Texas Wine and Food Day

Recently, TheWife and I had an opportunity to attend the Texas Food and Wine Day at Grapevine Market in Austin. Grapevine is an all-in-one liquore-beer-wine and gourmet food store that specializes in local and Texas foods. It has a giant cooler section for microbrews, all the liquor you could possibly want, and a seemingly endless wine section. There's even a gourmet deli, where you can get speciality cheeses and deli meats. Oh, and don't forget the international candy area.

On Texas Food and Wine Day, the Texas Department of Agricultural sponsored wine and food tasting in the market. It was quite a thrill to walk in the store, be handed a wine glass and be told to "ENJOY!" We walked around, listened to local wine makers give us their spiel and asked for free wine. And they gave it to us.

We spent a few hours in the store sampling wines, hot sauces, crackers, speciality cheese, coffee, and mustard. For those of you who don't know, Texas has a very good wine industry. In fact, there are over 30 wineries in the Central Texas Hill Country Alone. One of the wines we bought was a 2002 Rosato de Sangiovese from Alamosa Vineyards

One of my favorite products, of which I bought a jar, was the Hellacious Habanero Mustard. This stuff is unbelievable. OK, the company that was selling it, had a bunch of other foo-foo sauces, jams, jellies, and crackers. It was all good, but when I tried the Mustard, I was blown away, literally, by the quality and the heat of the Habs. I mentioned to the lady about how I am a chilehead and she said that I would probably find it pretty mild.

So I bought a jar and have been using it on everything from crackers and chips to hot dogs and chicken. I think that if the producer would just get a designer to do a professional label, this prodcut could soar, especially over at Hot Sauce Blog.