“It’s a whole hidden world,” my husband says as we ricochet along the increasingly steep and rocky dirt road that leads through the Davis Mountain Resort (DMR), a private residential community stretching over 8,000 acres across West Texas’ Davis Mountains.
Our woefully inadequate two-wheel-drive RAV4 stutters and stumbles behind Molly Cummings’ older, but far more sturdy, mother-of-pearl Land Rover as we ascend through tall piles of ochre boulders, patches of shrub, long grass, and prickly pear cacti. I’m mesmerized by the raw beauty of the mountains, the blue-gray clouds sitting low over the endless rugged peaks, but acutely aware of the sheer remoteness of our surroundings.
This is not a resort in the usual sense of the word—landscaped infinity pools surrounded by sun loungers, the unbroken sound of cocktail shakers hard at work, and sumptuous all-day buffets—it is a place where people come to escape the world in a very different way.
Cummings—slim, stylish, and sparkling with energy—is, by day, a biology professor at University of Texas Austin. She’s also a gin maker, and our journey to this remote tract of private land is to participate in one of her regular foraging expeditions.
Of the thousands of gins on the market, at least 95% are made solely with the common juniper berry, but Cummings hand-picks hyperlocal alligator and red berry junipers to make the first and only West Texas gins. WildGins features two expressions: WildBark and WildJune, each distilled with single-origin berries, with the name of the tree of origin written on each bottle.
In a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner, a Bud Light in every bar, and an Amazon package on every doorstep, Cummings has created something utterly unique with these gins. The process is sustainable and regenerative—trees are not harmed during foraging, and berries regrow every-other year—and requires no commercial cultivation or invasive farming, which means the spirits fully capture the terroir of the place in which they were foraged.
The gins also took a village to come to fruition. Cummings’ juniper-hunting journey started alone in the West Texas mountains with just a handful of textbooks—her intrepid nature and dogged persistence led her to find the home of these rare species—but WildGins only became possible after gaining permission to forage on land owned by isolated, self-sufficient DMR residents, trading berries for gin while building firm, lasting friendships.
This remote but tight-knit community helped Molly build her brand, piece by piece, connection by connection. “The access and support I’ve received from the community have been essential for me in creating a true West Texas gin,” Cummings says. “The relationships I’ve built are at its center.”
Originally from Wisconsin, Cummings moved to Austin in 2001 and has taken Texas and all things Texan into her heart. Independent, adventurous, and outdoorsy, she is as at home pitching her tent on the peaked crest of her land at over 7,000 feet, unfussed by the blustering wind or lack of water and electricity, as she is drinking cocktails in a hip Austin bar.
Over the course of our foraging weekend in West Texas she introduces me to a steady stream of residents she has befriended through her gin making process, many of whom take great pride in the fact that her berries are exclusive to their land. “I knew juniper was used for making gin, but I didn’t know our [junipers] were the best,” Bryan DeLesdernier says over Frangelico-spiked coffee on the first morning of our trip.
At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, he and his partner Paul Van Tine, and their cute dogs Angus and Henry, are happy to welcome us into their home to chat about life in the DMR, then forage juniper on their property—a sign of the immense goodwill Molly has engendered within this community. The pair met when DeLesdernier’s dog bit Van Tine—the best meet-cute ever, Cummings says with a grin—and the rest is history.
Their rustic two-story log cabin, complete with cowhide rocker on the porch, has the air of a Western fairytale—a feeling compounded by DeLesdernier’s intricately embroidered leather saddle and riding boots and their glass-fronted living room, where a magnificent Celestron Ultima 2000 telescope sits in prime position to take in all the desert night sky has to offer. Van Tine says their view of the Milky Way is second to none.
Cummings met DeLesdernier, who works in construction, early on in her foraging expeditions while he was hauling water from the community well, a job he does every two weeks, shifting 300 gallons at a time to fill the tanks on their property. There is no running water in the DMR, so residents either haul from the community well or have to dig their own. DeLesdernier and Van Tine’s stunning 22-acre piece of land boasts striking views in every direction—it’s easy to understand how unimportant running water might seem when you’re surrounded by such intense, visceral beauty and isolation. Living out here is an exercise in self-sufficiency, a choice to trade the creature comforts of infrastructure for nature, privacy, and space.
“The plants give us the gin so it’s our duty to give back.”
Strolling the boundaries of Van Tine and DeLesdernier’s property—Cummings’ dogs Jake and Bear know the steps by heart—they point out alligator juniper trees by name: Venerable Verna, Ample Alice, and Bountiful Betty. We discuss which are ready for foraging, dependent on berry size and quantity.
