Sunset Winery

Sunset Winery
1535 S Burleson Blvd
Burleson, Texas
USA 76028
Phone: (817) 426-1141
http://www.sunsetwinery.com/

Contact: Bruce Anderson
Email: [email protected]

After two years of teaching Sociology at the University of Manitoba in Canada, Bruce was happy to accept a teaching position at The [warm] University of Texas at Arlington in 1973. We purchased the house that has become our winery then, and moved in with our three young daughters, Britt, Belinda and Bodil. It was just about the time that The Little House on the Prairie series came on TV. And we all loved it and pretended our house was the little house on the prairie.

We had two acres and soon we had a big vegetable garden, and a milk cow (never mind we had never milked a cow before). We named the cow Elsie and soon she dropped a bull calf, which of course had to be named Beauregard. We would pipe Strauss waltz music into the barn while we milked. We also built a chicken house and soon we had a flock of chickens that was allowed to roam and provided us with wonderful fresh eggs. A couple of sheep, Romeo and Juliet soon joined the menagerie, and produced our first lamb, which we very foolishly named lamb chop. It was the first animal to jump into our freezer and for some time thereafter when asked what was for dinner the answer had to be “meat”.

We continued to populate our little farm, and soon ducks, geese and bees joined us. We made everything from scratch like in the olden days. We learned to card and spin the wool from the sheep and we even made candles from the beeswax. We could sit down at dinner to a home cooked and homegrown meal where meat, vegetables, milk, wine, butter and even the wheat used for bread was home grown. It was great fun to learn all of these skills.

As the girls grew up Birgit (Bee) went back to school and later opened her own Tax business in this house.

In 1989 Bodil our youngest daughter was killed in a car/train accident. It made the house feel very empty and sad. And in 1993 we moved to Ft. Worth. We have always had a passion for ballroom dancing and had begun taking lessons (we met on a dance floor in 1960, and have been dancing ever since). We could not find a way to have a practice space in this house, and that is why we made the move to a house where we turned the recreation room into a “ballroom”

In the meantime Daughter Belinda and her family bought this house with one of the acres.

While on a business trip to San Francisco, we visited Napa Valley and fell in love with the beauty of the vineyards. On the way back to Texas we decided to start growing grapes on the Burleson acre that we still owned. And that is how it all started.

Soon we learned that we could attend courses on how to grow grapes and how to make wine at Grayson County Community College. We have taken all their courses and our interests kept growing. We also took many seminars offered under the auspices of the Texas Wine and Grape Growers Association and other organizations.

We talked daughter Belinda and son-in-law Roland into selling the house back to us for conversion into a winery. Getting all the permits and bonds a very slow process we finally could open our doors to our tasting room Oct. 13 2005.

We sell our wine and gift items from what was originally a garage and then became Birgit’s Tax office. The rest of the house is devoted to winemaking. We make handcrafted high quality wine with the help of our consulting winemaker Mike Sipowicz (a young man we have known since he grew up in Burleson). He has wonderful credentials in the wine industry having been Cellar Master at Krug Winery and later Associate Winemaker at Merrivale Winery both in Napa. Now he and his lovely family have moved back to Texas and have a vineyard near Lubbock. We are indeed blessed to have him and his expertise with us.

Winemaker: Mike Sipowicz

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunset-Winery/155430577963

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