UNCORKING THE BEST FOR WINE LOVERS
Although it may seem incongruous at first glance, bubbles and bull riding will share almost equal billing during the 2023 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. But it makes perfect sense considering that promoting agriculture through a vast array of scholarships is central to RodeoHouston’s mission and grapegrowers are most definitely farmers.
However, the man behind the the Champion Wine Garden at current Grand Champion Best Carruth Plaza between NRG of Show bottle is the rapper Stadium and the Astrodome will Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, which become the city’s most visited segues nicely, too. Music, of wine bar from Feb. 28 through course, is a critical component of March 19 and Jackson’s Le Chemin the 20-day cowboy and cowgirl du Roi Brut champagne jam on the NRG grounds that’s figures to be flowing freely equal parts sports spectacle, there, along with the other most songfest and swirling-and-sipping decorated wines. extravaganza. Once again, Jackson considers Houston his home these days, so his champagne’s topping a field of 3,071 entries from 18 countries in the 20th annual Rodeo Uncorked! International Wine Competition is all the more special.
The Le Chemin du Roi, which sells for about $142 at Spec’s, had previously claimed Reserve Grand Champion honors in 2021, the news of which, Jackson said, “Almost made me faint.”
The thinking-out-of-the-box idea for inserting a wine component into the rodeo’s mix was the end result of many conversations between the late Bear Dalton and his close friend, former Houston Chronicle wine writer Mike Lonsford. Dalton was an expert horseman who was involved with the rodeo when he became Spec’s finewine buyer.
“Bear was our resident cowboy,” Spec’s Wine and Spirits owner John Rydman said when Dalton passed away in December 2020. “I turned the Bordeaux aisle over to him (in 1996) and sent him to France. Then I could hardly get him back.”
Lonsford covered the wine beat for the Chronicle from the 1980s through 2007.
The Wine Garden will be open 4-11 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 4 p.m.-midnight on Friday, 11 a.m.-midnight on Saturday and noon-10 p.m. on Sunday. Live music also adds to the nightly energy, and there’s an educational component, too, with almost daily seminars presided over by some of Houston’s leading oenophiles.
The rodeo wine “season” officially kicks off with the Round Up and Best Bites competition at NRG Center Feb. 19, when more than 450 wines and signature dishes from 100-plus local restaurants will be available for tasting.