The trees, which can grow up to 50 feet tall, look almost prehistoric. Many are 150–200 years old, surviving because of their resilience to extreme weather conditions, including the drought that has plagued the Davis Mountains over the past couple of years. “[Junipers] will go on strike during a drought, but like Lazarus will come back to life,” Cummings explains. Van Tine shows us trees that are completely dead on one side but pushing out fresh leaves and berries on the other, determined to survive.
The soil beneath our feet is volcanic. Sculpted by magma flows 35 million years ago, it is rich with quartz crystals and peralkaline rocks, which DeLesdernier makes into small artistic displays around the property. Van Tine fishes a few shining stones from the ground and gently presses them into our hands as souvenirs. The soil’s characteristics, combined with the altitude (the property sits at 6,500 feet), give the berries their particular flavor and quality, which they all assure us are the best. “It ain’t bragging if it’s true,” Cummings quips, adding how Texas boasts eight juniper varieties compared to Europe’s sole offering.
She uses the Juniperus deppeana var. sperryi to make WildBark gin for its intensely aromatic and bold qualities. (Both of her gins also contain common juniper, a requirement to legally be called gin). “It spoke James Bond to me,” she says, nodding to its shaken-not-stirred urbane elegance.
With just three other traditional drying agents included in WildBark—orange peel, organic orris root, and coriander—the aromas of the gin resemble an evergreen forest: rich, sticky pine sap and fern trodden underfoot. The flavor is equally dramatic, a dry gin turned up to eleven, with orange peel and coriander peeking through on the finish. The bouquet evokes the physical presence of the imposing, verdant trees that bore the berries.
Cummings selects Bountiful Betty for the day’s foraging, and Van Tine backs his truck bed up underneath her so we can reach the lower branches. Cummings often forages with a larger scaffold or portable ladder to reach the higher spots, and never takes more than 25 percent of the berries on a single tree, which is adequate to make a single-source batch. Even when ripe, the berries are firmly attached to the branch, so it requires a bit of effort to pull them off. It is a practice that is “similar to milking the tree,” Cummings says.
As we pick and pluck, she explains how the berries are completely wild—they grow, fall to the ground, get eaten by birds and animals, and that is that—so to get government approval to distill them into gin, she had to prove they were safe to consume by sending extracts to two different companies for chemical evaluations, which were then sent to the FDA for sign-off. As a land custodian appreciative of its bounty, she has partnered with the Nature Conservancy of West Texas via her Wild Buck program, donating a dollar from every bottle sold to support their work promoting food and water sustainability and tackling climate change. “The plants give us the gin so it’s our duty to give back,” she says.
Foraging is meditative, methodical work—partly from the slow, steady repetition but also from the environment, the sense of tending to a plant, working with it, for it, rather than against it. Cummings likes the mental space it gives her, particularly when she’s foraging alone with just the sounds of the mountains.
While we chat as we work, we periodically fall into a comfortable silence, and I’m intensely aware of the lack of noise, the absence of traffic, phones and aircraft. There’s a clarity to the silence that’s so different from actively canceling out noise, reflecting the vastness of the DMR.
At the end of the picking session, Cummings estimates a haul of 5-8 pounds of berries, which is not bad for a morning—she normally shoots for about 10 pounds per tree per batch. “We are harvesting positively,” she says. “Juniper foraging is sustainable—we’re not harming or killing the plant (like making sotol or tequila); we’re using a part of it that will grow back naturally and doesn’t have any other uses.”
“Foraging is meditative, methodical work—partly from the slow, steady repetition but also from the environment, the sense of tending to a plant, working with it, for it, rather than against it.”
We head to Cummings’ 17-acre property further up the mountain to decamp for lunch at her favorite spot, a dramatic cliff face with an endless view across the mountain range. Having lived in the DMR for 23 years, Van Tine knows the name of every peak on the horizon and points them out to us as we eat. We can even make out the McDonald Observatory glinting in the distance.
While setting up a tall, spacious tent where she will spend the night, Cummings shares how she and her dogs came face-to-face with a mountain lion on their first night camping on the property. “I could see its yellow eyes glowing in the dark,” she tells me. “The dogs and I stayed inside the tent for the rest of the night but it chose to leave us alone, which felt like a welcome to the neighborhood.”
Van Tine shares how his move to the DMR from Seattle came at a time when the land was even wilder and less populated than it is now. Fighting his fear of a completely new, remote, and carnivore-populated environment, he stepped out of his RV and screamed: “I am the meanest motherfucker on this mountain!” Nothing has bothered him since. This harmonized leaning-in to nature is a key facet of DMR life, and a forged connection between its residents, a shared love of the wild.
Cummings shows us the Zome she is building—a compact multi-sided home with a low carbon footprint, designed to withstand extreme weather. It will function as both a living space and a berry processing plant. “I was struggling to find a suitable way to build on the property when Bryan told me about Zomes, which are an ideal design for me as they’re hardy and sustainable,” she says. “The Zome will mean I can process the berries straight after harvest rather than traveling seven hours back to Austin, keeping the berries fresher, which is especially important with the redberries because they have a higher level of sugar content and spoil more quickly.”
