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Texas: land of oil, cattle, football and beer. Where men are men...and they also drink wine? Television seems to imply that a lot of wine is consumed in Texas, so Mike Supple takes a closer look.
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Mike Supple: You're watching "Screw It" on SuppleWine. I'm your host Mike Supple.

Over the last week I took a friend's suggestion and I've watched just about the entire first season of the TV show "Friday Night Lights" on TiVo. This is a fantastic show. If you haven't seen it, I recommend you get out there and check it out. It's about a high school football team in a small town in Texas, and it's great whether you like football or not. My fiancée's been watching and loving it she can't stand watching football.

An interesting thing occurred while I was watching this show. I noticed they drink a lot of wine. This struck me as a little bit confusing because I never really thought of Texas as a wine drinking state - I thought of it more as a beer state. Maybe this is just a problem that I have, but then again, at a bar a couple of years ago I was drinking with some friends and we ran into a guy from Texas and we started a conversation. At one point I asked him what there is to do in Texas. He looked straight at me and said, "There's only two things to do in Texas: drink beer and rodeo. And I don't rodeo. Champion of beer drinking." And that guy wasn't lying - he could put them back. And that just fed my opinion: Texas is a beer state, that's how it is and it's never going to change. But TV doesn't lie, so after watching "Friday Night Lights" and seeing everybody drinking wine I figured I had to check this out and investigate a little bit further.

It turns out Texas is all about the wine. In fact, the first vineyard established in North America was around 1662 by the Franciscan monks in what is now the state of Texas. They've come a long way since then. Texas now has about 177 commercial wineries, which is largely due to expansion in the last few years. Since 2000 there has been an expansion of over 300% in the number of commercial wineries in Texas. Along with the increased number of wineries production has also gone way up. Over the last 7 years wine production has increased 30% in Texas. And Texas is the 5th ranking state in terms of wine production in the United States, which I find rather impressive.

Along with that production, they are actually drinking a whole ton of wine. Texas is the 4th state in the country in terms of wine consumption. You might think that maybe it's just a few people drinking all of the wine, but this isn't true. Even though they're 4th in consumption they are only the 36th in per capita consumption, which means they have a whole ton of people all drinking a little bit of wine. A side note, the number 1 in terms of per capita consumption in the U.S. is the District of Columbia. So in case there are any lingering doubts in your mind of how politics get done in our country, it's all drunken.

Getting back to Texas and consumption, looking at the numbers from 1998 to 2007 they had almost a 50% increase in consumption - that is a lot of people drinking wine right now in Texas. They went from 10 million cases consumed in 1998 to 14 million cases of wine consumed in 2007. That is simply a ton of wine. And it's not all their own wine. They're not just sitting around drinking Texas wine which I personally haven't tried so I can't speak to it yet. I'm curious. I'm going to try to find some Texas wine, but it's difficult to find it in California, competing with the CA wine market, but I'll take a look and see what it's all about. But Texas is actually with the country, and maybe even leading when it comes to consumption of imported wine. 27% of the wine consumed in Texas is imported [as opposed to about 26% nationally].

There are more than two things to do in Texas. If I ever run in to that guy at the bar again I'm going to have to let him know. There's 1) drink beer; 2) rodeo; and 3) drink wine.

So screw it! Embrace your inner Texan this week and get out there and enjoy some wine. Maybe have a little barbecue. Whatever works for you. Go Longhorns!