Drive north on Highway 289 out of Gunter on a Saturday morning in October and you will pass a vineyard without knowing it. There is no billboard, no arrow pointing off the two-lane blacktop, nothing but a hand-lettered sign easy to miss at 55 miles an hour. Keep going another few minutes and the road announces itself properly: hay bales stacked into a photo backdrop, a line of cars turning into a gravel lot, kids already carrying pumpkins twice the size of their heads. That second stop is the one everyone in North Texas has heard of. The first one is the reason locals know something visitors don't.
Preston Trail Farms is what put Gunter on the map for anyone outside Grayson and Collin counties. It shows up on parenting blogs, pumpkin patch roundups, and family day-trip lists across the Metroplex every September. What those lists don't mention, because they're not written by people who actually live here, is that a few miles down the same stretch of 289 sits a working vineyard that a Texas wine writer recently compared, glass in hand, to Linden Vineyards in Virginia. That's not a knock on the pumpkin patch. It's just a reminder that the more interesting stop is the one without a website.
The Farm Everybody Already Knows
Preston Trail Farms runs its full pumpkin season daily from September 19 through November 25 this year, and if you've driven past on a weekend afternoon you already know what that means: hayrides, a hay maze, a petting barn full of goats and longhorns, and a True Value hardware and feed store that somehow shares a parking lot with all of it. The farm's cafe, now called The Trails Cafe, opened in 2015 as part of the property, back when it went by the name Burger Fixin before the rebrand.
What most visitors don't know is how close the farm came to not reopening at all last fall. In September 2025, straight-line winds of 70 to 80 miles an hour tore through Gunter overnight, flattening barns across town and killing three goats when one collapsed at Preston Trail Farms. Owner Cody Kimbrell, whose family had run the farm for 28 years at that point, described the damage plainly: "we put a lot of work into this, and it's gone." Gunter's volunteer fire crew worked past 1:30 in the morning clearing debris and freeing horses trapped in a collapsed structure elsewhere in town. The hardware store stayed open through it, and the family kept its promise to open the pumpkin patch on schedule two weeks later. This fall's full season, running clean through late November, is the version of the farm that rebuilt itself in front of the whole town.
What's Actually Down the Road
Here is the part that doesn't make the visitor lists. A few minutes from that same pumpkin patch, on a 25-acre property that used to run cattle, sits Square Cloud Winery. Jackson and Cheryl Anderson licensed the operation in 2011 and started producing wine from their own estate grapes in 2015, the same year Preston Trail's cafe opened. Ten of those 25 acres are planted in vine now, and because the property sits on the southern edge of Grayson County, the wines carry a Texoma AVA label, a designation the wineries just a few miles south in Celina can't claim.
The winery has no formal website. Its marketing is a Facebook page and word of mouth. A wine writer who visited in February of this year described tasting a 2019 estate Chardonnay that stopped her mid-sentence, noting it reminded her stylistically of Linden Vineyards, a well-regarded producer out of Virginia. She stayed past closing, sampled a tank sample of the next vintage, and joined the wine club before she left. That's a specific kind of afternoon for a vineyard most people driving 289 assume is just another fenced pasture.
Square Cloud pours Malvasia Bianca, two styles of Tempranillo, a late-harvest Roussanne, a Merlot, a Syrah, and a pair of Cabernet Franc-based dessert wines, all from fruit grown on-site. It's open Sunday afternoons. That single detail changes how a Gunter weekend actually works.
Why the Sunday Schedule Matters More Than It Sounds
If you treat Preston Trail Farms and Square Cloud Winery as two separate errands on two separate weekends, you're doing it the way a first-time visitor would. Locals who've figured out the rhythm run it the other way: Saturday belongs to the farm, when the hayrides and the crowds and the kids picking pumpkins off the vine make sense, and Sunday afternoon belongs to the winery, when the tasting room is quiet enough for Jackson to walk you through a barrel sample and the whole thing feels less like a stop on a list and more like an actual afternoon.
That's the piece outsiders miss. Gunter isn't one attraction with a parking lot next to it. It's a loop that only works if you know the winery's hours are the exception, not the rule, and plan around them instead of showing up on a Tuesday and finding the gate closed.
The Market That Keeps Moving Around
The third stop in the loop is less predictable, which is its own kind of charm. The Gunter Community Market sets up at Gunter City Park on Elm Street, but the day and format has shifted over the past few years. In 2022 and 2023 it ran on Sunday afternoons through the growing season, with one memorable footnote: it closed on Sundays when the Cowboys played at noon. By 2025 it had moved to second Thursday evenings, three to seven, running from May through December. If you've lived in Gunter for a while, you've probably already adjusted your calendar more than once for this market. If you're newer, it's worth checking the current schedule before you plan around it, because the one constant has been that it doesn't stay constant.
That inconsistency is oddly appropriate for a town this size. A market at Gunter City Park doesn't need permanent branding or a fixed identity. It needs local farmers and enough neighbors showing up to make rearranging the schedule worth it every year.
One Stretch of Road, Not Three Errands
Put the distances next to each other and the shape of the town gets clearer. Square Cloud sits inside Gunter proper. Eden Hill Vineyard, the winery most casual visitors have actually heard of, is 2.6 miles away in Celina. Cooley Bay Winery is 8.2 miles off in Van Alstyne. The wine map of this corner of North Texas treats Gunter as a pass-through between better-known names in neighboring towns, which is exactly backward if you're the one who lives here and knows the vineyard the map skips is the one worth the detour.
A weekend that starts at Preston Trail Farms on Saturday, moves to Square Cloud on Sunday, and swings by Gunter City Park whenever the market lands that month covers the whole town without putting more than a few miles on the odometer. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when a town this size holds onto its own farm, its own vineyard, and its own market instead of ceding all three to bigger neighbors down the highway.
If you're mapping this out for the first time:
- Saturday, September through November: Preston Trail Farms, 15102 TX-289, daily through November 25
- Sunday afternoon: Square Cloud Winery, just off 289 near the Grayson County line, open Sundays only
- Check the current month: Gunter Community Market at Gunter City Park, 200 W. Elm St., schedule varies by season
None of this shows up on the lists written for people passing through. It's the version of Gunter that only makes sense once you've lived here long enough to know which gate opens on Sundays and which barn got rebuilt after last September's storm.
Whether you're settled in Gunter for good or just starting to pay attention to what makes this stretch of Grayson and Collin County work, Nancy Floyd is always glad to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods around Prosper, Celina, and Gunter. Schedule a meeting whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
