• West Sandy Creek Winery celebrates 4th anniversary

    Excerpts from the article originally published by Kristie Stevens for The Item, Mar 20, 2023.

    West Sandy Creek Winery seating area

As we prepared to celebrate the 4th anniversary of West Sandy Creek Winery opening its public wine tasting room, we received a message from Kristie Stevens, who wrote, “I am a freelance reporter for the Huntsville Item and would like to do a story about the winery and your 4th anniversary.”

Very exciting! As we prepared to talk with Kristie, we took a trip down memory lane. When we strung it all together, we were a little surprised and a LOT grateful that we had four years of success to celebrate.

Stan McGinley purchased 360 acres on the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest in 2007 after a five year search. His goal was to create a vineyard and make amazing wine on site from estate grown grapes. On March 25, West Sandy Creek Winery will celebrate the fourth anniversary of opening their tasting room to the public.

From 2007 to 2018, Stan had 15 acres of grapes planted, built five cabins, the production area, and tasting room, and populated the ranch with all kinds of animals. The ranch was a kind of ‘grandkid camp’ for Stan and Peggy McGinley’s grandchildren and a place for many special family gatherings. Stan and Peggy were always generous, allowing groups from their church to use the ranch for retreats and meetings, and hosting their extensive network of family and friends.

They began to make wines, good ones, and won multiple awards for them during this time.

In 2018, Sandy McGinley agreed to resign from his career in financial compliance and devote himself full time to bringing his father’s dream to reality: opening the tasting room to the public.

Stan’s son Sandy McGinley is a hands-on proprietor who is normally out front serving and engaging with customers. This direct line of communication gives him a level of understanding about clientele that cannot be replicated from behind a desk. He is an active listener who gives a tremendous amount of thought to what customers like in order to lead them to a wine they will love.
For new customers, he will often start with a few questions and then provide a sample tasting to see the reaction before making recommendations on tasting flights or bottles.

The winery opened officially on March 14, 2019. There were enthusiastic customers from the beginning, even if there weren’t many of them right away. With wine pairing dinners once per month and a couple of murder mystery dinners, word began to spread, and in addition to the enthusiastic regulars, more and more customers began to come to WSCW. They fell in love with the wine, the beauty of the property, and Sandy’s effusive hospitality and attention to detail.

public wine tasting room

Whether you sit inside the tasting room or on the patio, the expansive view of the property is satisfyingly similar to a California vineyard.

Sandy’s wife Ingrid serves as co-manager and event coordinator. Wine pairing dinners, Bingo, and Murder Mystery Night have proven to be popular with patrons, as well as the addition of live music.

The lineup of artists who play on the patio each weekend is curated to add energy to the ambiance without being too loud to have a conversation.

When you pair Sandy’s attentive service with the friendliness of the staff and the thoughtfully prepared food that Ingrid brings to the table, the experience is made complete. They do allow guests to bring their own food, but the house charcuterie board is highly recommended.

The first anniversary of the winery opening was scheduled for March 14, 2020, and was canceled along with everything else because of COVID-19. Through the pandemic, Sandy and his team adapted: they launched a drive-through, to-go service as well as the capacity to ship WSCW wine to 38 states. They re-opened and then had to close again. In order to re-open the second time, they had to sell more food than wine, so they formed a partnership with a local food truck. Once the public wine tasting room was able to open again without restrictions, the business has done nothing but grow. Sandy and Ingrid are consistently mentioned in five-star reviews of WSCW for their hospitality.

The purpose of the anniversary party is to say thank you to the patrons who have supported the winery. Community partnerships are a top priority for the McGinleys, who have been a constant on the wine scene at local events sponsored by the Huntsville Downtown Business Alliance and the Walker County Chamber of Commerce.

“The smiles we see when people drink a product that was grown and made on this property connects us to an emotion that we share. Civic pride,” said Sandy. “Sharing milestones with our patrons also allows us to reconnect with our own experiences. That’s a large part of what gets us up in the morning.”

The winery offers visitors more than just wine tasting. For special occasions, the patio can be reserved with wine service from the outdoor bar. For couples, families, and small groups, they have four luxury cabins available for rent through Airbnb. Each has a fully stocked kitchen and an outdoor fire pit with firewood provided.

The winery is also a Harvest Host site with four RV spots for members. There are no electrical hookups but they do allow generators. Other options are also available for larger private parties.

