Coming up in November, Rodeo Uncorked!, the annual international wine competition of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

For all you Californians moving to Texas and taking your buy-local consciousness with you: Yes, Texas has homegrown wine.

Pinot Noir isn’t as big in Texas as peanuts and pecans, and cotton sits far higher than Cabernet Sauvignon on the list of the state’s more significant agricultural crops.

Nonetheless, with little effort, transplanted Californians can find wine based on grapes grown in Texas. Whether they will want to buy it is another matter.

Though grape growing and winemaking in Texas go back more than a century, the modern wine trade, which is to say wines made with traditional vitis-vinifera grape varieties, still is in its infancy in the state.

Much experimentation is under way in Texas as farmers and vintners try to corral which grape varieties and styles of wine will shine brightest in the Lone Star state. Keep in mind that the farming of wine grapes is more challenging in Texas than in many other states, especially states along with west coast of the United States. Like their California colleagues, Texas grape growers know drought, flood and heat, but they also deal more often with ice storms, hail storms, killing frosts, tornadoes and, in some areas, disease-fostering humidity. The landscape is less varied than it is along the west coast, and portions of it are prone to stiff winds that blow away topsoil and blow in pesticides from neighboring crops. As a measure of how susceptible the Texas wine trade is to adverse weather, look at what happened between the harvests of 2019 and 2020. First, vines were hit by a hard freeze in October 2019. Then, hail storms the following growing season further battered vines. As a consequence, the 2020 crop was down by half in yield and 40 percent in value from the previous year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture tracking.

Nonetheless, the Texas wine trade is growing, though only about 6,000 acres are planted to vineyards, and the state has only around 400 wineries. Cabernet Sauvignon is the most popular variety, planted to 724 of the state’s 5,840 acres in vineyards. Tempranillo, Merlot, Mourvedre and Blanc du Bois round out the top five. Texas is planted to no less than 55 other wine-grape varieties, ranging from the usual suspects (Chardonnay, Petite Sirah, Malbec, Syrah) to outriders not much appreciated beyond Texas (Black Spanish, Muscadine, Cynthiana, Mustang).

Texas has eight officially designated American Viticultural Areas, the principal ones being “Texas Hill Country,” spreading across nine million acres north of San Antonio and west of Austin, and “Texas High Plains,” covering about eight million acres given over largely to cotton, sorghum and wheat in the state’s northern panhandle. More than 80 percent of Texas wine grapes are grown in Texas High Plains.

At this point, no one has a clue as to what varietal or style of wine will emerge as the Texas flagships. Cabernet Sauvignon is planted extensively in Texas not because growers and winemakers are convinced it the best choice for the terrains and climates but because of its raging popularity among American wine consumers. Not long ago, in a feature on Texas wine for Grape Collective, seasoned wine writers Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher joined the widespread speculation that Tempranillo among red wines and Viognier among whites would emerge as the state’s signature varietal wines, though they qualified that outlook by noting that the Texas wine trade is still young, groping and evolving.

Nonetheless, Tempranillo from Texas registered impressive returns early this year at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the nation’s largest judging of commercial wines. For one, the lustrous and electric Valley Mills Vineyards 2019 Texas Estate Tempranillo was declared best of class against 66 other entries priced at least $35. Secondly, the invitingly floral, plummy, elastic and refreshingly crisp Spicewood Vineyards 2019 Texas High Plains Tempranillo tied with a California entry for best-of-class against 60 other entries priced up to $35.

I have judged at two high-profile wine competitions in Texas in recent years, the TexSom International Wine Awards at Dallas and Rodeo Uncorked!, the wine competition of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. While both competitions draw entries from around the world, they also attract scores of Texan wines. As luck would have it, panels on which I sat at both competitions were assigned large classes of Texan wines. That experience provided some insight to how the state’s wine culture is developing, but not enough to draw confident conclusions at this stage.

At TexSom in 2021, our panel tasted blind 114 Texas wines. Of 12 Tempranillos, two won gold medals, a pretty standard ratio for any varietal wine in most any competition, but not impressive enough to reinforce hopeful predictions that Tempranillo will emerge as Texas’s signature red wine. Of nine Cabernet Sauvignons, just one got gold. Of six Zinfandels, zero. Ditto for the five Sangioveses and the three Malbecs. And these generally were from the 2018 and 2019 vintages, both seen as being fairly favorable growing years.

As to Tempranillo, the results were even less encouraging at last fall’s Rodeo Uncorked!, where our panel was assigned the class of “New World” Tempranillos, meaning that entries came from regions other than Spain, the historic home for the variety. Of the 25 entries, 24 were from Texas. Given the buzz that Tempranillo generates in Texas, I expected this to be an exhilarating series of flights. We awarded only one gold medal, however. Just a handful of the 24 were fresh and exuberant, with floral aromas and suggestions of candied red fruit in flavor. They were pleasant red wines with not a lot of definition and drama. A disproportionate number, however, tasted flawed, vegetative and heavy with oak. They tried to live up to Tempranillo’s reputation as a wine of both muscle and grace, but too often the balance and seamlessness just weren’t there; too many barbs, not enough wire. The exception, our lone gold from the class, subsequently was crowned the Texas Grand Champion for the varietal. It was the fleshy and spicy Spicewood Vineyards 2019 Texas High Plains Friesen Vineyards Tempranillo ($40), a cousin to the Spicewood Vineyards 2019 Tempranillo that tied for best-of-class at the San Francisco Chronicle competition this past January. Ron Yates, who owns Spicewood, also has his own eponymous brand, under which the 2017 version of the Friesen Vineyards Tempranillo was named the top overall Texas wine at the 2020 Rodeo Uncorked! Evidence gradually is accumulating that Tempranillo indeed could be the state’s most prominent red varietal wine.

At Houston last November, I also was assigned to the sweepstakes panel charged with selecting the best Texas wine in the competition. Sixteen wines were up for the honor, and the field highlighted the diversity and potential of the Texas wine trade. Several were made with grapes traditionally grown in Italy and in France’s Rhone Valley. Just four white wines were in the field. Notable for their absence were Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Malbec and Merlot.

The decision was no slam dunk, reached only after much debate and several tie-breaking votes. My favorites included a juicy, concentrated and strutting Petit Verdot (Longhorn Cellars 2018 Texas High Plains Reserve Petit Verdot; about $40); a spicy Viognier that was all honeysuckle and honeycomb (Messina Hof Winery Texas High Plains 2020 Viognier; $19); and a dry, lean and persistent Blanc du Bois, a true rarity on the American wine scene, though hugely popular in Texas, where at 270 acres it is the state’s most ambitiously cultivated white-wine grape (Rosini Vineyard 2019 Texas Dry Blanc du Bois; $27).

My overall favorite early on was the swinging Blanc du Bois, a hybrid developed at the University of Florida for its versatility in the cellar and for its resistance to ailments for which vines are particularly susceptible in humid areas, such as powdery mildew and Pierce’s Disease. The Blanc du Bois didn’t win, but the wine to eventually emerge on top also was among my five favored wines in the initial vote for best Texas wine. It was the densely colored, abidingly fruity, sharp-edged and sleekly styled Hye Meadow 2017 Texas High Plains Boooom Red, a blend of grape varieties traditionally associated with Italy – Negroamaro, Montepulciano, Aglianico and Sangiovese. The wine sells for $100.

That’s a bargain compared with what the Houston rap artist Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson paid for a nine-liter bottle of the Boooom at the competition’s follow-up auction – $120,000. Take that as one more sign that the Texas way of thinking big extends to its developing wine industry.