cheers, y’all

LANDON WINERY TEMPRANILLO 2008 ($25) MC KINNEY, TEXAS>

Good wine is being made right here in the Lone there’s something all Texans can raise a glass to.

Regional wine, for years laughed at and looked types, is suddenly hip. This winter, a national survey National Restaurant Association identified regional as one of the top food trends in the country. Chefs ranked with locally grown produce, locally sourced seafood, and sustainability at the top of the list of culinary items.

This is huge news, especially for those of us who championed regional and Texas wine and felt — shall we say? — ignored. This new respect for local many reasons, not the least of which is that chefs and restaurants are discovering that local can give them a leg up in an increasingly competitive business environment. But also important is that the quality of regional wine has improved dramatically over the past decade.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where the improvement in quality has been impressive. Today, it’s no big deal to find a professional, competently made Texas wine; that wasn’t necessarily true at the turn of the century.

To that end, here are three Texas wines that show how far the business has come and that you almost certainly haven’t heard of.

All are available from the winery:

Grape Creek Vineyards Viognier 2008 ($17): Some of the best viognier in the U.S. is made Texas, and that includes California’s efforts. This a sophisticated, complex white wine with peach pit and apricot flavors — people who only drink chardonnay should try it.

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Landon Winery Tempranillo 2008 ($25): Texas, especially in the high plains, has many similarities climate and geography with Spain, where tempranillo is the pre-eminent red grape. The Landon, made from West Texas grapes in McKinney, shows the quality tempranillo that the state can produce.

Haak Winery Madeira Jacquez 2006 ($40): No less an authority than Jancis Robinson, perhaps the world’s second most influential wine critic, has pronounced Haak’s madeira-style dessert wines as world-class. This wine is made with the jacquez, or black Spanish grape, a hybrid popular in Texas and grown on the Gulf Coast for this wine.

—JEFF SIEGEL

JEFF SIEGEL’S WEEKLY WINE REVIEWS appear every Wednesday on the Advocate Back Talk blog, advocatemag.com/lake-highlands/blog.