Photo courtesy Virginia Wine Board
The first attempt at wine making in Virginia dates back to 1607. Four hundred years later, Virginia is, for all its wine trails and tasting rooms, still an emerging wine region. What stage of emerging, perhaps, is still up for debate. Ben Jordan, winemaker at Early Mountain Vineyards and Lightwell Survey Wines, thinks Virginia is a teenager. “Or even tween,” he says. “That awkward, figuring out there are other people in the world, sort of time.’”
Stephen Barnard, winemaker and vineyard manager at Keswick Vineyards, would place the state a little further along. “We’ve gone through our awkward stage,” he says. “Now we’re applying to college. We have an idea of where we want to go.”
What winemakers can agree on is that it’s an exciting time to be making — and drinking — wine in the commonwealth. “We’re starting to figure some things out,” Jordan says.
Virginia winemakers are becoming well versed in what works for our regions, paying attention to site selection, grape varietals and tricks of cultivation in order to deal with humid summers, frigid winters, pests and diseases. “The quality has skyrocketed,” Barnard says.
The increase in quality is partly thanks to efforts like those of the Virginia Wine Research Exchange, a nonprofit that launched in 2014 to support the state’s winemakers. Grant-funded by the Virginia Wine Board, VWRE aims to foster innovation through experimentation and education among winemakers.
Joy Ting, the organization’s research oenologist and exchange coordinator, says, “My job is to serve as many Virginia wine producers as want to be served. I help structure experiments so they’re as rigorous as can be but still on a production scale, and then help with analysis.”
When asked what stage she believes Virginia wine is in, Ting laughs. “I used to teach high school, and I feel like there’s such a big shift that happens,” she explains. “When you’re a freshman, you’re just trying to hold it together; when you’re a sophomore, you’re more capable of learning things. That’s how I think about our industry — a lot of pioneers have given us the tools to get the grapes clean and grow a ripe crop. Now it’s, how do we shift to these questions of real excellence?”
“We’ve come a long way in terms of being able to evaluate what is plantable,” says Jordan, noting his excitement for the promising 100% petit manseng.
Ting echoes Jordan’s thoughts. “We’re the second largest planting in the world [after France] … but we’re thinking about Virginia petit manseng and how to make it into a distinctive wine for our regions.”
Other winemakers are similarly refining their focus. At Keswick, Barnard says their expansions include cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and petit verdot. “We want to be world class,” he says. “We didn’t expand for 11 years, and we were researching, researching, researching. Then we decided: We’re all in, we’re going red.”
At RdV Vineyards in Delaplane, winemaker Joshua Grainer focuses exclusively on Bordeaux blends. “Being able to still define a winery, region and state is a pretty big honor and an exciting thing to be a part of,” he says. Virginia producers are feeling more confident, while continuing to refine their process. The goal, Ting says, is to “get to the point so that when someone orders a Virginia wine off a wine list, there is consistency in quality, even though from vintage to vintage, it [can be] very different because we’re very vintage-driven. But that [will be] a fun and exciting thing, as opposed to risky.”
5 VIRGINIA WINES TO TRY
- RdV Vineyards Rendezvous 2015
- Early Mountain Vineyards Red Pét-Nat 2018
- Lightwell Survey Wines Hintermen 2016
- Michael Shaps Wineworks Petit Manseng 2016
- Keswick Vineyards LVA Rosé 2018
Au Naturel
What makes a wine “natural?”
Though still a small slice of the total amount of wine consumed in the United States, natural wine has seized an outsize portion of the wine world’s attention in the past few years. But what does “natural wine” mean? The term natural wine has no legal definition or official certification, meaning that it can be vague and sometimes exploited.
Most winemakers would agree that a naturally made wine is one that’s grown using sustainable practices and manipulated as little as possible from start to finish. In practice, that usually means wine made from grapes grown using organic, biodynamic and/or environmentally aware practices that are hand harvested by small producers; fermented with naturally occurring yeasts; and free of most additives, beyond a small amount of sulfur dioxide for stability.
Wines made in this way can run the gamut from clean and crisp to funky, tangy and cloudy. Many wine enthusiasts, such as Randall Doetzer, chef and sommelier at Jackson Ward’s Adarra, consider natural wines a clearer expression of terroir. “When you start doing these [cleaner] wines, it’s more about the winemaker and where it comes from than it is the grape — although it’ll end up being a more pure expression of the grape as it relates to that area,” he says.
Because of the fuzzy definition of “natural,” many people prefer to use the terms low- or minimum-intervention wine. So where can you find low-intervention, organic and biodynamic wines?
“A vast majority of the wines that I love and bring in for the shop are made with low intervention,” says Booth Hardy, owner of Barrel Thief Wine Shop & Cafe. Places like Ellwood Thompson’s and Saison Market are other good bets, as are bars and restaurants that focus on low-intervention wines, such as Adarra.
