Frank Qualia came to North America with other emigrants from northern Italy, spent a short time in Mexico, and in the 1870s followed the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway west to San Felipe del Rio. What drew him was water. In the 1860s a land company had dammed San Felipe Creek and dug irrigation ditches, and the fertile ground beside them was cheap. Qualia bought land in 1883, raised truck crops and planted the Lenoir grapes, flourishing in the heat, from which he made his first wine.
Prohibition came with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 and should have ended the winery. Instead the Qualias kept tending the vines and sold table grapes, and most of the vineyard survived to start over after repeal. By the late 1950s every other winery in Texas had closed, and under Louis Qualia, Val Verde was the only bonded winery operating in the state into the 1970s. The Texas Grape Growers Association later honored him for carrying the industry across that gap. His son Thomas took over in 1973, and a fourth generation, Michael Qualia, runs it now.
The winery calls itself the oldest bonded winery in Texas, and the family has a Land Heritage Award for holding the vineyards for more than a hundred years. The wines are made in small batches, some from local grapes and some from grapes bought elsewhere in Texas; the best known is the Don Luis Tawny Port.
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