Welcome to the Family
Hello and welcome to our website.
Our names are, Kevin & Stephanie Maxwell, and we own Stone Trough Winery located inside the Stone Trough Mercantile building (“The Merc”), Fingerprint Farms, the family's 325 acre farm, and 171 Boat & RV Storage, which are both located just behind the Merc. On Fingerprint Farms we produce regeneratively managed grassfed beef, lamb, chicken, turkey and eggs and sell the meats direct to the public both online and at the Cowtown Farmer's Market and Mansfield Farm and Cottage Market. Along with our children: Cole, Kendall & Hayden, we live out on the farm and work together to operate all of the businesses. 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).
Since moving forward with the Vicharden, we have developed a hillside oak grove located adjacent to the Vicharden into an outdoor venue where we will be hosting Vicharden Parties, featuring Stone Trough Winery and Fingerprint Farms products. We also plan on hosting Christian Fellowship Nights we call "Gather Together Thursdays", other private events, and even a U-PICK garden beginning in the spring of 2026.
Regenerative management principles favor planting multi-species crops rather than mono-crop planting. So that is what we are doing. For the last two years we have been planting wine grapes, orchard trees (apples, pears, peaches, plumbs, apricots, apples, figs and even pomegranites), and berries (blackberry, boysenberry, raspberry, blueberries, etc) and vegetable gardens within and between the grapevines and trees. In addition to the plants we plant directly into the Vicharden, we developed a wild flower meadow between the oak grove and Vicharden. This has brought in a bunch of polinators and beneficial insects in close proximity to the Vicharden. This plan has proven to be fairly successful, as it appears we will be going into our third year with healthy vines (we ave lost the other three plantings within a year of planting when using a monocropped vineyard system), trees and garden. So we are very excited about that.
In addition to all of this, we planted a Milpa garden where next year's Vicharden planting will be happening. This is a mixture of 30 plus plant varieties broadcast into the plot. Talk about diversity, that thing has it. And, it roared to life. In fact, it has become quite the beast, growing extraordinarily dense and high. So much so, that we really have not been able to harvest it. But, I know the plants are pumping so much carbon in the form of sugars into the soil and feeding the soil life that next year's planting will have a truly awsome home to put roots down into. Really, we have already cut through the Milpa garden to plant a couple of rows of grapevines and blackberries and they are doing great despite the Milpa trying to devour them all summer long.
And speaking of blackberries, we planted so many more of these as they have been one of the most successful plants we planted in the Vicharden over the first two years. So much so, that our plans are to invest heavily in blackberry production so that we can host a U-PICK in the Vicharden, starting in the spring of 2026. We have truly fallen in love with the Vicharden concept and hope to have all of our direct sales, including the meats, occur out on the farm as we continue developing the U-PICK concept. We love having people out on the farm and sharing the experience of being on a chemical free farm, where they can see God's creation working together the way he designed it to function.
As we walked down the bumpy vineyard road, and other wine business challenges, Steph and I realized that, our true wine industry 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 relax a bit about the vineyard and wine production, so we can focus on running our wine tasting room, the Vicharden, and collecting wines from other great Texas wineries to stock our VinoPhiles Texas 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 or out at event in the Vicharden. 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.
Sincerely,
Kevin & Stephanie Maxwell
