looked, hard to find. I finally found one in a junkyard and uh stopped, asked the guy what he was gonna do with it. He says, I'm gonna cut it up for scrap steel. And I go, Oh, really? Well, because it was a mess. Didn't have the wheels, didn't have any glass in it. Every every nasty word you can think of was spray painted on the outside of it. And so I said, Well, how much is it worth in scrap steel? And he back then it was a penny a pound. Okay. And so we calculated out how much that would be, and I go, Well, I'll buy it for that if you move it to my ranch. And then you won't have to cut it up, you don't have to transport it, right? You don't have to spend money. One flat deal. Yeah, one flat deal. He goes, Really? And I goes, Yeah, yeah, it's worth it, it's worth scrap steel to me. So I bought it. Then I it I had to go find wheels.

Oh gosh.

The trucks. I had to buy two trucks, and I found those in a junkyard in Fort Worth. Okay. So, but then I had to have tracks. Wow. So I know why John Henry is alleged. That is hard work. Yeah. Driving those spikes into those ties. So I bought the ties, I bought the plates, I bought the spikes, I bought the rails. Really? I built that thing. 78 feet. You built a mini railroad, right? Yeah, I did. I have a mini railroad. And then I'm ready for the trucks. So I got a crane and got a trucking company to deliver my trucks for me, set them on the track. Now I'm ready for the caboose. Time to lift it. Yeah. So the caboose was halfway between here and Dallas. And so we videoed that trip. We we were in the pickup truck behind it. The guy that moved that welded a hitch on the front, put it on his semi-tractor, and welded axles to the back of it. And he drove that caboose down here like a like a semi-trailer. And I'm I'm like, this guy's crazy. He was going 70 miles an hour. And of course, he had to. It was oversized, and he didn't have a pilot car. And it was crazy. And my son's hanging out the window like this video, and it's a crazy video. That's awesome. So in fact, I need to get that out and put it up on the wall somewhere. But anyway, so get the caboose down here, and then we got to have two more cranes, and we set it on the the trucks, and then the work came. Then I had to start remodeling it. But I made it into a cabin. It has a fireplace in it, and restored as much of it as I could. Really? Started going to train shows and got the lanterns that fit on it. So you pieced it together. I pieced it back together. Yeah. It's not totally done, but I'm going to move it up here and it's going to become part of the bed and breakfast.

Wow.

Yeah, it'll be it'll be up here. We're adding, I don't you probably saw it coming in. We're adding a restaurant and a tasting room out front. Okay. And then the caboose will be out there, and we're doing another patio out there. So we'll have food and and dining and things like that here.

Well, old locomotive.

Well, and we want to go off the grid. Yes. So we want that restaurant, the winery, everything here to be off the grid. We already do geothermal. We've got 30, 32 tons of geothermal. We generate our own electricity. We do shading coefficiencies. We're subterranean. This is subterranean. And so all we have to do is add, and I harvest rainwater. I keep 40,000 gallons of rainwater at all times. And so we're going to add another 40 kV on the roof of electricity, and we'll go off the grid. Wow. And that's that's tough for a winery to do because during harvest, there's a huge consumption of electricity. So we'll have to really pace ourselves during that process.

The rainwater that you harvest, that's just what you use for irrigation, I presume?

Not so much irrigation because it takes 40,000 gallons to irrigate one time. Wow. So I do have a I do have a well, but we're gonna cut back when we replant, we're cutting back our vineyard. We won't have 19.6 acres anymore. We'll cut back to maybe somewhere between 10 and 15. Yeah. So I can balance my rainwater and my irrigation and my consumption here. Okay. So but it'll be it'll be a nice, it'll be a nice thing when I'm off the grid.

Yeah, wow. That's uh when you talk about sustainability, I mean that is it right there. I can't think of any other way.

Yeah, I pro I practice sustainable architecture. In fact, one of the most interesting projects is uh uh my brother bought a Tesla and he called me and he was bragging about his Tesla, and I said, I am going to disown you if you don't generate your own electricity to charge your own Tesla. You will not drain the grid and be my brother. I said, I I won't have anything to do with it. He's in California, yeah. So we designed this his whole solar system and battery packs on the side of his house. So he comes home from work, plugs his Tesla in, uses his own electricity, gets up in the morning, depletes his batteries, gets up in the morning, unplugs it, and goes off to work. So he doesn't draw one kilowatt off of the grid. And so he gets a he gets a paycheck from Edison every month. Wow. Edison Edison buys electricity from him. From him. Yeah.

