June Rodil
Master Sommelier June Rodil has a mantel full of awards from Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, StarChefs and the Texas Sommelier Association. When she’s not making acceptance speeches she serves as beverage director for Austin’s McGuire Moorman Hospitality group.
It’s very important to view Austin’s relationship with Texas as a market within an even larger market; each of Texas’s four large markets (Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio) work very differently as far as popularity and price points. One of the biggest questions is volume. If you’re looking for a larger volume push as a supplier, you have to be willing — and it’s a very big risk — to put a brand into a state that’s essentially four different states working within one legal structure.
As far as Austin goes, comparing it to the more traditional markets of Houston or Dallas, your average price point is lower but your volume is higher. There’s definitely more risk and excitement here when you’re talking about wine that people are willing to try. We like being on the forefront of things that are new and unique, so whether you’re co-fermenting two grapes that have never been co-fermented before, or you’re doing a list that focuses on Ribolla Gialla or Assyrtiko, there’s definitely more of an open mind for grape varieties and smaller producers that are also interested in unique items like that.
Younger entrepreneurs with big, expendable incomes are coming to Austin, and this is helping the wine and restaurant scenes tremendously. And it’s a new generation that is OK philosophically with drinking wine all the time with their meals. You’re starting with a deeper base knowledge in people — it’s not people who are still iffy about drinking wine with lunch, it’s “what glass of wine am I going to have with my lunch?”
There’s something so vibrant in Austin that you can feel. It’s a fantastic community. We bounce ideas off each other, and that is a huge thing that I think smaller brands, suppliers and distributers need to know: We all talk to each other very, very frequently, in a very positive way. We’re looking for these brands to come into the market; the question is, “how do we get it done?” There have been times when we’ve called the supplier directly and found a distributor for the supplier so we can get the wines that we’ve tasted. It’s an unwieldy market because of how big it is, it’s a big risk for a small brand to come in, but if you have people who are calling you up to say, “I like this, let’s do it, and we have buyers for you,” it’s a win/win situation that has worked out very nicely for a few brands, and we’re proud to be a part of bringing them into the market.
Denise Clarke
Certified sommelier and specialist of wine, Austin-based Clarke is executive director of Texas Fine Wine, an exclusive group of four wineries making quality wines from Texas appellation vineyards.
As someone who has been involved in the Texas Wine industry for more than a decade, it’s definitely an exciting time for our industry. While still in its infancy, the industry shows tremendous promise as it has fine-tuned its grape selections, expanded wine grape acreage, and focused on making better and better wines. Warm-climate grapes reign. Growers planted Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon in the early years, to make wines that consumers were familiar with. But over time, some of Texas’s more progressive wineries realised that warm-climate Mediterranean grapes were better suited for the Texas heat. Today, top Texas varieties include Viognier, Vermentino and Picpoul Blanc as well as Tempranillo, Mourvèdre, Montepulciano, Aglianico and Tannat, among others.
Texas wines are surprising a lot of wine folks. In the past, wine enthusiasts who found a great Texas wine would say, “This is a good wine for Texas”. Not anymore. Wine professionals and enthusiasts alike are finding Texas wines can hold their own against their international counterparts. As a young industry, however, many Texas wines are produced in small quantities, premium-priced and often only available at the winery. Texans consume all the Texas wine. Don’t try and look for a Texas wine outside of Texas – almost all Texas wine is consumed in the Lone Star State. Despite hundreds of new acres being planted over the past several years, the state is still short on grape acreage (about 4,000 acres (1,600 ha)) to support the burgeoning wine industry that now boasts some 250-plus wineries.
The culinary and wine scene in Texas is booming. What used to be a beer and BBQ state, Texas is now one that boasts so many cuisines, more fine dining establishments, and plenty of local cuisine/farm-to-table restaurants. This changing culinary scene is a driving force behind more daring and interesting wine lists, including select Texas wines on restaurant lists. No doubt, what grows together goes together.
The past several harvests have been devastated by late freezes and hail storms, but this year, the state’s grape harvest promises to be one of the best and most balanced in many years. Stay tuned for some exciting wines from Texas.
Mark Devin Sayre
Former beverage director at Four Seasons Hotel Austin, Sayre left 2007’s TexSom conference as “Texas’ Best Sommelier”, and in 2010 was named one of Wine & Spirits magazine’s “Top New Sommeliers” in the country. He is now Service Director for Austin’s ELM Restaurant Group.
Austin has become one of the “it” cities to live in. We get such an influx from both West Coast and East Coast in terms of people moving and living here that I feel like the city is having to change, and is organically changing from a food and beverage perspective; it’s just more grown up now. It’s not just a sleepy university town with a capital in it. This is a thriving, bustling, electric city — and changing all the time.
What does that mean for our restaurant group and for our wine scene here? You look at two major metropolitan areas in Houston and Dallas, which flank us, and the wine scene here is so much smaller, so the dollar spend doesn’t match Houston or Dallas, but they’ll buy more run-of-the-mill, traditional wines — lots of Napa Cab, lots of Californian Chard — but in Austin, with its cool, weird, hippy vibe, our wine-buying sensibilities have kind of echoed that. We may not spend as much as Houston or Dallas, but we buy a larger array of wines, with a focus on finding the new and the boutique. Texas as a state is growing in terms of demanding fine wine, and by that I mean a more boutique, more thoughtful approach to buying, and Austin has led that charge.
It has been cool to watch this town go from almost nothing in that regard to becoming a hotbed for it, and if you look at the timeline it has been about ten years now, and that’s not a long time. It’s weird to say it now because I feel like it has finally caught on, but we watched things like rosé completely explode five years ago when it was like crickets before. In Texas we’ve been a little slow-going on the rosé thing. Everybody was stuck thinking it’s still sweet and not a serious wine, but now we’re watching this next set of wines pass the big boys (Cab, Merlot, Chard, Pinot) and it’s been cool to watch the acceptance. And it’s not just people saying, “Oh, I drink that too” — no, people are crazy for it. There’s a snowball effect. Now that it’s OK to say Grüner Veltliner tableside, that spurs a “what next” scenario, and that growth happens at a much quicker pace than what it took to get to square one.
The newer generation needs something else and is always questioning, and with how the scene and professionalism has changed, coupled with other outside influences like the SOMM movie and things like that, the result is that now people are trusting sommeliers. People are asking what we like, what we’re drinking, and what special things we’re offering, and it’s our job to listen and deliver.