The process of making WildGins is a trade secret involving dehydrators and vacuum sealers, enabling her to store the berries for years without freezing them, meaning that she always has a plentiful supply and they are always in prime condition for gin-making.
“It’s the Zome gin built,” chuckles Van Tine.
Further down the mountain, we meet Joe Rowe and his wife Phyllis Arp, who are well-known members of the DMR community and very close with Cummings.
Rugged and skinny with long white hair, Rowe is a dyed-in-the-wool West Texan, his shotguns leaning neatly by his front door. He’s also something of a local celebrity and is accustomed to being interviewed, having been taken hostage by an armed militia describing themselves as the Texas Secessionist Movement back in 1997.
Rowe tells his story in a deep, throaty drawl, over glasses of WildJune gin mixed with pink grapefruit juice, poured over ice. It’s an intense, almost unbelievable tale including a two-day standoff, during which Rowe and his wife at the time were held hostage for 13-14 hours, but Rowe tells it with practiced ease and exceptional humor, especially considering he was shot in the arm at the start of the siege. “It was not exactly the way I wanted to spend my Sunday, but it worked out okay in the end,” he concludes wryly.
Arp, one of the founders and original directors of Austin’s South By Southwest festival, and great-niece of the founder of the McDonald Observatory, moved to the DMR 24 years ago and owns the nearby campsite where Cummings stayed before buying her own land. As we talk, she prepares food for a memorial service the following day for a neighbor who has recently passed away. “You can’t just order catering out here,” she tells us as she chops and stirs.
Cummings is very much at home in the elegant two-story adobe home. She knows where the glasses are kept and keeps us all topped up as we chat, occasionally hopping up to give Arp a hand with the cooking. “The first place I stayed in the DMR was Phyllis’ campsite,” Cummings tells us. She was quickly adopted into the family, with Rowe and Arp numbering among her first investors, and now this is where she shelters when camping in bad weather. “She has an open reservation,” Rowe laughs.
Cummings is a fun person to be around: relaxed, animated, and incredibly smart. It’s clear how she’s become such a favorite in the DMR. Like DeLesdernier, Rowe is sporting WildGins merch. The genuine fondness and pride the couple feel for her punctuates our discussion. “Molly’s damn sure something to write about—she’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of people in my day,” says Rowe.
“Cummings is a fun person to be around: relaxed, animated, and incredibly smart. It’s clear how she’s become such a favorite in the DMR.”
Back in Fort Davis, just southeast of the Davis Mountains, Cummings is warmly welcomed at the town’s charity barn dance. On arrival, she’s greeted by multiple friends and whisked around the dance floor to tunes by the Doodling Hogwallers, whose drummer, Aaron, is also the local honey- and mead-maker. Another friend, Audrey Hurley, throws her arms around Cummings in delight. Their long relationship began while Hurley was working at Fort Davis’ Blue Mountain Bistro, where she was one of the first bartenders to invent cocktails specifically for Wild Gins.
Afterwards, we head to Marfa—the region’s most famous tourist hotspot—for dinner at Jett’s Grill in the Hotel Paisano, where we spend time chatting with Jett’s general manager Carter Rowe, who is Joe Rowe’s granddaughter-in-law and another big advocate of Wild Gins. “To me, it’s important to support a locally produced and woman-owned business,” says Rowe, sporting a chic black puff-sleeve.
The following day, we meet Audrey Hurley at the historic H.E. Sproul Ranch, one of the best hunting lodges in the state and a taxidermist’s dream—all wood and leather with mounted animal heads gracing every available space. Audrey’s husband and co-owner, Roy Hurley, who is also the local fire marshal, hosts groups from all over the world on elk, musk deer, and aoudad hunts. The luxurious lodge is where visitors relax afterwards, drinking the WildGins cocktails Audrey creates.
The feeling is mutual. “This is exactly the effect I want with my gin: crisp and clean with the flavor shining,” Cummings says. The quality and personality of the cocktails that mixologists create with her gin is very important to Cummings, who often shares examples on her website and social media. “It’s all about treading lightly,” she says—the gins are so expressive of their environment, there is no need to cover up their characteristics with too many other ingredients.
As we sip our cocktails, Roy arrives to take us on a tour of the 7,000-acre property. Every inch a professional hunter, he sports a heavy gray-gold mustache, loaded leather holster on hip. We pile into his four-wheel-drive Bobcat, replete with hunting rifle in purpose-built holder, to inspect several trees that Cummings hopes to forage from, including both alligator and redberry junipers—our first sighting of the latter, as they are especially rare native trees.
