Lightning in its bottles: Haak Vineyards turning heads
Santa Fe operation’s award-winning wines garner title of Top Texas Winery at rodeo
SANTA FE — It made no sense for Raymond Haak, whose first career was as a systems engineer in the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical industry, to start growing grapes commercially in semirural Galveston County. It probably made even less sense for Tiffany Farrell to walk away from a good teaching job to go pick grapes in California.
But here they are today, the soon-to-be 80-year-old Haak, a Sante Fe resident since childhood, and his 37-year-old winemaker Farrell, who grew up in nearby Pasadena. They brought some 10,000 cases of Haak wine to market last year after landing a bumper crop of grapes, and recently took delivery on the saddle that was awarded for being the Top Texas Winery in the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo’s 2019 International Wine Competition.
It’s a fitting prize for a man who, back in the day, rode bulls and strummed a guitar on occasion.
Gladys, Haak’s wife, brought home a few grape vines from the nursery almost half a century
ago, and the next thing he knew, he had most of his property under vine and enough tanks to hold 32,000 gallons of wine.
“The wine bug?” he said, anticipating the next question. “There’s no cure for it.”
Farrell signed on two vintages ago. She calls landing the job “divine intervention.”
After learning of the opening at Haak on winejobs.com, Farrell arrived in time for the 2017 harvest, which is to say not long before Hurricane Harvey flooded the cellar and, thanks to a happenstance bolt of lightning in the middle of an historic deluge that dumped 60 inches of rain on the winery, blew up the property’s backup generator. The power outage lasted for days, and they wouldn’t see a tasting-room visitor for more than two weeks.
“Fortunately,” Farrell said, “we’d already gotten most of the wine bottled.”
The Haaks, Farrell and their team also have had to deal with the horror of the mass shooting at nearby Santa Fe High School. Both Raymond and Gladys are graduates, and one of their neighbor’s sons was among the eight students, along with two teachers, who died last May. So it has been the best of times but also the worst of times down on the coastal prairie.
The Haaks have lived at 6310 Ave. T since November 1963. (They moved in, Gladys recalls, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.) It’s a terroir, though, where the traditional vinifera varietals such as cabernet and chardonnay are easily done in by Pierce’s Disease, a bacterium endemic in the soil in much of the southern United States.
What thrives, however, are the hybrid blanc du bois grapes — created by crossing a vinifera golden muscat and local native grapes in a laboratory at the University of Florida in 1968 — and the black Spanish or jacquez. Farrell is two-for-two in bringing home double-gold medals for Haak’s Blanc du Bois from the San Francisco International Wine Competition, and she scored another in the Houston Rodeo’s judging last November. The double gold for Haak’s 2018 Semi Dry Blanc du Bois was one of three the winery collected.
Ten of its wines earned at least a bronze, which is how Haak won its first saddle in a competition that dates to 2004. That was four years after Haak released the first vintage, totaling 1,500 cases.
“We’d been trying for a long time,” Haak said, “so that was very rewarding. And, if we were looking to find out what our capacity was, we found out with last year’s bumper crop, which was about 50 percent higher than usual, and the clusters were twice as big. Normally one (cluster) will produce 4 ounces (of juice). We got 10 to 12 in 2018. Close to 60 tons of grapes came in.”
A small portion grew in Haak’s expansive backyard with the rest coming from vineyards in Fulshear, the Brenham area and deeper into the Hill Country. At the outset, he had purchased fruit from California, and his own original plantings were cabernet sauvignon because of the name recognition. But within six years, those vines were toast. Pierce’s Disease takes no prisoners in these parts.
But it forced him to become a champion and master of the blanc du bois. He did such a good job that the prestigious San Francisco event would create a special category for the grape.
“That was important,” Haak said. “Who wants to win something called ‘other white wines?’ ”
It’s critical, he suggests, to press whole clusters, explaining, “When you de-stem with blanc du bois, you always have a little bit of bitterness. With whole-cluster pressing, you lose a little of the yield, but the quality is awesome.”
He also learned early on not to chaptalize (the adding of sugar to increase alcohol content after fermentation), noting how the great German and Austrian rieslings tend to be low in alcohol yet reward consumers with elegance, nuance and balance.
Haak remains personally involved in the production of his popular ports and madeira dessert wines — made from both blanc du bois and black Spanish/jacquez — while Farrell, who also oversees the winery’s “outside sales,” handles the regular blanc du bois and the reds, mostly made from grapes grown by Vijay Ready on the Texas High Plains.
A graduate of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Farrell taught physics for four years at Clear Creek High School before that wine bug bit, and she honed her craft by working under Martin Guzman at J Vineyards & Winery in Sonoma, then spending six years in the cellar at Sawtooth Winery in Idaho’s Snake River Valley. While there, she worked with a full range of grape varieties and, in her spare time, earned a master’s in hydrology from Boise State University. She’d gotten a bit homesick and thought landing a job in the petrochemical industry would be her smartest, safest route back to Southeast Texas.
Getting that degree, however, wound up teaching her a great deal “about oxidation-reduction reactions,” she noted, “which is integral to winemaking.”
Farrell’s big wine adventure began when she attended a talk in Houston given by Ann Noble, a legendary oenology professor at University of California-Davis. Beforehand, Farrell got into a conversation with Justin Weibel, whose family owns Weibel Family Winery in Mendocino County. He told Farrell, “If you’re really serious, you need to go to California and work a harvest.” He then handed her his card, saying, “We’re always looking for interns. You’ve got a job if you want it.”
Within days, she gave her notice at Clear Creek. Understandably, her parents’ initial response to this sudden career right turn was, “You’re going to California to do Nonetheless, they quickly got behind her and “have been nothing but supportive ever since.” They’re delighted, to be sure, that Farrell has returned home to do something that makes her very happy.
As for the Haaks, they have become a second family, and vice versa.
“We’d been looking for Tiffany for a while,” Haak said. “We just didn’t know her name yet.”