At Umbra Winery, the details matter. Whether it be the lightbulbs in the light fixtures, the decor touches or the wine varieties, owners John Wilson and Debbie Ray-Wilson said they work to ensure their customers have a pleasant experience at Umbra.
“We like to make people happy,” Ray-Wilson said.
Wilson and Ray-Wilson said they stumbled into the wine business. After meeting at a wine tasting in 2010 and deciding to get married, the couple needed to find something for Wilson, who is a chemical engineer, to do in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. When they noticed the Cross Roads Winery for sale in Little Elm, they decided to buy it.
“To say that it was like a lifelong dream or that we’d been studying it—no, no,” Ray-Wilson said. “We just said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”
After they purchased the winery in January 2013, they renamed it Umbra Winery and began looking for space for a tasting room. They found that location on Main Street in Grapevine.
The couple transformed the space, making it distinctly their own. The shelves, which imitate wine crates, feature both the winery’s own products as well as a few imported wines, including several sweet wines. The menu also features some wine cocktails, coffee and other drinks.
“We originally just carried our wines, and then we saw how many international visitors we get from DFW,” Ray-Wilson said. “So we decided to expand our offerings by bringing in some boutique, Old World imports.”
Attached to the shelves near the front of the business are hand-blown glass flasks filled with different varieties of wine. Each one features a funnel at the top as well as a mechanism that allows patrons to send a puff of air into the container, which in turn emits the scent of the wine.
Wilson said he developed the devices to help customers experience notes in the wine in an interactive experience.
Wilson and Ray-Wilson plan to build an event center and tasting room at a vineyard they purchased before Christmas in Springtown. The vineyard was previously owned by Dr. Bobby Smith, who helped the wine industry get started in Texas.
Umbra Winery
415 S. Main St., Grapevine
817-421-2999
http://umbrawinery.com
Hours: Sun.-Tue. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Wed.-Sat. 11 a.m.-midnight
