Why? Well, it takes a rebellious spirit to turn your nose up at Napa Valley and Bordeaux. It also takes a rebellious spirit to go all-in on a burgeoning wine industry and max out a credit card to buy some land.

Say what you will about white tablecloths and fancy wine, but go to the Hill Country these days, and you’ll find that rebellious Texas spirit, paired perfectly with some of the best wines in the world. But make no mistake, they don’t taste like the best wines in the world—they taste like Texas wines, which happen to be some of the best in the world.

The connection between people, place, food, and natural history in winemaking has always fascinated me, so I thought it was high time to chat with Chris about his journey into the industry, the connection between Texan culture and the grape, and how he built a top-50 vineyard with nothing but gumption and elbow grease. Here’s Chris.

Levi Goode: I want to start at the beginning of your journey. How did you find your way into the world of wine? From what I understand, it wasnt exactly a straight line.

Chris Brundrett: Not even close. Many moons ago, I was kind of a lost little puppy. I was a dropout from the United States Merchant Marine Academy. I packed up my bags and wandered back home to San Angelo, but I didn’t even have the courage to tell my parents I was dropping out. I just showed up on the front porch with all my gear. My dad took one look at my bags and said, “Don’t unpack your shit.”

That very evening, I called Texas A&M University. A lady working late in the admissions office took pity on me. I told her, “Hey, I never actually told you guys I wasn’t coming. Can I still show up?” She laughed and said, “Yeah, if you can get here tomorrow.” So I woke up the next morning, drove to College Station, and stepped onto campus without the slightest clue of what I wanted to do with my life.

LG: What led you towards wine?

CB: Working in restaurants, I started discovering wine as this incredible, living element that enhances food, builds community, and completely elevates the dining experience. Eventually, I started working for a small Italian family that owned a white-tablecloth restaurant group in College Station. They let me start ordering the inventory and building the wine lists. I just thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

LG: What was the catalyst that shifted wine from a passionate hobby into a definitive calling?

CB: There was a couple who used to come into the restaurant once or twice a week. They were incredibly sweet people. One night, they looked at me and said, “Chris, you know so much about all these global wines, and you’re so genuinely into it. Have you ever been down to Fredericksburg? Have you ever tasted Texas wine?”

I looked at them completely blankly and said, “Texas doesn’t make wine.”

They said, “They do, right down in Fredericksburg.”

So I hopped onto this new, emerging thing called the internet, did some digging, and found a handful of places. Two weeks later, my girlfriend—who is now my wife—and I drove down to the Hill Country. We stayed in a crappy motel and visited all four wineries that existed in the area at the time. At one of the stops, the owner took us into the back, showed us the fermentation tanks, and let us taste wine directly out of a barrel.

It was an absolute bolt of lightning. It felt like God struck me right there in that cellar. It was a singular, crystalline moment of clarity. I stood there and thought, This is it. This is exactly what I am going to do for the rest of my life.

LG: Easier said than done, I’m guessing.

CB: I went straight back to College Station and immediately changed my major. It took some hard-headed convincing, but I eventually talked the head viticulture professor into letting me join the program and work the vineyards for $7 an hour.

LG: How was Texas A&M viticulture compared to what it is today?

CB: Oh, it’s night and day. What they are doing at Texas A&M now is phenomenal—it’s ten times the program it used to be. They have state-of-the-art wine production facilities now. When I was there, we were operating out of an old, abandoned dairy room. It was total hood-rat winemaking. We didn't have high-end fruit, so we would try to ferment literally anything we could get our hands on.

LG: I gotta ask, what was the worst wine you made in that old dairy room?

CB: Without a doubt, the watermelon wine. It was atrocious. But I wasn’t pursuing a career in fruit wines. I was chasing fine, estate-grown grape wine. I worked my way up from a grunt pulling weeds in the campus vineyard to managing the entire A&M vineyard operation by my final year.