Cummings first stumbled across Juniperus pinchotii Sudw (redberry juniper) while foraging for alligator berries near the McDonald Observatory. After rifling through a textbook to learn the berries were edible, she tasted one on the spot and felt “ecstatic, as it was sweet and so unusually flavored.” The trees are much smaller than alligator junipers, sitting low to the ground and lacking the distinctive bark. Their foraging season is shorter, too—just six weeks compared to three or more months—and the berries must be fully ripe, but not overripe, when harvested, requiring a fine balance to pick them at exactly the right time for processing.
The following day we join Cummings in the tiny town of Sheffield, Texas (population 174), to inspect fully ripe and ready-to-harvest redberry plants. Alligator berries grow only at the highest altitudes, but redberries grow more plentifully at the bottom of the mountainside, so Cummings has had to cultivate more friends and collaborators in the valley for her supply.
We step into a converted 19th-century mercantile that is part studio, part gallery, part checkered-table café. The space is filled with taxidermy, metalwork, riding blankets, and old posters and newspapers, amid which Mike Capron’s art is displayed. Capron is another West Texas legend, whose fascinating life story as an artist has been featured in Texas Monthly. He greets us warmly, chewing on a toothpick.
The former rancher’s elegiac, luminous Western art is created through a combination of commission and inspiration, and although he and his boss sold their last full-size ranch to Jeff Bezos (a true story, we are told), he keeps his hand in on the smallholding he and his wife Anne inherited 18 miles east of town, where they herd cattle and have a plentiful supply of red juniper berries. Capron treats Cummings as both a valued friend and custodian of his berries, whose progress he is keen to be updated on after the recent rains.
The two met through Joe Rowe and formed a close bond through their shared love of the land. Inside the Caprons’ home are signs of their connection to Cummings: bottles of WildJune made with redberries foraged from star performing trees “Capt. Capron” and “Lovely Lane” (named for the pair’s granddaughter) adorn the rustic wooden kitchen where Cummings was treated that morning to a cowboy breakfast with chicory coffee.
“Warmer and sweeter than WildBark, WildJune reflects the rust-colored cliffs and boulders shaping the West Texas landscape. ”
The Caprons’ property features ripe redberries bursting from the trees. Most local farmers consider the redberry juniper a weed and often cull them to stop the trees from draining scarce stores of desert water. Finding a practical use for them is, again, a first. These berries come easily off the branches—no milking required. Cummings can sometimes throw a tarp under a single tree and shake the berries from it, simplifying the process.
Plucking some from the bounty, I sample the dusty sangria-colored berries. Their taste contrasts dramatically to the alligators’: dry and tannic, like cranberry or boysenberry, but with a bright, juicy acidity that lingers long after you’ve finished chewing. “The redberry and common juniper are yin and yang,” Cummings explains. “It took a lot of creative experimentation to figure out what complement of botanicals would bring out the redberry flavors best.”
WildJune is a Western-style gin distilled with 10 botanicals, “so the juniper is not overwhelming, but more complex and nuanced,” Cummings says. With aromas redolent of redberry mixed with zesty lemon balm, initial sips bring the moreish cinnamon-white pepper combo to the fore, with a bitterness from centennial hops bringing up the rear.
Warmer and sweeter than WildBark, WildJune reflects the rust-colored cliffs and boulders shaping the West Texas landscape. There is a place for both and the essence of the land they carry.
A week or so later, back in Austin, Molly and I meet at El Raval, an upscale Spanish restaurant on South Lamar boulevard, where we catch up like old friends. I marvel at how her gins—which come from a place so different from where we sit—have been fully embraced by the bustling hipster city where her passionate, boundless hustle and belief in her product have led to success in a challenging and competitive market.
Nearly 10 years after her journey began, WildGins is stocked at retail outlets across Texas, including big names like Specs and Total Wines. They also feature on the menu at bars and restaurants around the state, from upscale spots like Dallas’ Boulevardier and Austin’s Sour Duck Market to sports bars like Austin’s Haymaker. With multiple awards and nominations, and evocative labels designed by well-known Austin musician and artist Bob Schneider, WildGins has cultivated a dedicated following among bartenders drawn in by the gins’ unique flavor profile, and hip young Texans who like to drink local.
Our conversation circles back to the community it’s taken to build a truly West Texas gin. A spirit from a place where people go to be surrounded by the wilds of nature and nothing else. The juniper berries in every bottle are picked by a loving hand, one invested in sharing their flavor (and story) with drinkers who may never visit West Texas, but will know what it tastes like.
In the space of her decade spending time in the DMR, Cummings has, in turn, become a part of this broad Texas community, integrated into its fabric and spirit in the same way that her gins are. Her energy, her passion, her openness have made all of this possible, making Cummings a West Texas legend in her own right.
Words by Ruvani de SilvaIllustrations by Colette Holston
