The mail is out, and the bubbles are in at Hye’s century‑old post office. William Chris Wine Company is turning the tiny Hill Country building at 10261 US‑290 into a dedicated tasting room for its new Rebecca Caroline sparkling label, focused on traditional‑method Texas sparkling wine. The tasting room is slated to open this May, with cellar tours already available by reservation, turning a sliver of local history into a small‑scale wine destination for members and curious passersby.
What the tasting room will offer
According to Rebecca Caroline, the Hye Post Office spot will serve as the brand’s home base and a hub for the R.C. Express wine club. The site describes the lineup as traditional‑method sparkling built on Texas terroir, signaling that the bubbles are meant to be as place‑specific as they are celebratory. CultureMap San Antonio reports that William Chris has framed the move as part of a family‑business focus on legacy, and the tasting room is set to showcase the new sparkling releases front and center.
Hye Post Office's Hill Country history
The setting brings its own street cred. The Texas State Historical Association notes that Hiram “Hye” Brown built a new post office structure in 1904 that later became the Hye General Store and Post Office, now listed as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. TSHA also records local lore tying President Lyndon B. Johnson to the site, including his use of the post office porch for the 1965 appointment of a U.S. postmaster general, giving the future tasting room a presidential footnote along with its postal past.
Tastings, tours and membership
The Rebecca Caroline site lays out the R.C. Cellar Experience as a 90‑minute, cellar‑focused tasting available Friday through Sunday for groups of one to eight. Reservations are required, and the experience includes early access to the first sparkling releases. The site also details the R.C. Express wine club, a limited‑release program offered in six‑ and twelve‑bottle tiers, with priority allocations and member‑only tastings dispatched from Hye. While the post office‑turned‑tasting room gets its finishing touches, guests can already reserve those cellar experiences.
What this means for Texas wine
For William Chris, a winery that has positioned itself as a flagship for Texas‑grown wines, the Hye project creates a public home for a premium sparkling program and plugs one more polished stop into the US‑290 wine‑tourism circuit. The company has increasingly emphasized estate and single‑vineyard storytelling, and Rebecca Caroline’s allocation‑driven club underscores a direct‑to‑consumer strategy designed for limited production. The new tasting room is expected to give visitors a way to taste traditional‑method Texas bubbles in a space that already holds more than a century of local memory.
Reservations and membership allocations for Rebecca Caroline continue to run through the brand and William Chris’s existing reservation channels. When the Hye tasting room opens this spring, it adds an intimate, membership‑forward stop along the Hill Country trail, with a spotlight on Texas fruit and the cellar work behind those sparkling releases.
