BUZZY DESTINATIONS

New Hill Country tasting room blends award-winning wine and whiskey

Bending Branch Winery has opened a new tasting room for all its brands.

Photo courtesy of Bending Branch Winery

Comfort’s Bending Branch Winery is giving guests a little more legroom with a new tasting room on its Hill Country compound. Although the brand has been sampling its award-winning wines on the property since 2010, the new 5,000-square-foot space will bring all of its brands under one spacious roof.

Before the late-July opening, Bending Branch was operating separate tasting rooms for its labels, a space for its signature wines onsite and its Ursa Vineyards offshoot in downtown Comfort. Marketing Manager Sara Potter says the move was a matter of practicality.

“Our original tasting room was very, very small,” she matter-of-factly explains. “So we expanded to a much, much larger space.”

Dr. Bob Young, who owns the winery with wife Brenda Young and daughter Alison Young, didn’t have to look far for the new site. An existing property on the site, renovated from an original 1840 log home, was ready to be reworked without a huge investment. Bending Branch shuttered its Ursa at Branch on High Tasting Room and Estate Wine Club Lounge in early June and the team quickly got to work.

Bending Branch 1840 and ChickenDuck Bourbon The tasting room also serves Bending Branch's two Bourbon brands.Photo courtesy of Bending Branch Winery

The broadened tasting room experience allows Bending Branch to showcase both of its wine brands, including a newly released trio of reds aged in Texas white oak. The space also incorporates the owner’s two Bourbon lines, Bending Branch 1840 and ChickenDuck.

Potter says the estate’s new tasting room will provide a more comfortable perch for enjoying the sips. The former space has plenty of outdoor seating, but less room to escape the Texas heat. Now guests can enjoy charcuterie boards and coffee while being blasted with air-conditioning.

Bending Branch’s new tasting room at 142 Lindner Branch Trl is now open noon-8 pm on Thursday; noon-7 pm, Friday and Saturday; and noon-6 pm, Sunday and Monday. Although the winery is easing into the new space with a soft opening period, Potter says grand opening details will soon be released through social media.

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BLENDING IN

Austin's famed JuiceLand chain to debut first San Antonio shop

JuiceLand/ Facebook

JuiceLand is finally squeezing into San Antonio.

After years of teasing San Antonio with social media hints, Austin’s JuiceLand will soon make its San Antonio debut. The wildly popular juice and smoothie chain is squeezing into Alamo Heights at 5300 Broadway.

According to company lore, entrepreneur Matt Shook got the idea for JuiceLand after visiting a shop called the Juice Joint near Austin’s Barton Springs Pool. He applied for a part-time job at the shop and soon learned the business from the inside out.

He took over the business, which became JuiceLand 10 years later in 2011. Now the chain has 52 locations in the Austin, Dallas, and Houston areas — many of them near or inside H-E-B stores.

The concept is most known for, well, juice, pressed on site or cold-pressed into bottles. Its menu extends to fruity staples like smoothies and açai bowls, as well as caffeine energizers, lattes, wraps, salads, pasta, and sweets.

Everything is plant-based, including the smoothies, which are made with nondairy almond milk. And the menu items have oddball names such as the Wundershowzen (a shake with banana, spinach, hemp protein, and peanut butter) and the Ninja Bachelor Party (a juice mixing pineapple, celery, kale, parsley, spinach, jalapeño, and sea salt).

JuiceLand also gets creative with the ingredients themselves. The Mannawich is a vegan Sloppy Joe made with pecans, cacao, goji berries, agave, vanilla, and cinnamon. A bánh mì wrap uses “meat” made from shitake mushrooms.

A request for timeline information was not returned in time for publication, but Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation project details say the renovation will be completed by June 2026. State records are subject to change and are not always reflective of actual opening dates.

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