Today historic downtown Grapevine is saturated with wineries up and down Main Street. However, Emily McRoberts, owner of Homestead Winery, said she remembers when her establishment and one other were the only ones in the area.

“If you look at the wineries around here, I think the only one older than us in this area is Delaney [Vineyards],” she said. “We came here 18 years ago. P.W. McCallum (Grapevine Convention & Visitor’s Bureau executive director) came to us and asked us to come down to Grapevine and open up a tasting room.”

Although the tasting room has been open in Grapevine for 18 years, McRoberts said its history dates back to the 1980s when her parents, Barb and Gabe Parker, began winemaking operations on their 100-year-old family farm in Ivanhoe, Texas.

“We have 500 acres that has been in our family for 100 years, and we’ve always done different things like wheat and corn and hay and just [the] normal [things that you grow on a farm],” she said. “And I guess when the wheat and hay market kind of plummeted, that’s when [my dad] was trying to figure something else out to do with our land.”

She said he then turned his love for wine into a business and began a wine production facility, growing grapes on 15 of his acres.

“We knew nothing about wine in the beginning, but my dad researched and got ideas and information from spending a lot of time in California in places such as Napa Valley.”

Today, along with the Grapevine tasting room, the family has production facilities in Ivanhoe and Denison.

McRoberts said the Grapevine location is unique because the 1890s Victorian folk-style home, which the tasting room is housed, provides visitors with a “homey” feel they cannot find anywhere else in the city.

“When you go into most of these wineries on Main Street they have more of an urban city feel to them; they’re very much like a wine bar,” she said. “We have that ‘come on by and sit on my porch and enjoy a glass of wine’ atmosphere.”

Not only does the tasting room have a homey feel, but visitors can also become a part of the house by leaving their signature on the walls.

“You can sit here and probably never finish reading the thousands of signatures here,” she said. “We have people from all over the world sign our walls. We even had somebody be proposed to on our wall.”

McRoberts said as a family-operated business, her family understands how important it is to offer wines that are affordable for consumers.

“We try to make them fit the Texas palate and the Texas wallet,” she said. “We want to make it available for anyone that walks through the door. We want them to be able to take a nice bottle of wine home and enjoy it with their meal at home.”

211 E. Worth St., Grapevine 817-251-9463 www.homesteadwinery.com Call for hours.