The Fizz #49: Regan Meador, winemaker at Southold Farm + Cellar, has a vision for the Texas wine industry
Regan touches on the bureaucracy that forced his move from Long Island, how he’s choosing the long-and-slow approach to figuring out terroir, and his hopes for the Texas wine industry.
For the 49th issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Regan Meador of Southold Farm and Cellar in Fredericksburg, Texas. Regan started his winemaking career in Long Island, New York and moved his family to Texas to plant a vineyard and start over in the South. The Texas wine industry is growing—I’ve been seeing more and more great bottles from Texas makers and am so excited to see the industry come alive in this huge and diverse state.
Texas has a long history of winemaking—grapes were planted in the late 1600s and the state’s oldest winery was built in 1883. Texas Hill Country is the largest AVA in Texas with a whopping 9 million acres, with 750 acres currently under vine. The region is full of opportunity. In this issue, Regan and I touch on the bureaucracy that influenced his move from Long Island, how he’s choosing the long-and-slow approach to figuring out his terroir, and what he hopes to see for the future of Texas winemaking.
Margot: You started out making wine in Long Island. How did you get into the wine industry in general?
Regan: I started the process in 2010. I was actually living in New York City, and we'd very quickly ascertain that being there for the long-term wasn't something we wanted to do. I had grown tired of the desk job life. I really wanted to get to do something with my hands. I had the wine bug for a bit. I always thought wine was one of those vocations that you needed to be born into. It was intimidating. I didn't really have a straight sense of how to get into it.
I found on winejobs.com a listing for an assistant winemaking job and in the ad it said they were looking for someone with little to no experience. I thought well, here's my chance. It was a winery out on Long Island that was five minutes away from my in-laws. I just banged on their door enough to where they finally let me come and do that. I started working there and then quickly it all just made sense to me. I loved every minute of it. It's so multifaceted and there's so many different variables, and with the place that I worked with, I was really fortunate. It was me and the winemaker and their case production was around 10,000 cases.
It was all estate grown fruit. I was in the vineyard quite a bit and got to see everything, which really helped demystify it. When you're that big with that few people, you have to be efficient and know what are the important things to pay attention to versus, you know, some of the superfluous stuff. Winemakers tend to be susceptible to the new shiny thing like this lab analysis and these machineries and things like that, yeasts and enzymes and all this other junk that you can throw into it. When you're that small of a team, there's not enough time to really do that.
The winemaking was very straightforward and very simple. There's some things that we don't do—a lot of filtering and things like that, but it was good for me to learn from this very basic point of view versus being an intern at a 30,000 case winery cleaning out tanks all season long. That experience gave me a lot of the confidence to feel like I can figure this out for myself. We bought our farm out there in 2012—the only way we were able to afford that was because my wife kept her job in New York City and commuted. The mortgage on that farm ended up being less than our rent in our apartment in NYC.
Margot: Why did you choose to make the move to Texas from Long Island?
Regan: It's a very convoluted story and it ends up requiring me to get into the nitty-gritty of city code language. We went to the town to build a small little winery production facility. I'd been borrowing space from a few friends on Long Island. There had been rumblings about how the town doesn't want to have any more wineries. There's too many wineries, too much traffic, blah, blah, blah.
I can understand some of that. There were some people that were acting outside of the spirit of their license with nightly dance parties and all this craziness. I figured that we're going to be the ones that they want to see happen. It's a small family estate. It's going to be appointment only. We're not going to be the big destination doing all the big buses and limos and all that stuff. Long story short, I was wrong. They were just done with wineries in general. And my timing couldn't have been worse.
I still remember this day, the head of the planning board telling me that after I brought all my plans and started that process, she said—you're unfortunately going to be the guinea pig on this. They took some code language that they had been interpreting one way for a long time and twisted it. There's a winery out there called Shinn Estate Vineyards [now called Rose Hill Vineyards]. It was the exact same size as we were, and it had been approved before. They took that same language and flipped it around and said well, you don't have the required space that's allowed to be built on.
