Why the Peach Stands on 290 Started Pouring Wine

What do you do with a peach crop you can no longer sell?

On April 1, 2024, Kristen Restani heard something hit her house in Stonewall that sounded like baseballs. It was hail, driven by winds near 50 miles an hour, and it tore through her family's 80-acre orchard on US-290. By the time the storm passed, roughly 70 percent of that year's peach crop lay bruised and unsellable on the ground. It was the worst damage the family had seen since they started growing peaches there in 1956.

Restani's family runs Burg's Corner, the roadside stand and orchard that's been a fixture on the Stonewall stretch of 290 for three generations. The old math after a storm like that was simple and grim: a bad harvest meant a lost season, sold at whatever discount the bruised fruit could fetch, if it could be sold at all. This time the family did something different. They called a winemaker.

A Storm, and a Different Kind of Harvest

John Rivenburgh runs Rivenburgh Wine in nearby Kerrville, and he had never made fruit wine before Restani asked him to try. The pitch was straightforward: take a hundred pounds of blemished peaches, pit them by hand, and see if something drinkable came out the other side. Two and a half months later, Burg's Corner had two peach wines on its shelves under the Duecker Orchard label, named for the family that has run the operation since Jimmy Duecker took over the farm in 1969.

That single decision, made in the aftermath of a storm, turned out to be the leading edge of something bigger happening up and down the corridor.

Restani has said the fruit that goes into wine doesn't need to look like the fruit that goes into a basket. Most buyers want a peach that's round, unblemished, and camera-ready. Nature does not reliably deliver that, especially not after hail. Wine doesn't care about appearance. It only cares about sugar and juice, which means a storm-battered crop that used to be thrown out can now be pressed, fermented, and sold.

The numbers back up how quickly that changed the business. Peach wine made up about 3 percent of Burg's Corner's sales in 2024. By the first half of 2025, that share had roughly doubled.

Not Every Orchard Got There the Same Way

A few miles down 290, Jenschke Orchards took a similar bet but arrived at it on purpose rather than out of storm damage. In September 2024, the family opened an on-site tasting room called Jenschke Cellars, built through a partnership with English Newsom Cellars out of Lubbock. The launch introduced nine bottles under the Jenschke label, including a peach wine that quickly became the customer favorite. Wine already accounts for about 10 percent of Jenschke's sales, and the family has said its goal is to push that number to 50 percent.

The two paths look different on paper. One family reached for wine as an emergency measure after a hailstorm. The other planned a tasting room as a deliberate second business line. But the underlying logic is the same in both cases: peaches alone are no longer a business a family orchard can count on, and wine is the way they're spreading that risk.

Why Peaches Keep Doing This

Peach trees need a set number of hours each winter within a narrow temperature band, roughly 32 to 45 degrees, to break dormancy properly and set a normal bloom. Early varieties need around 650 of those chill hours. The prized freestone peaches that ripen in midsummer need closer to 900. Too few chill hours and the bloom comes early and vulnerable to frost. Too many, and the trees are slow to wake up and drop fruit before it matures.

That math is unforgiving when Hill Country winters swing as much as they have. A mild winter in 2023 left Jenschke Orchards able to harvest only about 30 percent of a normal crop, no hailstorm required. This year's season has followed the same uneven pattern. CBS Austin reported in June 2026 that the Gillespie County crop was running smaller than average, and Visit Fredericksburg's own seasonal outlook described it as a moderate year rather than a bumper one. None of that is a one-off. It's the shape peach farming here has taken for a while now.

Gillespie County, which includes both Fredericksburg and Stonewall, is one of the largest peach-producing counties in Texas, with roughly 600 acres of trees on the ground. That scale is exactly why volatility here carries more weight than it would somewhere smaller. When a county built around one fruit has back-to-back uneven years, the businesses that grew up on that fruit have to find another leg to stand on.

What Shows Up Next Along 290

None of this is happening in isolation from the broader wine surge in the Hill Country. In 2026, USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards ranked the region the third-best wine destination in the country for what the publication called a grape getaway, noting more than 60 wineries spread across towns including Fredericksburg and Stonewall. Orchards adding tasting rooms aren't fighting that current. They're stepping into it.

This also isn't the first time an orchard family has made this move. Dietz Distillery opened back in 2021 on the Fischer & Wieser Farmstead, well before the 2024 storm pushed Burg's Corner in the same direction. What's changed is the pace. What used to be an occasional experiment by one property is now a pattern showing up at multiple stands within a few miles of each other, and it's easy to trace the timeline back to a specific storm and a specific decision to stop throwing away bruised fruit.

If you drive 290 through Stonewall this fall, expect the line between fruit stand and wine stop to keep blurring. The peach cobbler and the peach cider are still there. So is a glass of something fermented from the fruit that didn't make it into the basket. It's not a rebrand. It's a family business doing the math on a crop that keeps refusing to behave the same way twice.

Stonewall's rhythm has always run on the orchard calendar, from bloom to bushel to the Peach JAMboree every June. What's new is that the calendar now has a second harvest built into it, one that starts wherever the first one falls short.

If you're weighing what a piece of this corridor, orchard, homestead, or acreage under those same live oaks might be worth to you, Marjorie Group spends its time exactly where these stories happen. Let's connect.