Full Body Inspiration
A fully fleshed-out dream: Full Body Inspiration
If you look at a magnificent live oak spreading its crown out over your front lawn, you can rewind the clock in your mind and picture it as a smaller tree with fewer branches, perhaps even go back to when the trunk was thin and the bark wasn't yet rough and wrinkled. But keep going, and you’ll find it’s hard to make the jump all the way back to when it was an acorn. But that is where it came from, somehow. Every fully fleshed-out project or dream starts like that. A little seed in someone's mind; a little nut with tremendous possibility hiding within. These tree seeds have to fall and sit dormant for a good while before anything happens, and even once they sprout it's a long road to a giant tree. Flavory's story is a bit like this.
In some sense, it all started with a desire to see better cooking, a culinary school, classes that could help people cook better. A pretty humble beginning. The idea rumbled around amongst a group of friends; they had a name that attempted to sum up the idea, Texas Center for Wine and Culinary Arts, TCWCA for short(ish). The clearest part of the idea was to found and develop a culinary institute, so that was the direction that things headed for some years. Connections were made with Texas Tech University, this gave some institutional credibility. There were a few events and movements, a first tender sprout from the acorn, but it struggled to push its way through the leaves into clear air. Really, it was struggling with viability. Was there enough demand in the area for formal cooking training to sustain something like this? And so TCWCA struggled for life.
Eventually we decided that we really needed to stop and take stock. Our idea had grown slowly for almost a decade but hadn't really taken off. We had to decide, once and for all, if there was something here to do or not. So we engaged in a process of intense discovery where we asked tough questions of ourselves and everyone who has been associated with TCWCA through the years. What was really needed in our area, what did we really want to see happen, what would light up people's imaginations and get them engaged? The fruit of this process was pure, grand cru gold.
Ultimately, what we found we were looking for was way more than a cooking school, rather we wanted to be the seed for an actual renaissance of food culture with a distinctively Texan character. A hub, a starting point, the gateway to a lifelong love affair with the flavors of Texas. So how do you do this? What we knew was that people learn best when they are inspired and inspiration is what a flourishing food industry runs on. We didn't need a cooking "school" per se, we needed a place and mixture of environments where people could come together to have their imaginations set on fire by inspiring experiences. This was a concept that stretched beyond one slender stem-trunk of an idea, this had branches that could leap out in many directions. We found something that wanted to grow!
One of those essential branches of our project is to engage the visitor culture of the Hill Country. People come here for food, so let's be the hub of that journey. Just to show you how far we've come from the acorn of TCWCA to the growing tree of FlavoryTX, let us illustrate to you what a Flavory Wine Lovers Weekend might look like, to give you a picture of what the fully formed tree will be like. (For sleepy imaginations we prescribe at least two glasses of TX Sangiovese and a side of rare beef.) Let’s imagine this journey together for a minute or two.
A Wine Lover's Weekend: Inspired by FlavoryTX
Imagine you're a wine lover from the Panhandle or the suburbs of Dallas. You're looking for a retreat weekend in a lusher, greener environment, you hit upon Fredericksburg. You've heard it's got a lot going on, but where do you start? FlavoryTX is where you start. Your weekend tour of wine country starts Friday afternoon. You pull up to the gorgeous FlavoryTX campus and atmospheric facility and out on the patio, there is a wine-tasting tour of the Hill Country laid out for you on a table. But it's not just a typical wine tasting. There is a regional expert there who shows you a map of the area, tells you about different geography and elevations where the wines come from, and shows you how the flavors you taste are rooted in the slight variations of different valleys, hillsides, and microclimates of Texas. You’re amazed how much wine there is being grown across the entire state, let alone in the Hill Country.
At the end of the tasting, you are sent off with the address of a restaurant and recommendations of what to order. It is not just that they really like this restaurant but, as your host tells you, "we had all of their cooks up here last week for a two-day intensive seminar on schnitzel" with invited chefs from Germany mixing in with the Texan cooks. You leave with the name of the best version from the sessions that ended up making it onto the specials board. So when you waltz into Ottos for your 7:30 pm reservation, you're not a visitor anymore, you're an industry insider, and you know exactly what you're ordering before the menu comes out.
The next morning, over breakfast, you review an itinerary that came into your inbox overnight. Your new friend from FlavoryTX has sent you tasting tour times at your top three wineries based on your feedback during the tasting session last night. So off you go, map in hand, oriented to the Hill Country, first-hand taste knowledge ready to be enriched in the vineyards, and excited about your day. By the end of your tour, you've traveled the countryside, tasted the dirt on a raw grape or two, seen the vats, and heard from the vintners themselves. You arrived in Fredericksburg a wine lover, you left a burgeoning Hill Country Wine Culture native.
That is a fully fleshed-out experience, learning that will be remembered for years. That's why FlavoryTX exists. Full body Inspiration starts here, but there’s more. More stories, more imaginings and soon, some real live, flavory experiences we’ll be sharing.