It just got into this whole convoluted thing. I think the intention was to just slow everybody down and scare everybody else. They thought that we were just going to stay and fight through the courts and appeal it and have the New York State Supreme Court tell them that they were wrong, that they treated us unfairly, but it was going to be enough to where they kind of won the war, so to speak.
I don't think they intended for us to leave. It became apparent to me that—what are we fighting to stay here for? It is going to cost us tens of thousands, maybe more just in lawyers to fight through that system, and it's going to take at least five years time. When we laid it out on paper, it was clear that we're going to be so locked into doing this and not doing what we came here to do that it could sink us, and we don't have the pockets and money backers or anything like that. We didn't have outside investors.
It's a family business, and I wanted to go somewhere where we could just get back to what we were intending to do. Maybe it won’t be Long Island, but the theory and the idea behind what we had set out to do still holds wherever we decide to go. Me being from Texas, I had some contacts in the industry. I knew the area, I knew the climate. We looked at some other regions around the country, but this just made the most sense. And so in 2016, we sold everything up there, the house, the vineyard that we had planted, and moved all of our bottled wine and unfinished wine and everything else down to Texas and started it all back up here, basically from the beginning.
Margot: Wow. That’s such a powerful story. That must've been really difficult.
Regan: The further and further away I get from it, the more I realize how dangerously close we got to everything falling apart—the marriage, the business, everything. It was tough for sure. We're on the other side of it now though.
Margot: That's good to hear. It's really interesting to see the Texas winemaking community be louder and more pronounced year after year. Can you tell me a little bit about the terroir in your area, and what’s unique about your region?
Regan: I feel like we're just getting started right now with that. We finally honed in on some things. Our vineyard is coming online, we’re identifying growers that will work the way that we want to work, and we’re not so much worrying about, do they have this variety or that variety in there?
I’m not excited about having varietal discussions yet, because you still have to get better at just growing out here. That's all part of the discussion for sure, but for me right now, I’m working on identifying the people I want to work with. Let's just make everything under the sun and then start to really dial in on what is special coming out of this place. What are these varieties that they do have? How are they expressing themselves?
We've got everything from granitic sandstone, to heavy limestone to more alluvial soils across the board in every spot that we're working in. So we're just now starting to scratch that surface, having those varieties and repeatedly working with them. When we first got here, it was very much like where do you even start? Now we've made very long-term commitments with growers and are very active in all the stuff that they're doing for the future.
It’s a very long-term way of thinking. It's always planned to be a long-term project, so I've basically gone back to the basics on that whole thing. The goal for us is to try to strip away as much of the nonsense as we can, as far as our winemaking. We pick fruit on balance, not waiting for a certain brix number or even really pH numbers, we kind of watch everything now. The climate and all of the numbers vary drastically from year to year, so you really have to be on top of that. We’re very good at our pre harvest analysis, because that starts to help us inform how to make good wine where we don't have to do anything to it.
Once we bring the grapes in, we're just shepherding them through their paces. We're not thinking about oh big red blends are popular this year. Let's make some more of that. We're not thinking about anything stylistically. Here are the grapes we have, let's make the wine and see where it's at. That's vintage variation, but it also starts to inform you stylistically.
One of the big things that happens here and in any new region is that everyone always wants to talk about what the grape of Texas is. It's kinda like asking what's the grape of France? Five years ago, it was Tempranillo, and now it's Mourvèdre and a lot of these Rhone varieties, even though we're seeing how terribly they do with these big cold snaps that we're about to have. You see why places like Provence started to pull away from making red wine out of those grape varieties. The thing with Mourvèdre, for instance, which is very popular here, it takes a long time to ripen phenolically. If you're not diurnal [very high temps in the day, very low temps at night], you're not going to get there without burning through all of your acidity. It holds acidity pretty well, but not well enough to get as far as it needs to make Bandol, for instance. You could buy pallets of tartaric acid and try to adjust it, but that there's a wine completely out of balance as far as I'm concerned.
