Tasting room at William Chris Winery in Hye, Texas.

Mention the American southwest—Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico—and lots of images come to mind. Cactus, deserts, Billy the Kid, enchiladas, and the Dallas Cowboys. Fair enough. How about great mourvèdre, picpoul with attitude, and ethereal tempranillo?

Lately we’ve been tasting more and more beautiful wines from those states, confirming our recent experiences with advancing quality in American wines beyond the West Coast. 

Read: The American dream in a bottle
Read: Is this the most exciting time in American winemaking history?

Many wines we’ve tried are fresh, interesting and distinctive takes on varietals more usually found in Mediterranean Europe. Aglianico, tempranillo, mourvedre, tannat, and sangiovese have found new homes in the American southwest. The last four are becoming stalwarts especially in the huge Texas High Plains AVA. Many consumers have already experienced the quality of Gruet’s traditional method NV sparkling wines, from estate and partner-grown grapes from New Mexico and the West Coast. But this producer also makes a range of harder-to-get but lovely and interesting vintage and reserve sparklers.

Across a wide range of styles and varieties, we’ve found a lot of wine that may be off your radar but merits your attention. Many offer a great mixture of quality, place and value.

It’s almost impossible to generalize about a region larger than France, Italy and Germany combined. Contemporary wine production in the southwest is still tiny overall, and relatively new. Different political and regulatory environments, production levels, local purchasing power, and even cultural approaches make each state’s story unique.

Still, it’s safe to say there are some commonalities, including very positive trends, coming into focus across the largely high (3,500-6,000 feet) and dry growing areas comprising much of southwestern wine country.

Quality surges in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona wines

Estate wineries were the original core of this vast region’s production. Texas’ Hill Country, in the south-central part of the state, with its limestone and granite soils, may have been a cradle over 40 years ago. But today, a growing cohort of producers in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona also source from multiple growers and estate sites in their states, in Texas High Plains (southwest of Lubbock), north to south along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and in southeast Arizona. Texas alone is now fourth in the nation for vineyard acreage.

Growing conditions—including climate, altitude, and soil composition—vary across this vast area. But overall they favor the low-impact, low-intervention approach that increasing numbers of growers and producers—and the wine public—embrace. For Chris Bundrett, the highly respected co-founder of Texas’ William Chris Vineyards, it’s all about “our greatest goal: fruit- and vineyard-driven wines.”

Southwest wines can be weather driven, with significant variation between vintages, according to Texas producer Andrew Sides. Extreme weather can be a widespread threat, specifically in the form of early-season hail that can devastate crops in the blink of an eye. But he called 2016, 2017, and 2018 all “banner years at [his Texas estate] Lost Draw, with consistency and low weather impact.”

The relatively low cost of vineyard land in parts of the southwest (as low as $4,000 per acre, versus 100 times more in, say, Napa) is an interesting factor too. It provides much greater economic space for experimentation with things such as ultra-low yields and more esoteric clones and varietals than might exist in more established west coast growing areas. That affects everyone’s bottom line, of course.

And the wines, well, they speak for themselves. They’re delicious.

At lunch in New York City in early November we tried a couple dozen more, from seven leading producers you should keep your eyes on. Better yet, seek them out: Texas’ Inwood, Lost Draw, and William Chris; New Mexico’s Gruet, Noisy Water, and Vivac; and Arizona’s Arizona Stronghold.

Wine educator David Furer, who organized the event on behalf of the producers, believes it was “the first ever combined southwestern tasting in New York City.”

The wines were diverse, reflecting varying winemaking approaches and terroirs, but largely sidestepped the big and jammy characteristics of some West Coast wines. The selections the producers presented were enjoyable, across the board.

Vivac, from New Mexico, presented a cabernet sauvignon vertical spanning 13 years. This was an important demonstration of age-worthiness from this excellent producer. You couldn’t miss the connecting thread in the lively wines, denser as they advanced, despite variance in the blending varieties used to complete them.

Matt Raica’s Arizona Stronghold Vineyard is the largest and best-distributed producer in that state. His wines showcased Arizona’s prowess with affordable blends of Rhone (Nachise 2017) and Bordeaux (Lozen 2017) varietals. Lost Draw’s picpoul blanc and roussanne demonstrated how beautiful those whites can be in skilled hands in Texas High Plains.

William McIlhenny and James Suckling discuss the evolution in American winemaking while tasting.

Skill, passion and knowledge = quality

Beyond the wines, we saw something else that makes us optimistic about the future of fine wine from these states: the people who are writing it. It is a diverse group, but the rising quality of their wines points to various common qualities: skill, passion, commitment to quality and global awareness (and experience).

At Noisy Water, Jasper Riddle’s drive to revitalize New Mexico’s industry and many of its neglected vineyards has led to creative partnerships with growers all along his state’s thousand miles of wine trails. His production passes 40,000 cases now, some from sites sandwiched between Richard Bransons’s Spaceport, Ted Turner’s 12,000-acre bison ranch, and the former Trinity nuclear test site. Talk about color and critical mass. Says Riddle: “This has been a whirlwind decade … in the New Mexico wine industry. I’ve felt cohesion and progress in the past few years that I haven’t seen before. It’s truly exciting to see what is happening in our region.”

One of Texas’ best known winemakers, trailblazer Dan Gatlin, owner of Inwood, is a passionate exponent of the primacy of genetics in wine. He is dismissive of conventional wisdom about where you can and can’t grow great wine, and works with multiple clones—particularly of tempranillo, cabernet sauvignon, and chardonnay—to make his point. His 2018 Dallas City chardonnay (grown in the city, in possibly the hottest vineyard in America) is an interesting example. The apricot, mineral and beeswax flavors, powerful but restrained, made me think of Chassagne Montrachet. His hauntingly beautiful Colos tempranillo grown in Texas High Plains with a hyper-low yield of 0.3 tons per acre has a finesse and concentration some have compared to Spain’s fabled Termanthia. I just went out and bought a bottle of the latter to refresh my memory.

When you experience the quality of so many American wines grown beyond the West Coast, a beautiful story unfolds. We’ve called it the American Wine Revolution. It is real. It’s going strong in the American southwest. It affects more than just savvy local consumers. The broader economic impact of the regional American wine industry is immense: many billions of dollars in economic activity, which translates into substantial boosts in tax revenue, jobs, tourism, and so much more. And of course, most important, good drinking.

– William McIlhenny, strategy, JamesSuckling.com