While he drives around for free because he charged, yeah, generated.

And that's become a real problem, not to get sidetracked here, but that's become a real problem in Southern California with these apartments because they don't have enough charging stations. And you have to get on a calendar, you might have to wait two weeks to charge your car because uh there are more units and more EVs than there are parking stations. So it's he just thanks me every time he sees me for well, yeah. And it's all about it's pretty it's pretty basic, it's all about sustainability. Okay, it's real simple.

Yeah, it's real simple. Okay, we overcomplicate things sometimes.

Exactly. Exactly.

We we take for granted these conveniences and things we have, but we don't think about the back end of where those come from. Right. And you know, uh you think we think about the food that we have, the you know, the groceries we have and all that, you just go to the store, you get these things. But what you did, just like with the the winemaking, you just went back to the basics and just said, you know, yeah, well, how did they do it back then? Let's do it that way, and now you're fully sustainable.

And we do we grow our own, uh well, I do a jalapena vodka in my distillery. So we grow our we grow on jalapena, I do cilantro vodka, um, and we we uh grow that. We grow our own basil too. Yeah, we're doing a basil vodka also, but I do that all sustainably too. Interesting. Yeah, I don't spray, don't spray any pesticides.

Yeah. Well, you also mentioned you or to me beforehand that you were um working with the geothermal stuff here. So tell me a little bit about that. What got that started?

In 1967, I built a house for myself and I learned about geothermal, but I I'm really a fan of the Indians and their sustainability. Although a lot of the principles I use come from the Indians, they've been doing it for thousands of years. They they knew what geothermal was and and they knew what sustainability was. That's why they built their their cliff dwellings so that it was cool in the summer, and when the sun set in the winter, it picked up the winter rays, and so they were sustainable about site orientation, what where they live. Well, I said, I'm gonna do that, and so I built my own geothermal. I was I was just right out of college, built my own geothermal by putting copper pipes on the back of a retaining wall, then backfilled it, and then circulated that water through each through Regget. I made I don't know if I want to tell this whole story out to the to the public, they'll think I'm crazy, but um studs have a space between them of 14 and a quarter inches. Right. So I went to the junkyard and I wanted to get automobile radiators that fit in 14 and a quarter. There's fiat spiders. So I got a radiator and put it in every room, circulated the pipe through it, put a fan behind it, put a thermostat on top of it, and I was able to cool my house, which you really didn't need air conditioning in California where it was, is right on the coast. But I was able to lower the temperature in the rooms by about 10 to 12 degrees just by that, by basic, very basic. Then I had solar on the roof, so I wasn't consuming any electricity. I've been in love with that ever since. And I uh in my architectural practice in Dallas, we did schools and airports and big projects like that. And I did a school where we put 1700 wells underneath the football field for geothermal. Interesting, yeah. And uh that was a tough battle with the the school board because they said, You're not putting that under the football field. I go, Yeah, I am, nobody's gonna dig there. So we had every boring rig in northern Texas drilling wells, yeah. Took them several months to drill 1700 wells. I bet, but anyway, it proved to be very beneficial, and here it's it's really great, it's it's it's real sustainable and real comfortable in here year-round.

That's fascinating. Yep. Now you talked about being an architect, and you spoke of your architecture and some of your training there. You also told me before we started that you were the architect for 30-something wineries here.

36 36 wineries in Texas I've designed. Wow, most of them have been built. Yeah, that is there's about a third of them that haven't been built.

The tasting rooms and all the everything that goes into that. Yep. Wow. Is that something that you want to share on the podcast or not?

Um, yeah, I've I've I've worked with a lot of a lot of wineries, you know. I did Flat Creek, I did Brennan, I did several, several others.

Nice, that's real cool. Yeah, I have done an episode out at Flat Creek. Beautiful.

But anyway, yeah, I've I've I've learned a lot about wineries and designed a lot of wineries, done some gravity wineries. I did Perdon Alice Cellars. That was a gravity winery. They kind of modified it when they when they build it, but um, it turned out to be a nice winery. Yeah, yeah.

And uh, when I think about gravity, I also think about Valley Mills Vineyard, who has a gravity-based system there and theirs, and it's kind of built into the side of the of the the hillside there. Interesting, really cool stuff. Well, you're the only lead certified winery in the state.

