GROWN IN TEXAS

Putting Texas wines on the map is the goal of a veteran winemaker and a new winery

Ron Yates wants more. After buying Spicewood Vineyards from a pair of Texas wine pioneers in 2007, he’s ready for the rest of the world to recognize the big strides that winemakers around the state have made with the quality of their wines.

There is still a lot of work to be done to get Texas wine as good as it could be, of course, but at least he doesn’t have to worry as much about getting visitors out to the winery in Spicewood.

Droves of people, many of them younger crowds who aren’t yet swayed toward particular regions or varietals, have made the trip out to his winery and others and tasted for themselves the progress of Texas winemakers. For the boyish Yates, 37, the next step is to make Texas wine more visible outside the state.

“But how many people also live in the state who are never going to come to a winery?” he says. “We’re not at the point of people saying, ‘Oh, we’re at a midweek dinner at a casual bistro in Houston, and we had a $20 bottle of tempranillo from Texas that was amazing.’ Until that’s happening, Texas wine won’t see the real growth that we need.”

He’s taking a leap of faith in the hopes of getting closer to that point. Recently, he and his family opened his namesake winery, Ron Yates, in a very different part of the Hill Country: Ron Yates is located along U.S. 290 West, the wine road that leads into Fredericksburg and is dotted along the way with wineries like William Chris Vineyards, Pedernales Cellars and Grape Creek Vineyards. As a result, the new winery, sitting on nearly 16 acres, can draw a lot more attention.

It’s meant to fulfill something that Spicewood simply can’t.

“We had outgrown our size at Spicewood. We wanted a new challenge. We also wanted to create something that was ours,” Yates says as he sits on the winery’s shaded patio, a peaceful place that overlooks the wideopen land where he intends to build a stand-alone tasting room, a swimming pool next to a pavilion for the wine club, and additional grapevines.

He and Spicewood’s winemaker, Todd Crowell, relish the extra space Ron Yates gives them to make wine — with a new 6,000-square-foot facility built to Crowell’s exact specifications and prepared to hold more fermentation tanks and barrels.

A Spanish passion

At 28, Yates purchased Spicewood Vineyards from Ed and Madeleine Manigold, who had planted grapes there starting in 1992 as a retirement project. Yates had gone to law school, started up a record label and couldn’t forget the wines he’d tried in Spain during trips abroad in college. Although he’d always been exposed to wine — his parents are cousins of Susan and Ed Auler, who opened the Hill Country’s first winery, Fall Creek Vineyards, in 1975 — Spain swerved his life course.

“Spain was really the driver for opening a winery in Texas,” Yates says. “I love that lifestyle, that romanticism of the wine.”

The similarity in climates between Spain and Texas is largely

PHOTOS CONTRIBUTED BY LINDSEY REED With the opening of Ron Yates, winemaker Todd Crowell has considerably more space to make wine from grapes that primarily come from Texas. The winery opened during harvest season, keeping Crowell especially busy.

Ron Yates’ wife, Jessica, has been supportive of his dreams, as have the rest of his family, who helped him purchase the property that has become Ron Yates winery.