Val Verde Winery

Frank Qualia came to Del Rio from Milan in 1881, when the town held about two hundred people and the San Felipe canals had already been watering thousands of acres for a decade, which is a large part of why anyone was farming there at all. He found the Lenoir grape growing in the valley, bought into it, and founded a winery in 1883. Of the twenty five or so wineries that once operated in Texas, it is the only survivor, which makes it the oldest continuously running winery in the state by about ninety years: the next oldest, Fall Creek and Llano Estacado, date from 1975 and 1976. Continuously is the right word, and Prohibition is the test of it. The family kept the vineyard going by selling table grapes and holding a permit to make sacramental wine, and came out the other side as the only bonded winery still operating in Texas. That took a permit numbered seventeen when the state sorted out licensing after Repeal. Frank died in 1936 and his son Louis took over the vineyards, passing them to his own son Thomas in 1973; Thomas's son Michael is the fourth generation and runs it now, with a fifth studying plant and soil science with the intention of coming back. A century of unbroken family ownership earned the vineyards a place in the Texas Department of Agriculture's Family Land Heritage Program. The Lenoir is the reason any of it worked: a black grape carried into Texas in the nineteenth century, and tolerant of Pierce's disease, which kills the classic European vines in this climate.