Raising the bar

Originally published October 7, 2009.

STONEWALL - An unmarked white semi truck turns off U.S. 290 and pulls to the top of a scenic, oak-studded hill. It's a hot Saturday morning in August, and the truck's delicate cargo is eagerly awaited by a half-dozen people.

Forklifts stand by. It's the first "crush" day of the season and the truck has brought 10 tons of grapes hand-picked the day before in Deming, N.M, 100 miles northwest of El Paso. Clinging to green stems, the tight clusters of glistening tempranillo grapes taste sweet, and the sugar content is rising hour by hour.

David Kuhlken is pleased. The grapes he will transform into wine arrived properly plump, unbroken and still cool from the harvest in half-ton plastic bins. He paws through the clusters and dispenses with a hitchhiking spider before tasting a few of the small purple orbs and noting how much sweeter these are than common table grapes. "My kids love to eat them this way, too," he says as he offers a taste.

The forklifts begin carrying Pedernales Cellars' raw material to a stainless steel crushing machine wheeled out of the winery's human-created cave. The 4,000-square-foot room, cooled by geothermal wells, holds fermenting tanks and oak barrels aging the previous season's varietals and blends.

As the crusher's auger begins turning and removing the cluster stems, Kuhlken notices a needed adjustment. Wrenches come out, and he and a couple of workers wrestle with the equipment. Winemaking is about equal parts mechanical devices, fermenting chemistry and, of course, the agriculture prowess required to select and grow grapes.

The Kuhlken family's winery is a newbie in the area. The tasting room opened in December, after Kuhlken spent three years learning to make wine. But already Pedernales Cellars is at the top of its game, producing wines poised to win many fans and competition medals. With practice at nearby Texas Hills Vineyard and luring respected veteran Jim Brown from Becker Vineyards as general manager, the Kuhlkens quickly put nose to glass.

Not that they were strangers to grapes. David Kuhlken's father, Larry Kuhlken, has been growing them since 1994 at his ranch north of Fredericksburg and selling to area wineries.

Fredrik Osterberg, David Kuhlken's brother-in-law and business manager for the winery, says Pedernales Cellars adopted a clear mission: Spend the money necessary to make excellent wines, even if that required higher price tags than generally found on Texas wines. "Everything we do is focused on higher-quality wines. It's how we designed the production building for very stable temperatures, why we bought a basket press, which costs five times as much as the bladder press most everyone else uses." The basket press allows fine tuning so seeds do not break open and release too much tannin into the wine.

"When we opened the tasting room, a prominent figure in the Texas wine industry came up to me and said, " Nobody is going to pay $49 for a bottle of wine from Texas. It's not going to happen.

"Year to date that wine, our Family Reserve, is our No. 1 seller. Every time I see him I remind him of what he told me."

David Kuhlken notes that small-batch production, with hand-picked grapes and oak-barrel aging for all the reds, has helped set Pedernales Cellars apart. This boutique approach works, he says, because "Texas winery visitors are sufficiently critical now and know what they're looking for."

Nine wines are sold at the winery. A few restaurants in Austin and Fredericksburg carry some of the wines on their lists, and the Kuhlkens hope to soon place bottles in specialty store outlets. But don't expect to see the wines in H-E-B. Production this year will be about 3,500 cases (Becker, by comparison, bottles more than 70,000 cases).

Pedernales Cellars' standouts include:

* A crisp viognier ($16) showcasing floral notes.

* An earthy tempranillo ($29).

* The exquisite Family Reserve ($49), a deeply flavored red blend with tempranillo dominance that is the pride of the Kuhlkens.

An Austin restaurant familiar with the label is Mizu Prime Steak and Sushi, near Lakeway. Brian Phillips, the general manager and sommelier who previously was wine director at the Driskill Grill, says he first came across Pedernales Cellars wine in a blind tasting at the Driskill. "I really liked the style of the tempranillo."