Houston families bring the juice
In pandemic, vintners with Bayou City ties keep our glasses full
The novel coronavirus continues to wreak havoc in the wine world, from supply-chain disruptions to empty restaurants to shuttered tasting rooms. Therefore, it’s past time to give a loud shout-out to nine Houston families who are bringing wines to market from California and Oregon and as far away as the Andean foothills, in Argentina’s Mendoza province.
In other words, “drinking local” doesn’t just mean supporting Texas wineries, although I’m all for that, too.
The newest member of H-town’s vintner fraternity is Father John Wines owner Nick Maloney, who has lived here for less than a year and is newly married. We have his bride, Ana Riz, a Texas Children’s Hospital psychologist, to thank for his settling in. They met serendipitously one evening when he stopped in Houston to meet with Douglass Skopp, whose Dionysus Imports would become Father John’s Texas distributor.
When Cupid intervened, the 31-year-old Californian was in route to Argentina, one of 20 countries where his elegant, French-accented Mendocino County pinot noirs can be found. He also makes a higherend, smaller-production wine in Burgundy, under the Père Jean label.
If Maloney is still finding his way around his new hometown, Michael Stewart and Dr. Madaiah Revana are
old guard by comparison, and their respective wine operations date to the turn of the century. The Rice University graduate Stewart launched Stewart Wines in Yountville in Napa Valley in 2000, when he was 52, after selling a tech company he had founded. Revana, who hails from a farming family in India near Bangalore, fell head first into wine about the time he was establishing his medical practice in the early 1980s.
The Humble-based cardiologist said his doctor’s calendar has slowed considerably of late, but seeing fewer patients has given him more time to focus on his three wineries: Revana Vineyards in Napa Valley, Alexana Winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Corazon del Sol in Argentina’s Uco Valley.
With the latter, Revana is a neighbor of Sergio and Carolina Weitzman, proud Houstonians who founded Serca Wines in 2012. As it happened, both Revana and the Weitzmans purchased vineyards in the same wine-centric development called the Vines of
Mendoza. Revana went to the further expense of building his own winery there. The Weitzmans rely upon a customcrush facility.
Revana’s Newburg, Ore., property, in turn, is no more than 20 minutes from yet another Houstonlinked estate, Saffron Fields Vineyard, launched about a decade ago by Clear Lake residents Sanjeev Lahoti and Angela Summers in Yamhill on the site of a grass-seed farm they’d bought in 2003.
More six degrees of separation: Revana’s California winery, on the northern edge of St. Helena, shares a winemaker with another Houston couple. High-powered Houston trial attorney Jason Itkin and his wife, Kisha, operate Theorem
Vineyards a few minutes to the north near Calistoga on Diamond Mountain. Thomas Rivers Brown, one of California’s busiest hired-gun consultants — one of the most successful, too, with some 25 wines on his résumé having earned 100-point scores from the critics — oversees both cellars.
The Itkins hope their children, daughter Alia and infant son Aric will one day be able to appreciate what they’ve done to get Theorem up and running. The historical property, originally settled in the late 1800s, has one of the area’s oldest schoolhouses on the verdant grounds and has been magnificently restored.
Fortunately for Stewart, his grown “kids,” James and Caroline, and Caroline’s husband, winemaker Blair Guthrie from New Zealand, can be his boots on the ground down in Yountville because these days his dance card is full. After 14 years spent operating the winery as “a hobby,” he became the founding partner-CEO of Access DX, a medical testing company.
So you can imagine where his focus will be for at least the near term.
“We’re doing 3,000 COVID tests a day,” he said. “I wish we didn’t have that business, but we’ve got it, and we’re going to have a lot of it for a while.”
At the outset, Stewart had the financial wherewithal to hire the renowned Paul Hobbs as his original winemaker. Revana first employed Heidi Barrett, an A-list consultant in her own right, before turning to Brown. But two more Houstonians, Mark Ellenberger and Emily Trout, chose the opposite tack. After making wine for each other to celebrate their marriage, then their first anniversary, they deciding the juice was good enough to sell, and Kagan Cellars was born.
They added another different wrinkle, too. Alone among Houston’s wine families, they can sell their bottles at an H-town wine bar they also own. Mutiny Wine Room, their designated “retirement project,” opened shortly before Valentine’s Day close to their home in the Heights. Perfect timing, right? Well, five weeks later, the coronavirus forced them to close. Now, after briefly reopening, they’re back to offering only takeout after a customer tested positive, and they had to furlough all their employees except the chef and the general manager.
“It’s been gut-wrenching,” Ellenberger said. “We got the (PPP) loan to keep everybody on salary the first time around, but that money’s gone.”
At least Ellenberger and Trout hedged their bet by deciding to own the new building Mutiny occupies, and he’s confident “we’ll get through this.” Sadly, many other restaurants and wine bars around town, stuck with onerous leases, likely won’t survive.
Most of the aforementioned wineries, as well as Houston Master Sommelier Guy Stout’s Stout Family Wines, were counting heavily on restaurant sales to make ends meet. Although much of that revenue stream has dried up, those affected say increased direct-to-consumer business is mitigating some, if hardly all, of the damage. So, when you’re done reading, go online or head to the store (wear a mask!) to pick up a few bottles made by your neighbors. Hey, we’re all in this together.