Welcome to the Family

Kevin & Stephanie Maxwell own Stone Trough Mercantile (“The Merc”) along with a 325 acre farm situated just behind The Merc. Fingerprint Farms’ Local Meat Market and Stone Trough Winery are located inside The Merc. We operate the farm, meat market and winery with the help of our children: Cole, Kendall & Hayden. While owning and Operating family businesses is a challenge, we enjoy it and most of the time we feel like we get a little better at it each day. 

For us, it’s been a little surprising that as life-long city dwellers, raising animals on the farm (while complex and challenging) appears to come most naturally to us. The Winery sounded like a walk in the park (its not, but we’re figuring it out). And growing wine grapes has proven our biggest challenge. In fact, in our third attempt (sobs and tears flowing), we (well mostly me, Kevin) decided that the vineyard would be better aligned with the regenerative practices we use to manage the farm by incorporating the vines into a permaculture planting scheme. We (well, Kevin) call it a Vicharden (you know, a vineyard inside, an orchard, inside a garden).

Regenerative management principles favor planting multi-species crops rather than mono-crop planting. So that is what we are doing. If you are interested in learning more about the Vicharden.

As we walk down the bumpy vineyard road, and other wine business challenges, Steph and I have realized our true passion is the wine itself. We like visiting wineries in our travels; tasting, understanding, and pairing wines with food; and virtually traveling as we experience wines from around the world. But most importantly, we love sharing wine experiences with fellow wine travelers like us. 

So we have put aside our wine making plans in favor of working with experienced wine makers around the state to produce wines for our label. Making this shift allows us relaxa bit about the vineyard and wine production, so we can focus on running our wine tasting room and collecting wines from other great Texas wineries to stock our VinoPhiles Wine Cellar. With new Stone Trough wines to offer and VinoPhiles Cellar open, we’d like to invite you to come and visit us in the tasting room. We are both WSET Level II and Texas Wine Ambassador certified and would love to share a Texas Wine Experience with you and your friends. To do this, you can book a Group Curated Tasting at The Merc (click here for more information on private wine tastings and events) and we’ll share some wine with you.  We look forward to seeing you soon.