Check out our slideshow of Texas wineries and the Texas wine industry.

Haak Vineyards and Winery lies off the beaten path of the flat coastal plains of Santa Fe, Texas — a far cry from the idyllic vineyards of France or Italy, and certainly not an area historically associated with growing great grapes.

Out here, Pierce's Disease runs rampant and the erratic weather can either burn or freeze the grapes off the vines, depending on the year. But it's Raymond Haak's home — it has been for most of his life — and it's where he decided to plant his vineyard's roots.

Haak Vineyards is known for pioneering wines sourced with grapes that thrive on the Gulf Coast — grapes like the Blanc du Bois, which have been hybridized over years of research to withstand devastating disease and hot, humid weather. "You can't make great wine from bad grapes," he says.

Although there are a few acres of vines behind the quaint tasting room at Haak's tourist-friendly winery, most of his grapes don't come from the winery itself. This is standard in Texas, where wineries contract with growers. Haak's grapes come from both the Gulf Coast and commercial grape growers in places like the High Plains of northwestern Texas, where the finicky fruit thrives in the higher altitude and cooler weather.

The High Plains American Viticultural Area covers 8 million acres, a number that seems large enough — especially when combined with the 9 million acres in the Hill Country AVA, the second-largest in the entire United States — to sustain a Texan thirst for wine. And yet it's not. Only 3,500 acres of the Texas Hill Country AVA are planted with grapes. In the Texas High Plains AVA, it's even less: 800 acres currently grow grapes.

Unlike Haak, most Texas wineries can't get by on Texas grapes alone. Although the state produces more than 1 million cases of wine a year, Texas is drinking itself dry. And what do Texas wineries do when they can't grow enough grapes to make the roughly 12 million cases a year that we drink? They import the grapes from California.

That's right — the wine in your cupboard marked "Texas" that you purchased from a Texas winery is most likely made with California grapes. It's the dirty little secret of the Texas wine industry, an agricultural and tourism juggernaut that made $1.7 billion in 2009 alone, up from only $133 million eight years earlier.

As the Texas wine industry has flourished, it's brought with it a host of issues — including occasionally deceptive marketing practices, overreliance on chemical correction of "bad" grapes in the cellar and a propensity among Texas grape growers to focus too much on grape varieties that don't thrive in Texas. But that's not to say it's all plonk. It's in an awkward phase, a series of growing pains that serious Texas winemakers are eager to leave behind as they stretch toward a better future.
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The unforgiving Texas climate, marked by late-spring freezes and arid, brimstone summers, can't sustain grape growing like California's Napa Valley, which lies at the peak of one of the most fertile and productive farming corridors in the world and enjoys the consistently mild weather and cool summer evenings necessary to deliver fruit with freshness and healthy acidity.

In a "bad vintage" like the disastrous 2011 harvest, plagued by drought and extreme temperatures, says Gabe Parker, director at-large of the Texas Wine & Grape Growers Association, "less than 50 percent of the wine bottled in Texas is grown here." In a "good vintage" like the 2010 bumper crop, "more than 50 percent of the fruit is grown in Texas," he adds.

Is that the best that Texas can do? In a state known for its self-reliance and its unabashed homegrown pride, do citizens realize that even in the best-case scenario, only half of the wine in their glass was raised by Texas farmers? Few are aware of federal regulation that allows bottlers to label their products as Texas wine regardless of its source, as long as "For Sale in Texas Only" is included in the fine print.

In typical Texan style, we like to drink what we make: Nearly all of the wine bottled in Texas is consumed here as well, even if it's not grown here. That's one of the reasons national wine writers like New York-based Alice Feiring, when asked to comment on Texas wines, don't have much to say on the subject: "I really haven't tasted enough wines in Texas to make any sort of educated assessment," says Feiring, "except that conventional grapes are really not the way to go."

It's the same argument Raymond Haak makes when he talks about the Blanc du Bois that's the crux of his vineyard's success. But although the grape thrives here, many Texas wineries would still rather focus on the basics: Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs — in other words, wines that are familiar to the average wine drinker but that are nearly impossible to grow here. And when those grapes fail, the wineries turn to California to supplement their meager yield.