In the 1870 log cabin that served as the company’s first retail store, Fischer & Wieser Specialty Foods is introducing the Culinary Adventure Tasting Room. The premium wine tasting experience not only celebrates the Hill Country’s growing prominence as a wine destination but pairs solid wine education with no small amount of fun.
The Tasting Room offers expertly orchestrated tastings from two Texas wineries, which change out every two months. Wines cover the waterfront of flavor experiences, from white to red with stops for rose along the way, and from dry to a little sweet. With guidance, the taster walks away from the experience understanding the many faces and pleasures of wine a bit better, along with some of the techniques in vineyard and winery that make it the way it is.
In a major part of its innovative approach, the Culinary Adventure Tasting Room pairs each vintage with an international assortment of cured meats and cheeses. Guests are encouraged to taste each wine with many foods, exploring the myriad combinations that make wine, for so many, a fascination lasting a lifetime. In its initial celebration phase, the Tasting Room is offering three scheduled experiences per day, Friday-Sunday.
The Tasting Room hosts wines and wineries as part of the also-historic Das Peach Haus, now the company’s largest retail store at the edge of the peach orchard where the Wieser family started it all in 1928. Each winery is also featured at a festive vintner dinner class in the company’s Culinary Adventure Cooking School.
Texas has a long history of winemaking, reaching back to the earliest Franciscan friars from Spain who established missions here and planted grapes to make wine for Mass. This was before they headed on to build missions (and vineyards) in that other place, called California. The modern Texas industry was born in the 1970s. With several hundred wineries large and small, Texas is now the nation’s fifth largest wine-producing state. The Fredericksburg section of the Texas Hill Country is second only to Napa Valley in California as a wine tourism destination. Wine lovers now have one more terrific reason to head this way.
Story by John DeMers