For the last two years, Italy’s “Slow Wine tour” has come to Texas. When I first moved to the state in 2008, that would have been nearly unthinkable. At the time, Texas and its three major wine destinations — Houston, Dallas, and Austin — were part of an “emerging” as opposed to “established” market for fine wine.

As one prominent Texas-based wine blogger used to put it, Texas was “fly-over country,” a large swath of bourgeois America unworthy of coastal or international attention. But the financial crisis and the state’s seemingly unstoppable influx of young wine and restaurant migrants changed all of that.