Well, we we've we practiced all our principles, you know. We we wanted to be sustainable, it was a natural thing for us. We were doing it, whether we were lead certified or not, you know, we we became uh very, very efficient and and sustainable, but we just went through the process, it's quite a lengthy process.

Yeah, that yeah, that's a big honor though. Yeah, yeah. And that leads to that full sustainability that you're working on off the grid.

Right. And that'll be just one step beyond.

Well, let's talk about what most people come here for, the wine. So I want to know a little bit about what you're growing and what and you mentioned 13 different varietals. What do you have out there now? You're gonna replant some of the things.

Yeah, we we are gonna replant the Syrah does real well here in this Tiro. Okay. The Lenoir, you can practically ignore that, it just grows and produces year after year. And then the Tariga Nationale does really well. We have we have several barrels in here right now, Tariga Nationale. We use that for our port. Yeah. But um, I'm probably gonna go back with Cabernet Sauvignon, too. And everybody says don't plant Cabernet Sauvignon. In fact, Texas AM told me not to plant Texas AM. That was the first varietal I planted. It did great, but it didn't last. It it died out. It died out. So did my temper neo, all my temper neal. But I'll replant Temper Neo, Cabernet Sauvignon, uh probably do Merlot and Malbeck again. Okay. We specialize in big reds, yeah, the old world style reds, varietals. Um, we don't we did do a vioner and we did do a semion. But um, I may plant violnet again. That did pretty well, okay, pretty good here. Yeah. So, but we do, you know, we just do things that that we can control in an old world style. Yes. You know, we don't want to get in involved in any clones too flashy, fancy there. Don't want to do it. Not yet. Not yet. I know there's a lot of Pierce disease and clones out there that they claim this and they claim that, but the quality hasn't been proven and nobody really knows. Yeah. So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna wait and see. Okay. So it's a caboose philosophy. Okay, I've blast on a train. So anyway, we'll get there sooner or later. But we uh yeah, we did have 13 varietals growing. Okay.

And do you produce all of those here on site?

We did. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We don't we don't really buy grapes, but um we've I've still got 301 barrels of wine. So I'm I'm and they're uh we tasted them not too long ago. You can see the dots on them uh on the barrels. And so we know what's going on. Okay, and we're about ready to start robbing barrels again next week and do some more bottling. Yeah, because there's a lot of them that are maturing, they're all about you know anywhere between seven and ten years old. I've got a couple that are older than that, but it's about time to pull them out and start bottling.

And do you do your crush and your tanks and everything here on side as well? Yeah. It is a fully, I mean, full operation here.

Yeah, we do transport our wines to Clifton to bottle because we've got a we've got a bottling line down there. Okay. So we take it down there to bottle, and then we store down there and we distribute from there.

And you have a tasty room there in Clifton as well, right? Yeah, okay, perfect. Yeah. Tell me about some of the varietals that you enjoy working with. What are your favorite varietal or varietals to work with?

Well, Temper Neo is a big one in Texas. It's it's it's a good wine. I like that. We do a lot of blending with Temper Neo, but my all-time favorite is Smallbeck. Yeah. Smallbeck is just an exquisite grape. It's it's really good. Unfortunately, they all died, but we're gonna be replanting replanting them in the spring. But um any of the reds, any of the reds, Syraz Dynamite, it just it'll blend well, also. Yeah, Temper Neo and Cabernet Sauvignon, we won a Jefferson Cup in 2012. Wow, I think we might have been the first one to win a Jefferson Cup uh in 2012 with our 08 Cabernet Sauvignon. So we'd only been that was a three-year cab, that was a young one. So we that kind of gave us the initiative to really go for it. Okay, so we were really proud of that one, and it's since won all kinds of awards, right? And we most of our cabs have, in fact, that's Melanie's favorite, favorite wine is our cab. Okay, so I want you to taste our cab before you leave. Oh, definitely. And um Range Rider has been a good one. That's uh that's a Temper Neo. Okay, it's a Temper Neo Cab Franc blend, which is another really good blend. So the bad news is you're gonna have to go to Clifton to taste that one because we just bottled it last week. We've been out for almost a year, yeah. Yeah.

Is there a varietal that you have never worked with that you've always kind of thought, I kind of would like to try to work with that variety?

