Becker bucks the Texas tide

Wines & Vines, April, 2005 by Dale Rice

Richard and Bunny Becker stood behind a table at the 1997 Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival in Austin, pouring samples for those among the hundreds of attendees who chose to taste a Lone Star product rather than a better-known California competitor.

An older man widely known to those in the trade walked up to the Becker's booth and accepted a sample of their 1996 Estate Viognier, the sole example of that varietal then being produced in Texas.

The taster peppered Richard Becker with questions, asking about the growing conditions at his vineyard outside Stonewall, an hour west of Austin, not far from the ranch that served as summer White House for the late President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Then he praised Becker's wine profusely, saying he couldn't believe the Viognier had been made in Texas. Later that night, the taster--Robert Mondavi--paid the Beckers another compliment: He bought the double magnum of Viognier they had donated to a charity auction.

That was a defining day for the Beckers, who had launched their Texas Hill Country vineyard five years earlier. It affirmed the work and expense the San Antonio physician and his wife had put into Becker Vineyards.

It also was an important moment for the Texas wine industry, which had spent years fighting the stereotype that no good wine could be made in the state. It was another form of independent confirmation that Texas wines were coming of age, this time from the man who had spearheaded the drive to prove that American wines could be as good as European.

Riding A New Wave

The Beckers represented the second wave in the fledgling Texas wine industry. A number of wineries had been launched in the 1970s and 1980s, but only a few--such as Fall Creek Vineyards--had become commercially successful.

With their vineyard, where the first grapes were planted in 1992 and first harvested three years later, the Beckers straddled two competing philosophies in Texas wine.

One held that Texas needed to go where the market was, emphasizing the Chardonnays and Cabernet Sauvignons that were the leading sellers. The counter-notion argued that Texas should concentrate on hot-weather grapes, growing the varietals that were popular in Spain, Italy and southern France and creating a market in Texas for those products.

Becker did both.

He produced award-winning Cabernet Sauvignon, some of which came from his Hill Country vineyard and some from the High Plains of West Texas, where commercial vineyards were well-established in an area with more temperate growing conditions than Central Texas.

But Becker also gambled with the Viognier. On a trip to France, he and Bunny were visiting the Rhone Valley and noticed that the stifling hot days and breezy nights were similar to those in their vineyard back home, where 105[degrees] days could be followed by 70[degrees] nights at that 1,702-foot elevation above sea level.

That prompted the experiment with Viognier, which few U.S. vineyards were planting at the time.

The result was so successful that the Viognier has become a hallmark of Becker Vineyards, one of its many wines to win gold medals in international competition. It even has made it to the President's table (if not past his lips). President Bush served the Viognier at a White House dinner in March 2003 and again two months later at his Crawford ranch, at a dinner for Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his wife.

The Becker Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, too, has been served at the last two annual White House dinners for the governors of the states, and the Becker Texas Claret appears headed that way this year.

Limiting Production

Becker believes the quality he has achieved in his wine can be maintained at the current production, 30,000 cases, so he is vowing to grow no further. (He made the same vow at 25,000 cases, but insists he really means it this time.)

"This is a production where I can be familiar with all the tanks and all the barrels," Becker says.

Becker reached that size winery by following the advice of Kendall-Jackson founder Jess Jackson. "We only increased production if the market ran out," he says.

Although he declined to discuss specific finances associated with a production that size, Becker did say the winery is "in the black" and "debt-free."

It was Bunny Becker who contended that winemaking was going to be an expensive experiment, and they should do only what they could pay for in cash. Consequently, they did not borrow to get started or for major expansions along the way.

That freed them, Becker says, because no banker was pushing them to take everything to market. "We never had to sell wine that shouldn't be bottled."

Without those pressures, Becker says, he has never bottled anything he didn't deem worthy of the vineyard's name. In the early years especially, there were tanks that were sold off to other producers or used for other products, such as jelly.

Now, after sampling from more than 50 barrels, it's easy to see how good Becker has become: Wine after wine is top-notch.

The Hard Sell