Our Mourvèdres end up being a lot brighter and crunchier and in some cases almost rosé like—you start to learn these things. You can't necessarily just do what your neighbor is doing, or assume that what what's done over there is how things are done here. We've taught ourselves to just take it step by step and answer those questions ourselves. Your question about what does terroir in Texas look like? We're just now starting to scratch the surface and I'd argue that we're probably the only ones or one of three or four actually doing that work. To me, you've lost terroir once you make stylistic decisions before you've even picked a grape.
Hopefully as we go through these things with all these growers and these different varieties that they've had, we start to find a wine that we keep making, even though that might shift a little bit over the years, is really compelling. No matter if it's a really hot year or cool year. That to me is where we start to have something that's ours, so to speak. You're not going to get these flavor profiles anywhere else. And that's the real beauty of wine. You want to have place really represented, and there are some varieties that are starting to do that for us, and some of them are just complete surprises.
Margot: So you're currently working 100% with other growers as your vineyard comes to?
Regan: Right.
Margot: As you're learning about what Texas terroir looks like, how did you choose what to plant and where in your vineyard?
Regan: I made one good decision when we moved here, made a whole lot of bad ones, one good one. That was just to plant root stock when we first got here. It gave us the ability to take a step back. At first, I came here talking to my friends and people that we met along the way, and they said yeah, Rhone varieties makes sense. There were all these different assumptions—it's hot, this and that. At some point, I was looking at my plan and thought wow I'm going to be wrong about 95% of these, if I do this. So I canceled all those varieties that I had on hold and just ordered root stock and planted that.
We're on a hill. We got this hill specifically, because no one out here is really using typography, and we're in the hill country of Texas. You'd think that someone would have planted on some slopes out here, but it just hasn't happened. Then we thought let's see how they do without irrigating them. We'd never irrigated them for the first two years and we learned they can survive. They need more help. This is why you have certain parts of the France where you can irrigate baby vineyards until they get to production. We’re just taking this slower approach.
Last year we finally went about grafting in that field. I took this very long view approach. Our hill wraps from the Northwest side, all the way back around to the East side. If I plant a block of Cabernet right here, I might miss the fact that it should have been over there—and the same with a whole bunch of other varieties. Being a fan of wines from around the world, I know about the field blends of Alsace and Burgundy back in the day and in Austria. It wasn’t because they thought field blends were cool. It's just how they worked.
What if we did the same thing? With some thought behind it, but you know, we have about nine different blocks and there's about 40 varieties scattered throughout the entire nine blocks. They'll change a little bit depending on which one and where it is, but the idea is to get many different varieties around there so that we can start following nature's lead on what belongs where from a vineyard standpoint. The wine will be what the wine is and I'm certain that we'll make something great out of it. My hope is that it starts to teach us things about what we're doing here and what works here and what doesn't work here. That’s my hope, but chances are I just made a whole lot of problems for my grandkids.
Margot: That's awesome, and is a really low-ego way of thinking, instead of saying I want to plant this grape here, you’re letting nature show you what belongs where. You're kind of starting out with experimentation right away instead of thinking that you know exactly how it's all going to go.
Regan: Yeah, you're just going to be proven wrong. It's happened three times now since I've been here. People said Mourvèdre was the big variety for everyone. Certain people will tell you it still is. There's so many dead Mourvèdre vineyards out here from all the freezes. You know what variety did really great out here? Cabernet. The story they'd like to tell is the Texas wine industry started out with Cabernet and Chardonnay and winemakers quickly figured out that those don't work here. Well, they figured out that you can't make Napa Cab here, and that’s what they were trying to do. What they didn’t realize is that they did have a very interesting and beautiful expression of Cabernet that I haven't really found in any other place.
That for me is exciting. Having a variety that people know, and be able to present it in a way that is very different than what they typically expect without doing anything to it. We're not picking it screaming early and turning it into this or that or whatever. It's just what it is when it's in balance. This is what it turns into. It's awesome.
