By the account on its 1971 state marker, 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, leased vineyard land, 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, were founded in the mid 1970s. 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. After Repeal it took permit number seventeen, one of about a dozen bonded wineries in Texas, and from 1955 it was the only one left. Frank died in 1936 and his son Louis took over the vineyards, passing them to his own son Thomas in 1973, and Thomas's son Michael is the fourth generation. 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 the Texas climate.
Getting there
29.3461, -100.8956
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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