Texas wine

Texas has a long history of wine production. The sunny and dry climate of the major winemaking regions in the state have drawn comparison to Portuguese wines, in addition to other regions in Europe like Spain, France, and Italy. Some of the earliest recorded Texas wines were produced by Spanish missionaries in the 1650s near El Paso. Texas ranked as the fifth largest wine producing state by 2019. The state is home to over 42 members of the Vitis grape vine family with fifteen being native to the state, more than any other region on earth. As of 2017, the state had over planted with Vitis vinifera. Despite being the largest of conterminous states, this relatively small amount of planted land is dwarfed by the production of even the smallest French AOCs like Sancerre. The Texan wine industry is continuing its steady pace of expansion and has gained a reputation as an established wine growing region in the United States. Texas is one of the oldest wine growing states in the US with vines planted here more than a hundred years before they were planted in California or Virginia. In the 1650s, Franciscan priest Father Garcia de San Francisco y Zǘñiga, the founder of El Paso, planted Mission vines in West Texas for the production of sacramental wine. The horticulturist Thomas Munson used Texas vines to create hundreds of hybrid grapes and conducted significant research in finding root stock immune to the Phylloxera epidemic, which saved the French wine industry from total ruin. The advent of Prohibition in the United States virtually eliminated Texas' wine industry, which didn't experience a revival until the 1970s, beginning with the founding of Llano Estacado and Pheasant Ridge wineries in the Texas High Plains appellation near Lubbock and the La Buena Vida winery in Springtown. The Texas wine industry still feels the effects of Prohibition today with a quarter of Texas' 254 counties still having dry laws on the books. Texas is divided into three main wine growing regions with a vast range of diversity and microclimates that allows many different types of grapevines to grow in the state.