We came looking for the little old lady
who makes sparkling wine.

Somewhere along the way, before we ever met Elisa Jones, I had invented her.

Someone had told us about a woman out near Johnson City who made really good sparkling wine. She was only open on weekends. Reservations were strongly encouraged. Somehow those few facts became a fully formed character in my head: a little old lady quietly making bubbles somewhere in the country, perhaps emerging from a tiny cottage when the occasional visitor managed to find her.

There may have been a little Hansel and Gretel mixed into the picture.

We turned off the road onto 43 acres of Hill Country and, at first, the setting did little to correct me. The tasting room is small — genuinely small — a tidy little building with a red door, a porch, picnic tables and umbrellas out front. It feels more like something that might have arrived on a truck as a very nice backyard cottage than the public face of a winery.

I had gotten the weekends and reservations part right.

Pretty much everything else was wrong.

Elisa is funny, direct, intensely curious and very obviously accustomed to mastering complicated things. Before wine, she spent 25 years working in intelligence for the Department of Defense, including substantial time overseas in the Middle East and North Africa.

So much for the little old lady.

Her route into wine started with her father.

In 2007, Elisa helped him plant a vineyard near College Station. She later helped him make wine in what she described as an 800-liter tank, began working through sommelier certification and eventually learned that Texas Tech had a winemaking program.

She hadn’t taken chemistry in what she joked was “100 years,” but she enrolled anyway.

She loved it.

That apparently wasn’t difficult enough.

After learning to make still wine, Elisa decided she wanted to make sparkling wine.

Traditional-method sparkling adds another layer of precision. There is a second fermentation in the bottle, yeast cultures to build, sugar calculations to make, and once the process starts, timing matters.

“Making red wine is like cooking. Making sparkling wine is like making pastry. Everything must be very precise.”

— Elisa Jones

Get the timing wrong and the fermentation can fail.

Then there is riddling, disgorgement and dosage — the final addition that can round off sharp edges and determine where a sparkling wine lands stylistically.

Elisa talks about all of it with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely enjoys the fact that it is difficult.

There was one small problem with our carefully planned visit to the woman we’d heard about for her sparkling wines.

She wasn’t pouring the sparkling wines that afternoon.

After all that buildup.

Drat.

What she was pouring, however, made a very good argument for coming back.

Elisa Christopher produces only about 2,000 cases a year. Everything is made from Texas-grown fruit, but Elisa has no intention of forcing the winery into becoming entirely estate-grown.

One acre of Chardonnay had been planted on the property only a few months before our visit. It will take roughly three years before those vines begin producing usable fruit, and even then Elisa intends to keep buying grapes from the Texas regions where the varieties she wants to make grow best.

Her father’s vineyard near College Station supplies Blanc du Bois. Other fruit comes from growers across the state, including the Texas High Plains and vineyards near the Guadalupe Mountains in far West Texas.

The approach is pragmatic rather than romantic: grow what makes sense here and go where the right Texas fruit grows for everything else.

We tasted Vermentino from Gaines County Vineyards near Lamesa and Sangiovese from Lichtman Vineyards in Seminole. Elisa once thought she disliked Sangiovese until a class convinced her that what she disliked was not the grape, but what some producers had done with it.

Then came Amélie, a Bordeaux-style blend of Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet.

The 2023 fruit had arrived lighter than what Elisa needed for a bigger wine she had made previously, so she didn’t try to force it into becoming one. She made something different.

Amélie is named for the French film character — whimsical and elegant, Elisa explained, “anything I would like to be when I grow up.”

Then she poured Cabernet Sauvignon from Dell Valley Vineyard near the Guadalupe Mountains, aged 24 months in new and neutral French oak.

We bought a bottle.

We also bought another Amélie.

It made the total come out to a nice round number.

Sometimes serious wine decisions are made for very sophisticated reasons.

The tasting room occupies one corner of the 43-acre property.

The production facility sits at the other.

Between them is the part of Elisa Christopher that hasn’t been written yet.

The newly planted Chardonnay is out there now, along with cleared ground, native vegetation and the evidence of a property still being turned into what Elisa and Christopher envision.

This isn’t a winery built all at once and unveiled after the landscaping crew finished.

We’re seeing it while it is becoming one.

There are foxes, roadrunners, raccoons and a winery cat named Murphy who earns at least part of his keep controlling rodents.

We spent more than an hour sitting with Elisa.

Wine was only part of the conversation.

We talked about kids, Dripping Springs, water pressure, restaurants, travel, vineyards, winemakers and the wonderful family of people making wine in the Texas Hill Country.

What continues to surprise us is how interconnected this community is.

Elisa and Seth at Rebecca Caroline know each other well and taste each other’s wines in progress. Small producers share trucks, equipment and information. Elisa had been at William Chris around 7:45 that very morning picking up sparkling-wine fruit that had been pressed and cold stabilized in the High Plains and shipped back in a shared load.

Her explanation for all this cooperation was considerably less sentimental than the usual talk about community.

Wait until you see the diesel trucking surcharge.

Friendship starts making excellent financial sense.

The industry is large enough to have serious talent and serious ambitions, but still small enough that the people making it can call each other, share a truck or taste something unfinished and ask what the other person thinks.

From the outside, it can be a little intimidating.

Everybody seems to know everybody.

We’re still the new kids trying to learn the names, the grapes and which winemaker worked where before landing somewhere else.

Elisa seems to know all of them.

Elisa Christopher isn’t trying to become the biggest winery on the highway.

It isn’t even on the highway.

The tasting room is tiny. Production is roughly 2,000 cases. The first estate vines are only beginning their lives.

What is already fully developed is the thinking behind the wine.

Elisa sources fruit where it makes sense, changes direction when a vintage gives her something different than expected and seems positively delighted by the precision required to make sparkling wine properly.

The scale makes that visible.

You’re not standing three people deep at a tasting bar while someone recites tasting notes.

On the right afternoon, you’re sitting across from the person who made the wine while she explains why four grams of sugar per liter and 11 grams produce very different sparkling wines, how dosage changes a wine, or why a tiny adjustment can matter.

That is a very different kind of tasting.

People who want to talk to the person making the wine.

Sparkling-wine drinkers.

Wine nerds who actually want to know how the thing in the glass got there.

Anyone more interested in a small producer than a giant tasting-room operation.

People willing to make a reservation and trade spectacle for access.

And anyone who enjoys discovering a winery before the rest of the world has finished discovering it.

We drove out expecting bubbles and a little old lady.

We got neither.

Instead, we spent the afternoon with someone who can move from secondary fermentation and dosage to Texas grape sourcing, trucking economics and suburban water infrastructure without seeming to change gears.

We saw Chardonnay vines only a few months into what will be a years-long process.

We saw the production building across the property, the tiny tasting room at the other end and plenty of unfinished ground between them.

That may be the best reason to visit Elisa Christopher now.

There is already enough here to know what the winery is.

There is still enough unfinished to wonder what it becomes.

We’ll be back.

Partly to see how the Chardonnay is coming along. Partly to see what Elisa and Christopher build around it. And mostly because we came all this way to visit the woman whose sparkling wines everybody keeps talking about — and she wasn’t pouring them.

Guess we’ll have to go back.

Don’t throw me in the briar patch!