LG: Did you intend to stay in Texas, or were you looking out west?

CB: I was fully prepared to head to the West Coast. I had a string of job interviews lined up in California. But right around 2006 or 2007, I looked closely at what was happening in the Texas Hill Country. There was this undeniable, electric hum of potential in the air. Something incredibly special was beginning to take root, and I didn’t want to miss it. I turned down California and took a job at a tiny Texas winery where I had previously interned.

One day during harvest, I got into a massive argument with the owner. I was working myself into the dirt—working 50 days straight. A switch flipped inside me. I said, “See you later.” I walked out to my truck and immediately thought, Oh shit, what am I going to do now? The next day, I started my own independent vineyard management and wine consulting company. I became a traveling, freelance winemaker.

By 2008, I was hanging out constantly with Bill Blackmon—who founded William Chris with me. By 2009, our philosophies aligned so perfectly that we said, “Screw it, we have to do this ourselves.” We took $40,000 on an American Express card and founded William Chris Vineyards.

LG: Who needs venture capitalists.

CB: It was definitely a gamble. We found a beautiful little historic farm in Hye, Texas. People told us there was absolutely no way a business could survive out there, but we believed in the land. The moment we opened, the business was instantly on fire. The growth has been relentless ever since. Today, we farm vineyards all over the Hill Country and the High Plains. We are blessed to have 120 families working inside our company across six or seven distinct wine brands. Breaking into the top 50 in the world last year at number 31 was a monumental milestone for us, but more importantly, it was a victory for Texas wine as a whole.

LG: How does the environment of your vineyard affect the final product?

CB: I can plant a five-acre block of Cabernet Sauvignon right here in my backyard in the Hill Country, where the vines grow directly into ancient limestone. Then, I can drive just 30 minutes north and plant the exact same clone of Cabernet Sauvignon, but there it’s growing on decomposed red granite. The minerals, the age of the vines, and the unique weather patterns of that specific vintage will result in two wines that taste completely different.

Even the human element is part of it. If a vineyard manager is going through a messy divorce, you’ll probably get a taste of it in that bottle. Everything leaves an imprint.

What we have in Texas is a highly unique terroir that exists nowhere else on the planet. When people taste our wines and say, “Well, this doesn't taste like Napa Cabernet,” my response is always, “No shit! It’s not supposed to.” We aren’t trying to copy California or Bordeaux. We are trying to bottle the honest, rugged expression of Texas soil.

LG: How much has the broader Texas wine landscape transformed over the last 20 to 25 years? The public perception used to be pretty skeptical.

CB: It is completely unrecognizable today. The modern industry didn’t start rebuilding after prohibition until the 1970s, but the true, exponential boom started in the early 2000s. Today, there are over 900 commercial wine permits in Texas. We are officially the fourth-largest wine-producing state in the nation. We are second or third in the country for total economic impact, and the Hill Country is second only to Napa Valley in terms of annual tourism visitation.

The seismic shift, however, has been entirely about quality. Ten years ago, there were just glimmers of greatness. Today, I can easily give you a list of 20 different wineries within an hour’s drive where you will have an absolutely world-class experience.

LG: Do you still occasionally run into people who hold onto that old bias?

CB: A decade ago, I’d hear someone say, “Texas wine sucks,” multiple times a day. Now, I might hear it once or twice a month. When I do, I look at them and ask, “When was the last time you actually tasted one?” Usually, they admit they’ve either never had one or they tasted something 20 years ago.

You can fit the entire country of France inside the borders of the state of Texas. I was just in Napa Valley recently, and guess what? There is some shitty wine in Napa. There is plenty of shitty wine in France and Italy, too. You can find bad wine anywhere on earth if you look for it. But the train has officially left the station in Texas. You can either get on board, watch it pass you by, or stand in the middle of the tracks and get run over. We are producing some of the finest, most unique juice in the world right now.