No, there's so many of them out there. Yeah, you know, I I picked our the favorite one. So I think we went out on the ladder, we did tinta cow okay for the pork. Because when we first got started, we wanted to produce the best pork. True level pork, true Portuguese old world style pork. So we got the Tariga Nacional, we had the Tinta Cao, we had, and we put Lenoir in there.

Okay, yeah.

And uh I may plant tintacau again, I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, because I we we want to continue to produce pork. What types of events or things like that do you do at the winery? I know you mentioned that there's a concert going on here in the vineyard tonight. Uh what types of things do y'all y'all host out here?

We'll host anything. You know, come come to us, we'll host, we'll host it. Um, we we have a concert, we call it a cork and fork. Okay. We have a concert the last Saturday of every month from March to October, and that's tonight. And uh, and then we do weddings, we do lots of parties, okay, reunions, family reunions, things like that. We had a couple celebrations of life here not too long ago, but uh yeah, we'll host anything when we get our new tasting room and our restaurant done, we'll be able to do a lot more, yeah. But um, and we we sponsor 5K runs. That was that's been kind of interesting.

So, like the wine run and things like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I actually did the wine run several years back. Did you? Yeah, it's the only 5k I've ever run. And the only reason I did it is because they said you got a glass of wine at the finish line. I said, Hey, I'll get up and run for that. There you go.

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And they love it here because we have got 200 acres. Oh, wow. And I took them on the back side of the ranch, and they said, Oh, we can do 10Ks and we can do trail runs here. So we've got a they've got another one planned for October, and then they're gonna do trail runs on the back side of the ranch. It's really beautiful, really beautiful back there.

Yeah, this is such a beautiful area out here as well. A meridian. I didn't even realize there's a state park and Meridian Lake and all that out there as we were coming in. We were in. Oh, I love the drive in with all the trees over the road. It's picturesque. Just I told I told my wife, I said it with the blue bonnets too at this time of year. I said, I feel like I'm in a a painting of the Texas countryside as you as I was coming in the room.

Yeah, we're coming into a real pretty time of year.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, let's say that one of my viewers or some of my viewers are getting excited and want to come out and check out Red Caboose. So let's talk about what it looks like when they come. What does a tasting look like? So when a customer comes in and they want to do a wine tasting, do you have a set flight of wines that you give them, or does the customer choose their wines, or what does that look like?

Okay, we have uh we have a pretty good gamut of uh of wines. We have we make 21 different wines. So okay, you can pick from any of those. Any any five, you can pick. Okay. So we'll we we'll we'll open them up if we don't have them open. Yeah, yeah. What does the tasting cost?

$15. Okay, yeah, 15 for five. 15 for five. That's a great deal. Do they need reservations?

No, you can call. We're right now we're only open on Saturdays. Okay, but uh, that's soon soon gonna change. But um, you can call. Okay, yeah, it you don't need reservations, you can show up. We're dog friendly, we're family friendly. Okay, you know, you just bring your kids, yeah. Bring your dog, stay out of it, bring your picnic blanket, do whatever. Uh-huh. We have people bring their own chairs or blanket and they sit out on the lawn and yeah, have their own little picnic.

Do you provide any kind of food options or can people show cuterie trays? Okay. Yeah. Can people bring their own food in if they wanted to do that? Yes, certainly. Okay. Yep. What about maximum group sizes? Do you have any maximums you'd like to know or be notified ahead of time if a big group's coming or things like that?

We like to keep it 100 to 120 or less. Less. And that and the only reason is because we have uh our bathrooms, we have limited bathrooms. Okay. We've got plenty of parking, plenty of space, plenty of wine, plenty of seats, but we don't have plenty of toilets. Okay, yeah. That's another reason why I want to get that restaurant done because we're building toilets out there.

Well, tell me a little bit about that project, the the restaurant and the bed and breakfasts and all that.

Yeah, we will do a bed and breakfast. We have an RV park, we have 12 spaces, and then I have another 12 spaces roughed in that we're probably going to do tiny houses. Uh, and you can come camping here anytime you want. Just call us and say, Hey, can we camp on them for the weekend? Primitive camping. Yeah, yeah. Tent camping. Uh, we've had people come out here, and the stars are beautiful because we're in one of the darkest spots in Texas. Really? And we've had people come out here and sleep in the back of their pickup trucks just to see the stars. So real. And the Haley's Comet is coming, I think, in about a month. Okay. And we're gonna plan an event for that. Ooh, that would be neat. Yeah. And uh, but yeah, we're we're camping friendly, we're on several different camp apps, so you can come bring your trailer, bring, bring whatever, camp in the tent.

