Pheasant Ridge Winery by Byron Browne
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You may have a difficult time finding the Pheasant Ridge Winery. Their own web map gives vague directions to a remote section of Texas farmland and the signs that should point the way along the route have all been repeatedly stolen. The former is most likely user error, the latter most likely sophomoric mischief. However, a little perseverance peppered with a dash of determination will lead you to one of the brightest starsin the everexpanding universe of Texas wineries.
The Texas Department of Agriculture lists eleven major wineries in the “Western region” which spans from Del Rio to Morse, just north of Amarillo. Among these the Pheasant Ridge winery is unique primarily due to the fact that all the wines are Estate Bottled. That is to say that, from the grape to the bottle, the whole process is completed at the winery; a system far less common than people may imagine.
Standard industry practice involves wineries buying much of their grapes or juice from remote, unaffiliated vineyards. The wineries then crush, age, flavor and bottle the wines according to their own specifications. In fact, several west Texas farms are host to hundreds of acres of grape vineyards that are producing fruit for hundreds of vintners across the state and country, many of which are right here in the hill country.
The winery, a small, dun colored outpost stationed amid hundreds of surrounding acres of cotton and soybean fields, is the sole repository for the company’s annual output of roughly 10,000 cases of wine. (By contrast, the Ste. Genevieve winery near Ft. Stockton, Texas, the state’s largest, delivers 1.6 million gallons of wine to stores all over the country annually).
Arriving at the winery is both a relief and a little bewildering. The relief is born from finally reaching the winery after driving through the chaos of west Texas farm lands; the bewilderment arises while facing the diminutive structure and realizing that this is it. The tasting room is the first, and indeed, only room designed for visitors. At one end a large wooden bar is in service for tastings, (the Saturday that we were there, the bar was hosted by a student from Texas Tech’s Hotel and Restaurant department, a parttime employee of the winery’s), at another, the closet sized area intended for the sale of some wines and a few t-shirts.
The majority of the winery’s area, separated from the tasting room only by a portion of wall, is designated for the storage of the wine and even still, many of the oak barrels spill out into the tasting room area, stored wherever space is available. It is this proximity to the stored wine that accounts for the winery’s roborant odorthat of a very successful Christmas party.
It was this peculiarity, the relatively dwarfed sized company producing a giant of a wine that initially drew my attention to the winery twenty years ago. I was working in a restaurant at a Dallas country club when a representative from Pheasant Ridge visited to give us a tasting of a couple of their wines. We were all astounded that such a small enterprise could produce such a wonderfully rich, Frenchstyle wine.
We tried to order enough to satisfy the club’s members; however, the representative could allot us only 25 cases. All 25 cases were gone within three months. All these years later, the production has doubled from that of the mid-80’s however, the 10,000 cases now produced are still not enough to keep up with demand. The focus of Pheasant Ridge has clearly always been on quality over quantity.
The approximately 60 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay and Semillon are harvested by hand (a nearly antiquated method that most winemakers find cost prohibitive) by vineyard manager Manuel Lechuga and his employees every fall.
During our visit there this past summer we were allowed to roam the vineyard at our leisure, inspecting the fruit that Mr. Lechuga told us had been so badly damaged by a late snow storm on Easter weekend. While the fruit did show some signs of abuse, the vineyard appeared verdant and healthy and it was an extraordinary experience to have free access to the acreage.
When we returned to the winery, Mr. Lechuga led my wife and me, together with a couple arrived from Iowa, to the storage area to taste some of the barreled Cabernet Sauvignon. After removing a baseball sized cork from the side of the barrel, Mr. Lechuga produced a long, glass siphon and offered us all an ample tasting. While we had visited several of Texas’ wineries last summer, nowhere else did we have the pleasure of sampling wine directly from the cask.
Indeed, some wineries have no wood barrels anywhere on site. However, all of the wines at Pheasant Ridge, save the Chenin Blanc, are aged exclusively in French and American oak barrels (“The French is better,” Mr. Lechuga confessed). Many wineries prefer stainless steel casks for aging and fermentation because barrel aging takes years to months, stainless steel aging only months to weeks; better to have the wine on the store shelf than barreled in a warehouse. However, Mr. Lechuga would have it no other way. When asked why these methods are preferred Mr. Lechuga explained that the grapes, “son como mis hijas”, they are like my children.
Extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results; the wines of Pheasant Ridge are clear indication of this. Luckily, the wines are much easier to find than the winery itself. Since Pheasant Ridge is creating such a unique product, the quality of these wines is the only direction needed.