The double doors of an A-frame barn open to an empty hall ending in a wall of windows. The intervening space is bathed in gentle southeastern morning light. The view looks northwest toward the forested backside of Carter Mountain. Charlottesville’s there somewhere, but it’s hidden behind blue mountains that overlap in rising layers. Red bud, white dogwood, trumpet-shaped wild azalea and a well-pruned old peach tree bloom in a forest of color on the convex hill below. At the window, a small vineyard fills the foreground. Rows of trellis wire and wood posts support sinuous vines. The vintner (call him Mathieu) paces the nursery with furrowed intensity. An untended thicket of dandelion, mustard and wild onion sways around his knees.
For, say, a cool $10 million, the vision could be yours.
A second generation of vintners is taking root in Virginia’s red clay. Heiresses, rock bands and wealthy Texas cattle families now ferment European Vitis vinifera varieties. Behind the estate walls and farm gates, they are building on the legacy of small farm families that resurrected the craft after Prohibition. Between the wine barrels they are fermenting a culture of intrigue, big money, and intergenerational feuds, and safeguarding the last best hope for agriculture here. Welcome to the curious but wonderful world of winemaking in Virginia.
Winemakers believe the influence of the land can be tasted in the grapes. As wineries grow, the reverse is also true: The culture of the vine begins to influence the land. Agriculture preserves traditions, places, generations and names, and when that culture changes so does the landscape, for good and for ill.
The number of vineyards in the state has grown to 87 in 2004 from six in 1979. Comprising 2,500 acres in total, it’s a rare growth sector of agriculture in the Commonwealth. And with the United States Supreme Court this week striking down interstate commerce laws that had banned Virginia wineries from shipping their products directly to customers outside Virginia, the business is poised to grow even more. Charlottesville and Albemarle lie at the heart of the best grape-growing land, with the 21 wineries in the Monti-cello appellation outnumbering the others. On the southeastern aspect of a foothill, just east of the Blue Ridge, is about as good as vineyard land gets in Virginia.
Which is not so good. The Common-wealth ranks fifth in the country by volume of wine, but it’s difficult to grow vines here and the wines were historically of poor quality. “If there is a way to describe Virginia from a viticultural standpoint, it is variable,” says a Virginia Tech viticulture professor. “And variability is not conducive to high wine quality or the perception of wine quality.” Virginia’s viticulturists, however, like the vine itself, thrive in the face of adversity.
Virginia’s First Lady of Wine is Felicia Warburg Rogan at Oak-encroft Winery. Recently named Tourism Person of the Year by the Char-lottesville-Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau, Rogan opened the winery in 1983; 2005 represents her 22nd vintage. Three miles off Barracks Road, Rogan remembers being surrounded by farmland when she moved from New York in 1977 to join her husband on his farm. Then there were only five wineries in the state. Today, Oakencroft is the closest winery to the rapidly growing city and the University.
When they started the winery, John Rogan had never had wine. “Like most Virginians, he drank Scotch,” Rogan remembers. “He spent a year and a half trying to make wine from these grapes. I called it garage wine.”
From that humble beginning, Rogan now produces at least a dozen varieties of celebrated Virginia wines. She credits her staff, Philip Ponton, the vineyard manager who planted the first vines on the site, and Riaan Rossouw, a South African winemaker. She points to her Merlot and Chardonnay as two of her personal favorites. This year the winery will also do its first pressings of Viognier (a white wine that grows particularly well in the region), Chambourcin and a rosé, a Bordeaux-style blended wine that is lighter and sweeter.
Winemakers mark time in vintages, not years. Their calendars start and end not with holidays but bud break and harvest. May 22 is a high holy day mentioned in whispers, the day when the risk of frost passes. Bud break starts around April 15 and for an agonizing month, each dawn carries the risk that the fragile budding fruit of this year’s harvest will freeze.
Over a two-week window in late April, the first green tendrils of the coming year’s crop poke from the matching brown buds on spur-pruned cordons of the vine. From Afton to Barboursville, Charlottesville’s wine set opened their doors and gates to let this writer in.