Margot: I love that. It sounds like vintage variety is a challenge in Texas. What other challenges would you say you've seen starting out there?
Regan: I think it really comes down to what your perspective is and what your background is and where you might've come from. If you ask a lot of my neighbors, people will tell you how hard it is to grow grapes in Texas compared to California. They are absolutely right, it's harder to grow grapes here than it is in California, but it's no harder to grow grapes here than it is to grow in Beaujolais or the North Fork of Long Island or Champagne or any of these other more difficult regions. California is a very unique place—they're not without their own struggles, no doubt, water and all those things are causing them problems.
We have disease pressure here, so you can't just ignore your vineyard and come back three months later and have grapes still on the vine. You’ve got to make sure your canopies are clean. You have to be sure that you’re leaf pulling and there's air flow coming in, you're not over-cropping things. It's an intense vineyard region, but not any more so, and probably less so than a lot of the vaunted European regions.
It doesn't bother me because I came from a place that's difficult to grow grapes in. From a vineyard standpoint, while we are affected by climate change, we’re not affected in the same way as all those other regions that I talked about, because there's no expectation for us. We're not facing the fact that we can't make Pinot here the way we have for 2000 years, for example. We're just figuring out what everything is and what's working for us with this whole upheaval that we're having to deal with in regard to climate change. It's already baked in for us—that experimentation is already happening and we're not having to move away from something that we already knew.
Margot: Absolutely. That's a really interesting way to look at it. In terms of the Texas agricultural history—Texas does have a pretty deep history of winemaking.
Regan: Oh sure! It was just forgotten.
Margot: Do you feel connected to that history at all?
Regan: I like learning about it, but it's so far removed that there's not really a through line. There's such a big gap from when things were happening here to Prohibition and until even the seventies, there's some people that were here and still are in the industry, but that never came back until about the last 10 to 15 years. That coincided with consumers in general—wine drinkers being more open to things not having to taste exactly like they expect them to taste every time they open a bottle. That was the opening for wine regions in the United States to lean in a bit more into adventurousness. Now it's about defining that and making sure that we remain interesting. That's where this whole thing around getting away from emulation of styles is important to me. Making the wines for what they are and deciding what is really compelling and putting that in a bottle.
It's fascinating to go up to some of the older wineries, like up in the High Plains that have been around since the seventies—it's cool. It's almost also frustrating, though, because there were so many points where they could have held onto what they were doing. There's stories of old vineyards up there and test vineyards and all these different varieties that just got left for dead. The industry here had so many fits and starts.
Margot: Have you seen a lot of newcomers come in to make wine in Texas?
Regan: More and more. I wish I would see more people coming here with the intention of planting vineyards. Not to say that I'm not welcoming for everybody to do what they want to do, but there are still so many places to explore and interesting things to do on the vineyard side. I’d like to see all of our energy more focused there.
There’s been a lot of folks just buying grapes and putting up a tasting room—it’s that easy, you know? When we moved to Long Island and even when we moved here, as a newcomer, you want to ask yourself the question of what things are you going to do that push the industry forward? What are you going to contribute? We can’t just sit there and do what's already being done and call it a day.
The guys that started back in the seventies are the reason why we know how to grow grapes in Texas and we can get really great quality fruit. Now we need to take that and get even better because those guys are done. They're retiring. They've been doing this all their lives. They're not going to keep going. It's up to this next generation to keep pushing that ball forward. You are seeing people starting to show up that are of that mindset. It'd be nice to see more of them. It's a pretty low bar of entry compared to starting your winery anywhere else in the country. There's still so much to be explored out here.
Margot: It sounds like there’s a ton of opportunity out there right now. I’m so excited for what’s to come for you and for others making wine in Texas. Thank you so much for your time!
You can support Regan and Carey by joining their wine club and signing up for their newsletter. Follow them on Instagram to stay updated on their new releases. If you’re thinking about booking a vacation to wine country this year, consider Texas!
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Great read. Lost my favorite LI winery when the TX move happened 😢...