Lost Draw

Lost Draw sits just off Highway 290 in Johnson City, easy to reach but removed enough to feel like you have left the road behind. The entrance sets the tone quickly: rusty steel, a cattle guard, vineyard rows, sculpture, big sky, and buildings that look more practical than precious.

That matters here.

This is not a winery trying to win you over with glass-box drama or Instagram choreography. Lost Draw begins somewhere else entirely — in Terry County, near Brownfield, where a family farming operation shifted from cotton and peanuts into wine grapes. The Johnson City tasting room is where that story becomes visible: the vines, the wines, the staff, the barrel room, the bottling line, and the sense that everyone here is still connected to the work.

The first impression was better than polished. It was specific.

The driveway passes vineyard rows that looked almost suspiciously healthy on a hot afternoon. The metalwork, the boulders, the oaks, and the low buildings gave the place a practical Hill Country feel — handsome, but not fussy.

Outside, the shaded lawn was doing real work. Picnic tables sat under live oaks. A tour bus group was finishing up outside when we arrived, and for a Thursday afternoon, the place had more energy than expected. We chose the air conditioning, because Texas in summer does not care how romantic your editorial intentions are.

The dog-friendly details were impossible to miss: bowls, a YETI water station, and the general sense that four-legged visitors were not merely tolerated but expected. The water setup stayed full and busy all afternoon. This is a place that plans for dogs.

Inside, the tasting room is not grand. It is utilitarian, Hill Country, and a little eccentric, complete with taxidermy mounted near the high windows. It is not the Signor version of wine country. It is not Slate Theory steel-and-glass drama. It is not William Chris polish.

And honestly, that was fine.

Because the visit changed the second Ashlyn welcomed us with a pour.

The first wine was a sparkling Meunier, which was new to us and immediately made Malana happy. She is partial to bubbles, but even beyond that, the welcome pour did what a welcome pour is supposed to do: it made us feel like we had arrived at the party instead of checked in for an appointment.

The room was busy, so we settled in and waited a bit. That could have gone either direction. At Lost Draw, it became part of the pace. Nobody made the visit feel rushed. Nobody made the wines feel like homework. And once Ashlyn got rolling, the afternoon turned into one of the better guided tastings we have had.

She was warm without being scripted, knowledgeable without getting precious, and honest about still learning the deeper corners of Texas wine herself. That made the tasting better, not worse. She talked about the Texas Wine Ambassador course, the Hill Country Wine Academy, and how working at Lost Draw had opened up grapes and Texas wine in a way she had not expected.

That is exactly the kind of person we keep running into on this project: people who found themselves in a tasting room and then got pulled into the larger story.

Ashlyn gave us plenty to taste, answered our questions, and did not make us feel silly for asking basic ones. That matters. Wines of Texas is not being written by sommeliers trying to impress other sommeliers. We are looking for stories, places, grapes, people, farming, and the kind of hospitality that makes someone want to learn more.

Lost Draw gave us all of that.

Lost Draw’s wine story starts on a Terry County farm.

Andy Sides grew cotton and peanuts out on the Texas High Plains. While his nephew, Andrew Sides, was attending Texas Tech, Andrew suggested his uncle try planting a little Tempranillo. The vines took. Season by season, cotton and peanuts gave way to vineyard, neighboring growers followed, and the family found itself producing the kind of fruit other Texas wineries wanted. Andrew eventually reached the obvious conclusion: if the family was already producing outstanding Texas fruit, they should be making the wine themselves instead of only selling the grapes.

By the time you’re standing at the bar in Johnson City, that history is already in the glass.

Beyond the sparkling Meunier that opened things, Ashlyn walked us through Grenache, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, and Nero d’Avola, along with a few experimental releases. The lineup handed us several new grapes for the field guide, which is becoming one of the unexpected pleasures of this project.

The Nero d’Avola was the one Malana kept circling back to. Dark, pretty, and full of personality, it became her favorite of the tasting. The Sangiovese had that dry, food-friendly pull that made us immediately talk about pizza. And the Tempranillo — the grape that started all of this — was smoother than many we have tasted, without the hard tannic finish that can glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

So why does that history matter once the wine is in your glass?

Because most of the fruit begins on the Texas High Plains, up around Terry County — high, dry country where the elevation climbs past 3,000 feet and hot days give way to sharply cool nights. That swing, the dry air, and the sandy soil are why so much of the state’s most respected fruit is grown up there: slow, even ripening, and grapes that hold onto their acid and color.

Lost Draw still leans on those relationships. Alongside its own vineyard it works with neighboring High Plains growers and other Texas sites, including Uplift — which is how the tasting can range as wide as it does while staying grounded in one point of view: Texas fruit, farming first.

So the wine you’re tasting in Johnson City really begins hundreds of miles away, out on the High Plains. The last stretch of that journey happens right behind the tasting room, where the fruit finally becomes wine.

Then Ashlyn did something that turned the visit from good to memorable.

She invited us and the remaining group into the production side.

Behind the tasting room, Lost Draw was bottling. Not theoretically. Actually bottling. An eighteen-wheeler was backed up to the facility with a mobile bottling line inside, feeding clean bottles through the process and into the cellar where people were boxing them up. It looked like a winery version of the Laverne & Shirley opening credits, with bottles moving down the line and everyone handling one small, necessary part of the job.

That kind of behind-the-scenes moment is hard to fake.

We also tasted from barrel, which is always a thrill no matter how many times someone pretends to be calm about it. Barrel tasting makes wine feel alive in a different way. It is unfinished, in motion, and still becoming itself.

That was the moment Lost Draw stopped being simply a tasting appointment and became a field note.

Before we left, Ashlyn showed us the upgraded tasting space overlooking the vineyard.

That room matters because it gives Lost Draw a more elevated option without forcing the entire property to pretend to be something it is not. The main tasting room can stay casual and energetic. The private room can slow things down, keep a host with the group, and pour wines not available in the regular tasting.

We would come back for that.

Not for the room itself so much as what it offers: smaller-production wines, more unusual grape varieties than the main flight, and more one-on-one time with Ashlyn to walk through them. By then she had already earned our trust, and a quieter room with deeper, harder-to-find bottles and her full attention is exactly the kind of visit we’d drive back for.

Lost Draw is different because the polish is not the point.

What stays with you is the line running from the farm on the High Plains to the welcome in the Johnson City tasting room — a working winery that still knows how to make people comfortable.

Lost Draw is best for visitors who want a real Texas wine conversation without a lot of tasting-room theater.

It is especially good for:

• people curious about High Plains fruit
• visitors who want a relaxed Johnson City stop near Highway 290
• dog owners
• small groups that like shaded outdoor space
• Texas wine beginners who want to learn without being talked down to
• grape nerds looking for Meunier, Nero d’Avola, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Grenache, Tannat, and other less-obvious Texas bottles

Maybe skip Lost Draw if you are looking for a highly manicured luxury estate experience, formal architecture, or an Instagram-first setting.

That is not the assignment here.

It needs a story. It needs a point of view. It needs good wine. And more than anything, it needs someone who can make the whole thing feel worth slowing down for.

Ashlyn did that.
The farming story did that.
The barrel room did that.
The welcome pour did that.

We arrived planning to taste and move on. Instead, we stayed, learned, talked, tasted from barrel, and watched an actual bottling line at work.