Aug. 19, 2010 - Dave Reilly more or less hired himself as the winemaker at Duchman Family Winery. He was a grape grower with his own vineyard about five miles from the Duchman Winery (then Mondale Estates Winery) near Driftwood, in Hays County. He met winemaker Mark Pena when he showed up to sell some of his grapes to Pena.
The Duchman winery, owned by doctors Lisa and Stan Duchman, was producing its first wines in a barn on the Duchman property. Pena needed help with the harvest and Reilly needed experience in the wine business if he was going to meet his goal of becoming a winemaker. Reilly liked working with the highly-regarded Pena so much that he asked if he could work there full-time.
"He said he would like to keep me on, but the position just wasn't in the budget," Reilly said. "So I just kept showing up. About four years ago, Mark had some health problems and I took the helm. He likes to tell me that I hired myself."
Reilly said the free labor he provided was more than offset by what he learned working side by side with Pena, who has returned to the winery on a part-time basis. "People ask me where I learned to make wine and I tell them I went to the School of Mark Pena," he said.
Reilly had a construction company before getting into the wine business. The construction business was intense and demanding and his wife suggested he get a hobby to relieve some of the stress. He decided to grow some grapes for wine and planted 10 grapevines, which grew to half an acre and then six more acres.
"Pretty soon, it wasn't a hobby anymore," he said. "I really knew that this was what I wanted to do as soon as I planted those first ones. You just sort of know when you hit on something that's going to be your passion. I eventually worked myself out of the construction business by working in the vineyard."
Reilly said that state wine specialist Jim Kamas was extremely helpful when he first started growing grapes and had a lot of questions. "I still keep in close contact with Jim," he said. "I still have questions."
Though Reilly grows grapes at the Duchman winery, most of the grapes used for the Duchman wines are from the Panhandle, which supports several large, successful vineyards and wineries. The grapes from the High Plains AVA (American Viticultural Area) are the closest the Duchmans have found to the varieties they found in certain regions of Italy. The High Plains AVA encompasses about nine million acres in the Panhandle and has the highest concentration of grape growers in the state.
"I started out in the business as a grower, and I have all the respect in the world for our Texas grape growers. We use grapes exclusively from Texas, not only because they're good, but to support Texas agriculture," Reilly said. "Those guys out on the High Plains have families to feed, and they do it by growing grapes. They're in the best area of the state to grow grapes, though the weather can be a little dicey."
That also applies to the Central Texas region, which has been plagued in recent years by excessive rainfall in 2007 followed by two extremely dry years. Though the drought hurt, Reilly said the soggy 2007 season was the hardest.
"A vineyard is easier to manage in a drought than a flood," he said. "When it's too wet all the time, you get a lot of fungal pressures and the wet floor makes it hard to get in and spray fungicides. The worst (weather event) by far is a late freeze, and we've had some of those. If you get a late freeze, it doesn't matter if you have a wet year or a dry year because the season is over."
The grapes are doing well this year, both in Driftwood and on the South Plains, and the winery has drawn notice in the marketplace through its strong showing at the San Francisco International Wine Festival. Duchman's 2008 Texas Dolcetto wine was awarded a double gold medal and two other wines received silver medals.
For Reilly, the awards are not only a validation of the Duchman Family Winery wines, but of Texas wines in general.
"People in Texas have every reason to support their Texas wines," he said. "Wine labels are tricky enough anyway, but some say things like 'For Sale in Texas Only' and people think it's a Texas wine when it's not. When you support Texas wine, you support Texas agriculture. That's a big part of what we want to do here."
