2025 Texas Wine Lover Year in Review

It’s that time of year when I tell you what happened with Texas Wine Lover during 2025. Personally, as I settled into the Hill Country in my first full year, I couldn’t be happier with the move I made from Houston to the San Antonio area. Not only do I now live closer to a lot of wineries in Texas, but the people in the area seem so much friendlier than where I lived for 29 years.

The Texas wine industry continued getting accolades worldwide, and Texas Wine Lover was there to help. The Texas Wine Lover website Guide is proving to be popular for planning your visits to Texas wineries, and the mobile app is continuing to get weekly downloads. Since the launch of the app, there have been over 7,200 downloads. That’s a lot of people learning about the Texas wine industry, and we’re helping with that.

If you haven’t already downloaded the app, please do so now. If you are on your smartphone, the link in the previous sentence should direct you to your correct app store so it can be downloaded. We would appreciate for you to take a couple of minutes and please leave a rating and review. The more ratings and reviews the app gets, the higher it rises in the search results, which in turn means more exposure to Texas wine. Even if you have downloaded the app already, you can still go back and give a review.

Wineries that have claimed their listing on the website Guide and mobile app can add their events, and this in turn, helps the rest of us find those events to attend. Use the Events menu item to find all those upcoming events to attend. Then use the custom planning feature in the Guide and mobile app to Plan Your Trip. When you’re ready to go, the app can even give you directions!

Right now, there are 532 Texas wineries, meaderies, and cideries being listed. 2025 was another big year for listings, as 34 new wineries and tasting rooms were added. Unfortunately, 2025 had its disappointing numbers, where 29 were closed or converted into other businesses like wine bars.

The website Guide and mobile app are not only for Texas wineries, meaderies, and cideries. Other categories are Services, Eat, Drink/Nightlife, Stay, and Shop, so we can support all the businesses that are located around those wineries, meaderies, and cideries. Services cover all those businesses that help support the Texas wine industry. If you are a business, you can add your own listing, or if you need help, please get in touch with me.

Here are other highlights for 2025 for Texas Wine Lover:

• There were ten writers who wrote at least one blog post in 2025. You can find most of those writers in our very active Facebook group Texas Wine Friends, which has a very engaged audience of both wine industry and consumers.
• The Texas Wine Lover team ended up writing 189 blog posts in 2025. We will always be writing about our visits to Texas wineries, plus providing important Texas wine news.
• The new News Flash page we added last year was continually updated with short updates that didn’t require a full blog post.
• We wrote our first Winemaker Profile in February 2014, and since then, there were only two months at the beginning where a profile was not published. Other than that, every month since 2014, we have had a featured winemaker. We started publishing a Grower Profile in 2023, and every month, there has also been a Grower Profile. We are looking for Texas winemakers and growers for 2025 to be featured, so please get in touch with me!
• I have continued writing a weekly newsletter about Texas Wine Lover writings and other news, and I’m getting close to writing my 500^th newsletter. That also includes weekly newsletters I wrote while traveling worldwide this year, including a Burgundy river cruise hosted by Messina Hof Winery’s founders Paul and Merrill Bonarrigo.
• Texas Wine Jam held its incredible wine festival again this year, now in Johnson City, where Vinovium has moved. Texas Wine Lover was a sponsor, and we also had a booth at the festival. We were also a sponsor for the Hill Country Wine Symposium held earlier this year. Speaking indirectly about Texas Hill Country Wineries, be sure to pick up one of their Guide maps and see the Texas Wine Lover advertisement in it.
• I want to thank the advertisers who partnered with Texas Wine Lover in 2025, as we helped those advertisers showcase their businesses and bring them more business. Texas Wine Lover is not free to create and maintain, so the advertisers are very instrumental in helping to keep bringing Texas Wine Lover to you. Please support our advertisers! If you would be interested in being an advertiser where your ad will show up on every page on the website and also in the mobile app, please download our advertising package and get in touch with me.
• I made a change to the website shop this year. It was getting difficult managing the logistics of selling items, so we have partnered with Vinotive where they have a dedicated Texas Wine Lover page devoted to Texas wine accessory products, including some Texas Wine Lover branded items. If you were a newsletter subscriber, you would have learned about the discount coupon just by being a Texas wine lover. Removing the website shop also improved the performance of the website.
• Social media numbers for Texas Wine Lover are currently as follows, as I write this: 13,409 Facebook Followers (all organic [that means we did not pay for any follows)]) for our Facebook page, 7,513 members of the very active Facebook group, 5,205 X/Twitter followers, and 6,591 followers on Instagram. Our email subscriber list has continually grown. Have you subscribed to our mailing list yet to get our weekly newsletter?

2026 promises to be another productive year for Texas Wine Lover. For the past couple of months, I have been working with a marketing person to get even more exposure for Texas Wine Lover and the Texas wine industry as a whole. I want to thank all of Texas Wine Lover’s followers and all of the Texas wine industry for your support in 2025. Here’s to you for a healthy and happy Texas wine-filled 2026! Cheers!