Texas Wine Grape Season Yields High Quality Crop Despite Challenges

Texas wine grape growers wrapped up an early, weather-battered 2026 harvest that Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service experts forecast to be an outstanding vintage.

Widespread spring frost, heavy disease pressure, and a long stretch of summer heat and drought made for another challenging season, but growers who kept ahead of the problems produced high-quality fruit, says Justin Scheiner, Ph.D., AgriLife Extension statewide viticulture specialist and Professor in the Department of Horticultural Sciences, Bryan-College Station.

The seasonal challenges were not as unusual as they were widespread. In most years, Texas typically loses part of its crop to a late freeze somewhere in the state but frost in 2026 touched more ground than normal.

“We normally have some sort of late spring freeze event every year, and disease, heat and moisture challenges pop up, but they’re typically regional or in localized areas,” Scheiner says. “This season, those challenges tended to be a little more widespread.”

Michael Cook, AgriLife Extension viticulture program specialist, says a hard freeze on St. Patrick’s Day hit Hill Country and North Texas vineyards hardest, cutting the potential crop by at least half for early budding varieties such as ‘blanc du bois’ and many of the newer University of California, Davis, Pierce’s disease-resistant varieties.

The Gulf Coast largely escaped the freeze, and in the High Plains, where most of the state’s wine grapes grow, only the earliest-breaking varieties were affected because most vines were still dormant.

Rain and unusually mild temperatures followed through the spring, fueling heavy vegetative growth and disease pressure from powdery mildew, downy mildew, black rot, and botrytis, Scheiner notes.

Then conditions flipped. Extreme heat set in in June and held, and many vineyards went a month and a half to two months with little to no rainfall.

Grapes also ripened quickly, and harvest wrapped up two to three weeks earlier than usual for most growers under the hot, dry conditions.

“Texas vineyards face challenges every year, but the trick is adapting and applying regimens according to the conditions the season presents,” Scheiner says. “Growers who were able to control disease and other problems had great fruit. Everything we heard, quality-wise, was great.”

For more about this season’s Texas wine grape crop, continue reading at agrilifetoday.tamu.edu.