The Texas High Plains produces 80% of wine for the state of Texas, and has more than 8 million acres of grapes. Greg Burni is the vice president and executive winemaker for the Llano Estacado Winery, and says they’ve started their harvest. Burni says that although Lubbock has experienced some hot temperatures and heavy winds during the early growing months, it’s still looking like a great year.
“We have droughts we have heat spells, we have wind, very cold winters. So there’s just a whole mixture of ingredients,” said Burni. “But on the other side is good that it’s dry, because we don’t have a lot of disease pressure, the winds are nice to come up every once and a while.”
Burni says that West Texas experiences different harvests than the rest of the state or from California, because there are more variables, but that they follow the weather patterns closely to prepare for the upcoming growth.
” Each year is a different year, so we try to evaluate what type of year we’re going to have and make adjustments before harvest, so that we can take the experience we have over the years of making wine in Texas, and try to make little tweaks to our wine making protocols as necessary to assure the highest quality of wine possible.” said Burni.
The director of hospitality, Mike Laughlin, says that this is one of their busiest times of the year, and that as the harvest comes to a close in October, they will be having their twenty third annual grape day, as well as the celebration of Llano’s 40th anniversary.
“As tech comes back into session in the fall, right when we’re starting harvest, we’ve got a lot of kids moving back into town, we see a lot of students coming back, and then every single homegame weekend, especially, we see a lot more people through here at our tasting room.” said Laughlin.
