Students as inspiring as the world of wine
UH Hilton College assistant professor finds passionate pupils asking right questions on Hill Country ‘field trip’
I used to think I had the coolest job around. Then I met D. Christopher Taylor, a faculty member at the University of Houston who earned his doctorate in — despite what it says on the parchment — The Good Life. Taylor “taught” a class this spring that entailed rounding up a dozen of his students, getting on a bus in mid-March and heading to Fredericksburg, hitting every barbecue joint on the way, then looking for the right wines to wash down all the brisket, ribs and sausage.
Oh, and they’ll convene one more time Friday to revisit their discoveries. Where will this conference take place? At Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland. Note, too, that everything was paid for by a grant from the Fred Parks Foundation.
I’m going back to school.
This is what happens when you land a gig at UH’s Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, where Taylor is an assistant professor and overseer of the Fred Parks Wine Cellar. The latter means he can go take a selfie with a bottle of 1920 Château Laffite Rothschild or 1971 Domaine Romanée Conti anytime he pleases. Taylor — Chris to his friends — also has at his swirling-and-spitting beck and call a bevy of bright and passionate young people who are intensely serious about food and wine and their relation to the cosmos.
One of them, Amanda Hu, has been Taylor’s graduate assistant of late and, full disclosure, my indispensable right-hand person when it comes to organizing my Chronicle tastings and cellar (which doesn’t include bottles of Laffite or DRC). At 16, Hu arrived in Texas from Beijing speaking almost no English. But soon she will earn her master’s degree from the Hilton College with wine-marketing research as an area of specialty. Taylor, an academic through and through, had hoped she would go on to pursue a doctorate of her own at his alma mater, Texas Tech, but she opted to throw herself into the real world, accepting a position with the wine wholesaler Glazer’s last week.
That was great news for me because she’s staying put. That’s also great news for Glazer’s, although her bosses are going to find out quickly that Amanda’s favorite question is, “Why?” And kudos to Taylor for encouraging same. If she’s any indication of the Hilton College collective mind-set, scholars coming out of the UH wine program aren’t going to tolerate nonsense from winemakers and/or wine-sellers. That became readily evident to Taylor on the recent Hill Country road trip, which he called “eye-opening for all of us.”
“I look forward to reading their final reports,” Taylor said. “But what I took away from it at the time was that the wineries they most enjoyed were the most authentic ones, the ones who were really making Texas wine.
Hu concurred, saying, “The wines made from Texas-grown grapes were, to me, more appealing than those made from juice sourced from elsewhere.”
The students bonded most closely with the young, forward-thinking team at Lewis Cellars — for obvious reasons, it would seem — and ultimately preferred, according to Taylor’s feedback, those wines over others made at their other stops. Note that the group struggled with Grape Creek Winery’s reliance on non-Texas-fruit wines and with pioneering Texas vintner Gary Gilstrap’s “interventionist” wine-making style at Texas Hills Vineyard, although credit must be given to Gilstrap for being unapologetically honest about his old-school cellar tactics.
The kids also questioned Messina Hof ’s proud advertisement on a sign outside its Fredericksburg winery/tasting room that 27 different varietals were available, or “one to fit everyone’s tastes.” They felt, Taylor noted, “that (such variety) makes it harder for the hospitality industry to decide, ‘What wines are we going to bring in to put on our list?’ That kind of approach doesn’t (give the winery) a strong identity. There’s still a lot of confusion out there.”
The Texas excursion was offered as an alternative to the Hilton College’s “California Wine Experience,” a week-long trip to Napa Valley and Sonoma County that requires an additional $2,500 to $2,800 over and above the cost of the course itself, a tariff that Taylor himself acknowledges “is cost prohibitive. We wanted to do something closer to home where it wouldn’t cost the students anything but their tuition. The Parks Foundation kicked in about $10,000, which covered all the expenses: travel, hotel, food, tastingroom fees.
“We also got Chamber of Commerce in Fredericksburg to get involved, and they were very, very helpful in giving us some ‘ins,’ like back-of-the house tours to wineries. We were four nights out, leaving Saturday morning and returning Wednesday. We were able to visit eight wineries and a bourbon distillery. We ate at different barbecue restaurants. The idea behind it was that we’re studying hospitality, not just restaurants and wine. Fredericksburg is such a great tourist destination, showing how everything fits together.”
Because of his own High Plains roots, Taylor hopes to organize a more far-afield expedition to the Lubbock area in the near future, giving the students a chance to meet many of the state’s best grape-growers and to visit the place where it all began for him, the Llano Estacado winery.
“First time I walked into Llano — February 1991, I still remember — and took the tour, I fell in love with their wines and in love with wine. Until then, I’d been a Miller Lite guy. That was it. But I loved everything from the barrels to the yeasts to the wines … I wound up taking the first enology class that Tech offered taught with Roy Mitchell, one of the (founding fathers) with Robert Reed and Doc McPherson at Llano. I was spending all my extra money on wine.”
Taylor got a real job with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, spending 14 years working on childsupport issues across West Texas, but wine kept calling and, when Tech offered him a grant that would allow the pursuit of a Ph.D. without undue family hardship, he readily accepted. After finishing, he wound up launching a hospitality program at Eastern New Mexico University, where he got tenure and even became a dean with a big desk.
“In other words,” he admitted, laughing, “exactly the kind of job I never wanted.”
So, the second time UH called, asking him to come focus on “wine marketing and consumer education, that sort of thing,” he swallowed hard (he’d have to earn tenure all over again) and accepted what he calls “my retirement-career, I-won-the-lottery job” — in no small part because of inspired, and inspiring, students like Hu and adventures like the one they had over spring break.