William Chris Vineyards Hye
— a porch the afternoon settles onto.
Not only on a wall.
William Chris Vineyards Hye, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“William Chris Vineyards sits on a working farm in Hye, on the wine road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg. The tasting room is a restored 1905 farmhouse with a wide porch and a live oak in front of it. The house pours single-vineyard Texas wines: Mourvèdre, Cinsault, Trebbiano, Roussanne, the grapes the High Plains grow well. Saturday afternoons fill up; weekday afternoons sit quiet, with the wind moving through the porch screens and the goats on the back acres. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
William Chris Vineyards is on US Highway 290 in Hye, a small unincorporated community in Blanco County, Texas, between Johnson City and Fredericksburg. The winery was founded in 2008 by Bill Blackmon and Chris Brundrett, who restored the 1905 Deike farmhouse as the tasting room. The estate is 22 acres of planted vines surrounded by leased High Plains fruit. The 290 wine corridor between Johnson City and Fredericksburg holds more than fifty wineries and was designated an American Viticultural Area, Texas Hill Country, in 1991, the second-largest AVA in the United States.
The tasting room is open daily, with reservations recommended for weekends and required for groups of six or more. The standard pour is a flight of five wines, sat on the porch or at the high tables under the oak. The estate emphasises 100 percent Texas fruit, much of it sourced from the Texas High Plains AVA around Lubbock, where elevation and diurnal swing favour Mediterranean grape varieties over the Bordeaux varieties early Texas growers tried. Picnics on the lawn are welcome; outside wine is not. The nearest lunch stop is Hye Market, a few hundred yards east on 290.
Spring on the 290 corridor brings bud break in March and the bluebonnets along the highway shoulders through April. The Texas harvest is unusually early: pickers are in the High Plains vineyards by late July, finished often before Labour Day, almost two months ahead of California. The estate vineyard at Hye, planted in shallow Hill Country soils, ripens later. Autumn at the tasting room is the slowest and most pleasant season, when the porch holds the long light from October through mid-November and the live oak by the house keeps its leaves.
