Today we’d like to introduce you to Brooke Hester.
Hi Brooke, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m originally from West Texas, and after graduating from Texas A&M, I leaned into numbers. My first jobs were in tax consulting and then financial analysis within the oil and gas industry. While living in Houston, my husband Randy and I dreamed up a 10-year plan to move to Napa Valley to gain as much experience and knowledge from the wine industry as possible so that we could bring that home to produce wines in Texas. In 2006, we packed up our life and made the trek. Once there, I was fortunate to land a job as the CFO of Patz & Hall Wine Company, one of the region’s top wineries, and that’s where I gained the majority of my wine business experience. Today, I am the Director of Finance at Garrison Brothers Distillery and for our brand C.L. Butaud, I oversee the business side, including accounting, finance, marketing and compliance. The fun stuff!
We started C.L. Butaud Wines with one small, 5-ton lot of Tempranillo in 2014. The brand is named after Randy’s great grandfather Clet Louis Butaud, also known as Frenchy, who was his hero and always left a lasting impression with anyone he met. At that time, we were still living and learning in northern California and Randy’s monthly commute to Lubbock was arduous to say the least! In 2017, we moved back home to Texas and introduced the PaPa Frenchy wines alongside the CLB Tempranillo and Rosé, and expanded our portfolio to include the Desert Willow wines and Cease & Desist. By 2020, we were making 13 different wines from 7 different vineyard sites and we opened a tasting room in Southwest Austin.
Randy’s approach has always been minimalist and experimental, paying respect to the centuries of winemaking that led us here while backing up his artistic instinct with the empirical data of fermentation science. At the end of the day, we produce wines that we like to drink and find folks that want to drink them with us.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As any small business owner would say, it hasn’t been a smooth road, but we have learned how to weather the bumps along the way and alter our plans as we need to. We made a ten years plan when we moved to Napa in 2006, and although the general goals didn’t change, the roads leading to them did twist and turn. We saw opportunities to make headway and we also encountered setbacks. One struggle along the way was the transition from California back to Texas. Handling two harvests and two wineries in two different states was a new challenge for Randy. Since Texas is a relatively new winemaking region compared to Napa Valley, we’ve been excited to work with other winemakers, growers and cellar hands to increase infrastructure. We’ve continued to see big strides in a positive direction, so that’s exciting for us!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
At C.L. Butaud, our winemaking philosophy is simple: create high-quality wine that proudly utilizes 100 percent Texas-grown grapes in the High Plains region to highlight the state’s unique terroir, as well as expert, low intervention style winemaking. C.L. Butaud has been featured as a top Texas wine in Texas Monthly, our Tempranillo received a 91-point score by Decanter, our Mourvèdre was listed as a “Top 50 Wine of 2021” by VinePair, and our brand has been recognized by Austin Monthly, Austin American-Statesman, Forbes and more.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
We’d love to welcome folks to our tasting room in Southwest Austin where they can sample our wines and learn more about our winemaking process. Randy is always up for a chat! We also put a lot of focus on our Friends & Family Wine Club which ships four times per year with our newly released wines. Oftentimes wine club members are the only people to try some of our smaller productions. We also host events with chefs like John Bates from Interstellar and winemaker friends from California, and our members get discounted tickets and first dibs. We like to have fun and work hard to make our wine club something we’d want to be part of.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@clbutaud.com
- Website: www.clbutaud.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clbutaud/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CLButaud
Image Credits
Jasmin Porter Photography Heather Gallagher Photography Manda Levy Photography