Overnight guests can fish in the stocked pond and purchase carrots from the tasting room to feed the goats, horses and zebronkeys (a zebra donkey mixed breed) that live on site. They also have a family friendly, nine-month old camel named Sadeeq that guests can bottle feed.

Today the WSCW ranch and vineyard offers many opportunities for enjoyment for guests, but it all started with wine. Ten years went into selecting and nurturing the plants, the development of the vineyard, and the construction of the production facility where the wine is made and bottled on-site. It was a labor of love for Stan McGinley.

Building the winery was a lifelong dream for Stan, who fell in love with wine making in Northern Italy in the 60s. Stan retired to Walker County after a 40 year career as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Saudi Aramco.

They began by propagating red and white varietals on five acres in 2009 with a goal of growing enough fruit to produce all of their wine in house. They concentrated on grapes that thrive in a hot and humid climate with guidance from Fritz Westover. He is the viticulturist who first served as their ag extension agent and is now an independent consultant for the winery.

Lenoir, a black Spanish grape, and Blanc du Bois, an American hybrid white wine grape are the varietals that have proven to flourish.
The McGinleys are now working with Westover and nurseries in California and Georgia to introduce new grapes to the vineyard. These are Lomanto, a Texas hybrid red wine grape that is especially disease resistant, and Errante Noir, which is similar to cabernet and has great blending potential.

The mission in production is to maintain consistency in the process while showcasing the unique nuance of flavors in each harvest. Their wines have received recognition at the Texas International Wine Competition, the Lone Star International Wine Competition, and the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition.

Recipes were developed with painstaking care to bring out the unique flavor of the Blanc du Bois and Lenoir grapes. Because the Texas palate favors sweet wines more than other regions of the country, the recipes for the Blanc du Bois Sweet and Lenoir Blush were tweaked over the years, resulting in a Best in Class – Best Texas White award for the 2018 Texas Blanc du Bois Sweet at the Texas International Wine Competition.

Their best selling and most awarded wines are the Blanc du Bois Dry Estate Wines and Bounty Land Crossings blends, but they also make table reds, rose’, white port and sweet wines that are specially designed for the Texas palate. Their red wines are aged in oak barrels up to 18 months and some have aged incredibly well after bottling, like the 2014 Lenoir.

Honoring the rich history of the land is a top priority for the McGinley family. The label on most of the wines features a drawing of an old bridge over the West Sandy Creek on their property and will soon be updated to feature a rich watercolor version of that image that was commissioned by the family from a local artist.

bottles of Wes Sandy Creek wine that won Gold, Bronze, and Silver in the Texas International Wine competition

The history of the land dates back to the Texas Revolution. At one time, the property was three separate tracts of ”Bounty Lands” that were awarded to soldiers for their service in the Texas Volunteer Army.

As a veteran family, this piece of history is a source of pride for the McGinleys. Their Bounty Land Crossings red blend is named in honor of this heritage.

To be a part of Sandy and Ingrid’s team is to be a part of the extended McGinley family. Sandy’s management approach values strong communication, mutual support, and committed, durable partnerships. Staff and vendors alike are acknowledged as essential contributors to the winery’s growth and are welcomed into a share vision for its future.

Their success has been cultivated by a dedicated team that includes Sam Houston State University and out of state college students along with Megan McCready of the 4M Agency. While attending a meeting at the winery before it opened to the public, McCready realized that many of the things Sandy wanted to achieve for the business could be accomplished by her agency.

They joined forces in 2018 and she handles marketing, social media, graphic design and photography while Sandy and Ingrid focus on the anchor elements of the business. For a glimpse of how McCready’s work celebrates what they do, she created a “Vine to Glass” video as a love letter to Stan: https:// youtu.be/Nc_IEthJmzg.

Live music happens on the patio every Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m. Learn more about their wines, events and accommodations by visiting their website at https://www.wscwinery. com/.

It’s not often that a local business gets to tell their story so fully to the community in the local paper. We at WSCW are grateful to have had this opportunity to do so here. It allowed us to reflect deeply on how and why we started this business and to honor the vision and dedication of our founder and beloved patriarch, Stan McGinley. As we looked back on the obstacles we’ve overcome, we recognized for perhaps the first time that as a team, we have adapted and flourished when the odds were not in our favor. Thank you to the Huntsville Item for this gift: a new appreciation of our history, our products, our team, and the little slice of heaven that is West Sandy Creek Winery.