Peaches and Wine in the Texas Hill Country

    As the state of Texas opens up from the Coronavirus, quarantine, people can now go from staying at home to doing some traveling while still exercising social distancing.  Living in an area full of Skyscrapers and traffic, it is pleasant to travel on a wonderful country road and head to the part of the  Texas Hill Country known for its orchards and wineries and just plain get out of the city.  From mid-May through June, it is Peach season in the Fredricksburg, Texas area.  Usually, there are peach stands all up and down the highway heading to Fredricksburg but not this year there.  So, we ended up driving all the way up to Stonewall Texas to Vogel Peach Orchard.  Vogel's is a little more than an hour from the city of Austin.

Vogel's Orchard has a roadside stand with a little shop where they sell items from their farm.  This time of the year, it is peaches.  Inside of their shop, they had items such as homemade jams and spreads and peach barbeque sauce.  At the roadside stand, you could see where they sort out their peaches.

    From Vogel's, we wanted to experience one of the many fine wineries in the Texas hill country.    The Texas Hill Country is known as the Napa Vally of Texas. In the Texas Hill Country, there are over 40 wineries to choose from.  We started to look for a winery that had vines outside of the winery.  The winery that we choose was Baron's Creek Vineyards.

 This is a wonderful facility with villas if one desires to stay there. The Villas start at $408.00 for a 2-night stay. The property has some grapevines that are in front and back of the property but most of their grapes come from either other parts of Texas, California, Washinton State, or Spain.

    When we arrived, we saw many people enjoying the surroundings of the grounds of the vineyard.  My wife and I went into the wine tasting center and we were asked if we had a reservation, We did not but they took us anyway,  So if you are planning on going there, it is best to have a reservation,  They have two choices when it comes to wine tasting.  The first one is red wines and the second is a mixture of wines. If you are traveling with a companion, I would recommend that one of you get one and the other get the other. If you and your companion share, you will both get to test all of the wines,  One of our two favorite wines was the Viognier.  This wine has a flavor of plum jam and cranberries with a hint of chocolate in it. The second wine that we preferred was a Rose wine which to me had a taste of fresh strawberries with a very slight hint of cranberries to it.
    After the taste testing, we toured the facility.  This winery consists of various buildings and one of them had a wine distillery in it.

 Next, we headed out to Fat Ranch and Winery because my wife wanted a bottle of  Peach wine.  When we arrived at Fat Ass Rance and Winery there was a musician in Cowboy boots and hat playing his guitar and singing outside the winery.  People were sitting outside on picnic tables eating baroque and drinking Fat Ass wine.  The atmosphere at this winery has more of a Country Texas feeling.  We did not do a wine Tasting there; however,  they do offer tours of the Ranch for $30 (the tour might be a topic for another blog)  and wine tasting is only $10.  To me, one of the interesting items we noticed on arrival was the old still that they had on display.

The nice thing about this day trip was that all this was done in one relaxing afternoon and we were home by early evening.