Can Peach Wine Save Texas Hill Country Farmers? – Texas Monthly

The sound Kristen Restani heard at her Stonewall home on April 1, 2024, could have been mistaken for baseballs pounding the west end of the structure. Her father, Jimmy Duecker, and sister, Katelyn Eames, sat stunned inside their respective homes on the family’s eighty-acre orchard.

When the hail shattered the windows, Restani knew the year’s burgeoning peach crop, which grows annually in the Hill Country from spring to early fall, was going to fare badly—she just didn’t know how badly.

The storm brought 50-mile-per-hour winds that stripped the trees. It was the worst the family had experienced since it began growing peaches, in 1956. The ground was littered with bruised, unsellable fruit. Seventy percent of the crop was destroyed. The family announced it would not ship fresh peaches that year and would instead prioritize selling what was left at its Stonewall storefront, named Burg’s Corner, just off U.S. 290.

Faced with an estimated $100,000 loss in sales, Restani called winemaker John Rivenburgh of Rivenburgh Wine, in nearby Kerrville. “That’s when we had the silver lining of hope come through,” Restani says.

She had long wanted to produce a peach wine but hadn’t found a willing partner—until Rivenburgh. He had never made fruit wine but decided to give it a try with the family’s blemished peaches—they just had to remove pits from one hundred pounds of peaches for a trial batch. Two and a half months later, Burg’s Corner was offering two peach wines under the Duecker Orchard label.

As Fredericksburg’s wine scene grows and climate change makes peach harvests more volatile, growers are turning to winemaking to salvage or supplement their businesses. In September 2024, Jenschke Orchards debuted an on-site wine tasting room on its Fredericksburg farm through a partnership with Lubbock’s English Newsom Cellars. The launch introduced nine bottles, ranging from red to white, under the Jenschke Cellars label, including a peach wine. The favorite is already clear. “Peach is king—peach is always king,” says tasting room manager Savannah Duby.

The Fischer & Wieser Farmstead, founded by Mark Wieser and Case Fischer, originated from the Wieser family’s Das Peach Haus, Fredericksburg’s first permanent roadside fruit stand, which opened in 1969. In 2019, Fischer’s youngest son, Simon Fischer, launched the Fischer & Wieser Culinary Adventure Wine Collection.

“Wine had always been somewhat in the background of Fredericksburg—it was always second to peaches—but around that time, it blew up,” Simon says.

Fischer & Wieser partnered with Bryan-based Messina Hof Winery, which coferments Fischer & Wieser’s peaches with Brownfield-grown muscat grapes to create Fischer & Wieser’s peach moscato.

“Everything is very volatile in the peach world—peaches are very vulnerable in general,” Simon says. “Luckily, the peaches that go into these wines don’t have to be pretty.”

Peach trees require a certain number of dormant hours in 32-to-45-degree temperatures to grow peaches. These are called chill hours. Early-season varieties need around 650 chill hours, while later ones, such as the sought-after freestones, require about 900. In 2023, Jenschke Orchards was only able to harvest 30 percent of its usual crop due to the mild winter. “It’s harder and harder and harder to accumulate those later chill hours because our winters are just getting warmer,” co-owner Lindsey Jenschke says.

After winter chill hours, peach trees begin to flower from late February through April. A 26-degree freeze during this stage has a 90 percent kill rate, says Case Dietz Fischer, the eldest son of Case Fischer, who spent three consecutive nights in March 2019 burning hay bales to keep the family’s orchard from dropping below 30 degrees.

This year, 65 percent of the Hill Country peach crop was able to be harvested due to a mild winter and late freeze, according to the Hill Country Fruit Council. The limiting factors have contributed to a number of Gillespie County peach growers getting out of the game. In the seventies and eighties, there were around thirty to forty peach farms. Today that number is closer to fourteen or fifteen, says Case Dietz Fischer. “The people that remain in the peach-growing business are doing it because it means so much to Fredericksburg, to Gillespie County, to everybody that comes there,” Simon adds.

Jenschke Orchards combats inconsistent crops with an array of offerings, including an on-site restaurant, a seasonal corn maze, wagon rides, and a country store offering produce and canned and baked goods. Burg’s Corner sells more than one hundred products, including peach cider, canned fruits, ice cream, and peach sundaes. Last year its peach wine accounted for 3 percent of sales. That number has doubled in the first half of 2025. Wine currently accounts for 10 percent of sales at Jenschke Orchards, but the family hopes to boost that to 50 percent.

Before venturing into winemaking, Restani recalls throwing away buckets of bruised peaches that couldn’t be sold. “Most people want a perfect, pretty-looking peach, and nature doesn’t do that,” she says.

In 2021, Dietz Fischer and his sister, Elle, opened Dietz Distillery on the Fischer & Wieser Farmstead. Drawing from his internships with Garrison Brothers Distillery and Austrian master distiller Markus Wieser, Dietz Fischer crafted a peach brandy. It’s costly to produce, with fifteen to twenty pounds of fruit needed per 375-milliliter bottle.

“We knew we wouldn’t be able to make a ton of it every year, but we always wanted to do that because it just fit in perfectly,” Dietz Fischer says. Last year brought an abundant harvest for Fischer & Wieser: 24,000 pounds of peaches, compared to 5,000 in 2023. Up to 30 percent of its annual harvest is used for winemaking and distilling.

“It helps us make sense of everything that’s happening in Fredericksburg and cope with all the change, because it’s a lot, but it’s really wonderful,” Simon says.

For Restani, Duecker Orchard wine is her mark on the family’s half-century-plus peach-farming legacy. It’s how she turned one of its most heart-wrenching moments into one of its proudest.