And you're building a restaurant, is that yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, that was a question. Yes, we're building a restaurant out front. It'll be a combination of restaurant and tasting room. Okay, and it'll seat about a hundred people. Okay. And of course, we'll have restrooms. Right.

Or restrooms. There you go. You got the extra space that you need. All right. What are your busier and slower seasons? What's the best time to come visit?

Anytime you want. We really don't have, I mean, around uh around Black Friday, you know, after the after people shop, that weekend seems to be a good weekend. Thanksgiving seems to be a good weekend because all the people come down to their ranches and they bring their family and their friends. So the day after Thanksgiving is always pretty busy. Okay. But anytime we're open, we we we don't really close on Saturdays. We're open all Saturdays. Okay. Now we have closed a couple times when it was you know freezing and snowing and everything, but we we put a sign on the gate and have them go to Clifton to our other to our other distance. Yeah, yeah. Clifton is is open Thursday through Sunday.

Okay. So you got another tasty room there that people could go to to experience things.

Yes, and that's where the distillery is.

Okay, gotcha. So you got a wine club, right? Tell me. A little bit about your wine club. How do people join and what are the benefits of that wine club?

You can go online, you get discounts, you get a free glass of wine when you come in, you can bring friends. And uh the main thing is we have wine clubs uh parties four times a year, the wine club pickup parties. And we always try and do something special with that. The last one I think I mentioned earlier to you, we did uh barrel robbing. Okay. And they love that. They love barrel robbing. And and it's it's really good too for me because I use them all as canaries in the coal mine. You know, they which one should I bottle just exactly? Yeah, they say, Oh, we like this one, we like this. They liked all of them. It's a live focus group. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. And so, yeah, we bottled all four of them that they they they picked. Yeah.

That's awesome. And that's great because it gives your wine club members a feeling of ownership. And part of it, I picked that one. I that this bottle is one that I said to them.

And when we bottle it, they will get we'll have another party, another wine club party, and we will release it to them first. Okay. So it's kind of a continuity of ownership throughout throughout the process.

What about any kind of distribution? Or are you in l places that people can buy outside of the winery? Or do you sell on your website?

Not at the moment. I we sell on the website. Okay, good. You can do it, you can do the website, you can buy it here, you can buy it in Clifton, but we no longer have a distributor. Okay. No longer by choice, we no longer have a distributor.

We've kind of already touched on this just a little bit, but do you have plans for future growth beyond the restaurant and the replanting of the vines? What ideas do you have? The sustainability is one of those things or being off the grid. But do you have other kind of plans for growth or things you'd like to see red caboose do?

Well, hopefully we can get more developed here. We're gonna move the caboose up here. That'll be part of the bed and breakfast. We're gonna expand our RV park, we're gonna build tiny houses, we're gonna really concentrate on the restaurant because in this area there's limited places to eat. Okay, and so we're gonna we're gonna expand upon that. And hopefully we'll have more of a bed and breakfast. So I may build I may build little cabins on the back side of the ranch, also. Okay. It's very, very, very pretty back there.

Yeah, this is a beautiful ranch. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of great places in Texas that people can go to drink great wine. Red Caboose is one of those. So can you tell me, in your opinion, what do you think really sets Red Caboose apart that would make people say, I've got to get there as soon as I can?

People always comment on the the feel of our wine in their mouth. Okay. Not uh, you know, the aroma's great, otherwise we wouldn't put it in the bottle. The flavor's there, but they taste something different. And that's because it's our wine viscosity is different because we don't filter, filter, filter, filter for clarity. Yeah. Because I mentioned earlier the old books at the half-price bookstore. I give them a plug any bookstore. Um the la I learned, and I haven't learned this at too many of the uh too many of the seminars that I've been to, bottle clarification is the last phase of filtering. We store our bottles upside down. So when you go over there to taste our wine, look at the shoulder on the bottle, you will see botanicals stuck there. They're not done on the bunt because we store our bottles upside down, they're right there. And that's the last phase of bottle clarification. So our wine is thicker, so and a lot of times there will be some particles in the bottom of the glass, and people will say, What is this? And I said, That's what nature wants you to have. That's right. Those are botanicals that need to be in the wine. And the first time we filtered our reds, the filter pads were just unbelievably red. And I looked at my son and I said, Shouldn't this be in the wine? Yeah. This is color and flavors. Shouldn't this be in the wine? And we we looked at it and we researched it, and to a certain degree, yes. But if you're if your wine is bad and you're trying to fix it, you're gonna filter it.

