Becky Murphy

“I remember one of the (California) grape growers said, we have a surplus of wine and a surplus of grapes in California and things are getting tough. Now we have all you other states competing with us. I said, wait a minute, you obviously never read Leon Adams. He said, if we had people growing grapes all over the United States, we would become a wine drinking country. I see grape growers, they’re just regular people, they’re farmers. They don’t go to fancy restaurants, they don’t know about fancy wines, they don’t care about fancy wines. Their neighbors see them, they’re growing grapes, they’re making some wine. Joe Bob has some pretty good wine down there. Real people are making wine, not people in fancy restaurants. It put it at that level. That’s when I said to them, we’re building a market for you. We’re not taking a market away from you.”

Becky founded the Lone Star Wine Festival to showcase Texas wines and to give them recognition from people who spend their days recognizing quality in wines from all over the world. The festival provided legitimacy for Texas wines. She worked with the Texas Department of Agriculture to put on the festival and then to take some of the out-of-town judges around to visit some of the wineries. They got to meet wine makers, got to see what they were doing. Becky later worked with Stephan Pyles at Routh Street Cafe as a wine advisor. She told him, “You got this Southwestern cuisine, you need to have certain kinds of wines on the list, you need to have some Texas wines on the list.” Becky has a regular column in Wine Review Online, and writes reviews there every week.