LG: If someone has spent their life touring Napa or Bordeaux, what’s different about walking into a top-tier Texas winery?

CB: It comes down to an authentic, unpretentious aura of hospitality. Napa has done an incredible job and they’ve built a legendary industry, but often when I visit out there—and I am an insider in this industry—I can feel incredibly uncomfortable. You sit down for a $250 tasting where they pour $500 bottles, and the vibe can feel very stuffy and exclusionary.

In Texas, we believe in stripping away that elitist barrier. I love ripping into a badass $50 bottle of wine that has immense heart and soul, farmed by gritty, hardcore agriculturalists. In Texas, you will find the actual winemakers and vineyard managers rolling through the tasting rooms. Everyone is deeply hospitality-driven. We want you to have an epic time, we want to educate you, but we never want you to feel small. Wine shouldn’t be a high-brow luxury reserved exclusively for the wealthy. It belongs to anyone with a palate.

LG: Tell me, how does a vineyard land in the top 50 worldwide?

CB: It requires a relentless pursuit of excellence. In our company, we have a golden rule: You cannot leak integrity. You can never allow a single bottle of wine with your name on it to be anything less than great. If we harvest a block and the resulting wine isn’t hitting our standard, we won’t bottle it under our label.

LG: Let’s walk through a hypothetical. If Joe Smith walks into your tasting room and says, “The only wine I’ve ever drunk is Yellow Tail out of a plastic cup at a wedding,” how do you guide him without making him feel judged?

CB: We get incredibly excited. First, we teach him how to physically handle the glass. We show him that a wine glass has a stem for a reason—so your hands don’t warm up the juice. Then, we tell him to put his entire nose deep into the bowl and take a massive breath. I might tell him what aromatics I smell—maybe I get citrus, leather, or ripe blueberries—but I always tell him, “Look, this is your journey. If you smell cherries or baking spices, you are exactly right.”

Next, we teach him how to take a sip, swirl the liquid completely around his palate, and think about how it registers on the edges of his mouth versus the center. We show him how to swirl the glass on the table to introduce oxygen, releasing those secondary and tertiary aromatics that lay down a whole new layer of complexity. Then, we hand him a specific piece of artisanal cheese, tell him to take a bite, and sip the wine again. Suddenly, his eyes light up because the wine completely transforms on his palate.

Once we have him engaged, we tell him the story of the land. We say, “Let me tell you about the rugged farmer up in the Texas High Plains who grew these grapes. He’s a retired Marine, he’s got a three-legged dog, and he farms at one of the highest agricultural elevations in the world.” Suddenly, Joe isn’t just drinking an engineered beverage anymore. He understands the human hands, the resource investment, the French oak casks, and the sheer labor that justifies a $40 price tag over a mass-produced grocery store bottle. It’s a beautiful ripple effect.

LG: To close things out, I want to go back to your start. What was it about wine specifically that captured your imagination?

CB: I love the restaurant industry because you get to serve people and curate an experience within the four walls of your establishment. But you can’t wrap a Michelin-starred dinner up in a cardboard box, mail it across the country, and have it survive.

Wine is a living capsule of time and place. It allows me to sit at a table with people on their absolute best days, their worst days, and in the most intimate spaces of their lives.

The ultimate compliment I can receive isn’t an award or a write-up in a magazine. It’s when a customer calls me up out of the blue and says, “Chris, my wife and I were sitting on our back porch last night. We pulled the cork on a bottle of your wine. The first glass was solid, but during that second glass, the wine completely opened up, evolved, and bloomed. I don’t even know how to describe it, man, but it made our entire night unforgettable.”

A mass-produced, factory-engineered grocery bottle is static; it will never do that. The wines we produce are alive. When you pull a cork, you are stepping into a once-in-a-lifetime, singular experience. This isn’t just a profession for me, Levi. This is exactly what God put me on this earth to do, and I’m going to chase this beautiful juice until the day I die.