Yeah.

That's one way. You're gonna filter it, then you're gonna add things. That's another way, and you're gonna filter, and maybe it gets good, maybe it doesn't get good. But um, we are the philosophy that you just just have to do it the old world way. Okay. How'd they do it before electricity? And that's what we do. We do it to this day, and people can tell the difference. The other thing is our wines, some of our wines have no sulfites in them. Okay, wines will generate their own sulfites, and there's a lot of sulfites added uh during the process, but we we don't add that. Okay. So, and people recognize that too, and they'll come back to us. In fact, we have a customer in Oklahoma, and she comes down here to buy cases of our wine. When she goes down to Houston, she comes to buy us and she buys a case of wine, she goes, ours is the only red wine that she can drink. Interesting. Yeah. So, anyway, our wines are different, and people recognize that they're different. There's you know, you can market that all day long, say, hey, our wines are great, they're tasty. We make old world wine, but really that doesn't go very far. You have to taste it to really experience and you can and you can set up 10 glasses of wine from 10 different wineries and you can tell of the same varietal, you can tell the difference. And people people people know that.

Yeah.

So well, looking back over our conversation, what really stuck out to me was Gary's commitment and dedication to letting the wine clarify and mature naturally over many years, resulting in a wine that has a unique old-world viscosity that you just do not find in commercial wine production. Now, make sure you check out their website before you go to visit them. It's www.redcaboosewinery.com. And on their website, you can read about their two tasting room locations. Gary mentioned that in the interview. They have a tasting room at their vineyard where I visited there in Meridian. And they also have just down the road in Clifton another tasting room. That's where he has his distillery as well. And on that website, you can shop for his wines. You can check out the latest events and what's going on there. And you can also sign up for their mailing list if you'd like to. And don't forget, when you go to see them, make sure you tell them you heard about them on this podcast, Texas Under Vine. All right, now the time has come for our wine wanderer reveal. So today's episode library selection was the 2007 Syrah. Now, I've got two things to say about this particular wine. I love Syrah. Syrah has always been one of my favorite wines. It's got such deep dark notes to it, very fruity in nature, but you get this kind of current of spice that runs through it. It's just a really elegant wine from the southern French region, the southern Rhone, especially. And I just love Syrah. So you already had me at that. But did you see that vintage date? 2007. You didn't read it wrong, 2007. This wine is 19 years old. So it's amazing to see a wine go this far back. You're not gonna go to many tasting rooms, if any, that I can think of in Texas and get wine from this vintage. So that just is a tribute to what he's doing in the vineyard and what he's doing in the cellar to be able to age these wines for such a long period of time and then make those available. So this is really cool. I was just so fascinated with being able to drink a great wine that was from 2007. This wine is a testament, not only to Gary's patience, but to the ageability of Texas wine, aged for many years in oak without being opened up, so that kind of forms a vacuum inside of the barrel that causes the wine to mature beautifully. It's an amazing example of how Syrah can age and develop beautifully when treated with that old-world respect. You got to make sure that you get a bottle and try some of that when you go to visit them. All right, now that we've explored those wines and the sustainability there at Red Caboose Winery, it's time to hit the tracks and roll on down to our next Texas wine destination station. And if you're loving these stories from the vineyard from these amazing people on these episodes, please support the show on Patreon. Just go to my website, www.texasundervine.com, and click on the become a patron link at the top to get a lot of extras for just a little bit of support every month. And don't forget, this podcast is a visual podcast. So although you may be listening in the car on audio, the main version of this podcast is video based. So it can be found on YouTube. If you haven't checked out the visual versions of these podcasts, make sure to go to YouTube and my channel there at Texas Undervine and check it out. And don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe while you're there. And while you're there watching the video on YouTube, run down to the comments real quick. I want to know something. So answer this question for me. Tell me if you have some sort of a lifelong hobby or interest, kind of like Gary with his train collection that you've been able to incorporate into your lifelong story. Let me know down in the comments. And once again, a huge shout out to the supporters on Patreon who helped keep this journey through the Texas Vines moving forward. And with that, my time is up. So don't forget, subscribe to the podcast and follow my socials to be notified anytime 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.