Gabriele Rausse is the man who brought vinifera to Virginia. Tourism boards like to credit Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson’s grapes died. Rausse’s genius lay in using European vinifera that had been grafted, or joined, with the rootstock of disease-tolerant native grapes.
No one believed it would work. “When the first Barboursville wine appeared on the market, people started to say we were getting the wine from Italy,” Rausse says in a charming Italian accent. The Department of Agriculture told him he was crazy and warned him not to lead the Virginia farmer astray.
The man now known as both the patron saint and godfather of Virginia wine was inclined to agree with that assessment. “I have been a loser all my life, starting from school,” he remembers. “So the idea of coming here and doing something which didn’t work was very attractive to me.”
Thirty years later, Rausse’s small, weathered hands grafted many of the oldest vines in the area. It’s excruciatingly detailed work. “We were doing 100,000 vines per year and I enjoy every graft,” he says. At Simeon Vineyards, later Jefferson Vineyard, he planted 50,000 vines a year.
Today, Rausse spends his days as the associate director of gardens and grounds at Monticello. His small, eponymous winery ferments grapes from his one-acre vineyard and independent growers. His wine sells on his good name, and he’s not in a rush to post a Web page or respond to orders. If he doesn’t like a crop, he’s free to throw it away (and has). “Everything I do, I do it with my heart and not with my brain,” he says.
Good wine is made in the vineyard. “Wine is only a reflection of the grapes,” Fernando Franco tells me while driving through Barboursville Vineyards. “When you have beautiful grapes you have beautiful wine.”
Theoretically, wine is profoundly simple—it requires a single ingredient. To fill a bottle it takes three pounds of grapes, or the fruit of one vine.
Franco is the vineyard manager for Barboursville. Touring his farm in a dusty, well-worn farm truck, bud break is well advanced. The Chardonnay leaves are nearly fully formed and he points out miniature grape clusters.
Franco spends his days in the fields. “This is what I live for all winter long,” he says this sunny afternoon. “For a day like this, being here and being in a beautiful place.” He surveys the rolling hills and the 30 acres newly cleared for planting.
Owned by an Italian winemaking family, Barboursville is the oldest and biggest winery in this region, producing 30,000 cases a year. The owners have just invested $1 million to renovate an inn next to the Barboursville ruins. The esteemed Palladio Restaurant also captures the tourist dollar.
Barboursville’s not blessed with an idyllic location, so Franco’s well versed in the vagaries of weather. Early growth puts his vines at heightened risk of spring frost damage. “Grapes are like we are,” he says. “When grapes are under stress they respond to that.”
When we talk, there’s been frost the previous two weekends. On cold nights, Barboursville uses wind machines to circulate air. The windmill-like machines mix warmer air 150 feet above the ground with the colder air at vine level. Some vineyards rent helicopters. The air 150 feet up can be as much as eight degrees warmer.
Like children, vines flourish when they must care for themselves. A healthy root system feeds a healthy vine. Rich, loamy soil and irrigation on demand “makes the vines lazy,” Franco says. Irrigation is another technique that distinguishes local vineyards, with some managers shunning it and others embracing it. Left to scavenge, the roots, like the vine, can grow many feet in a year. Some roots reach 90 feet into hillsides. Managing a plant’s vigor is a big challenge here.
The goal is to grow heavy, ripe grapes within a short window. Sugar content—or brix—of the berry is only one criteria that determines ripeness. “At 23 brix sometimes there is a nice body and a nice tannin, all that expresses in the wine so neatly that once the grapes are in the winery, you can tell from the moment the fermentation stops,” Fernando says. “You can tell already, ‘Wow, this is going to be a great wine.’
“When I walk through the vineyard and I am ready to harvest,” he adds, “I pick the berry and I crunch the seeds. If the seeds crunch neutral without overpowering green tannins, that is ready for harvest.”
Wine should be simple, but these are just a few of the influences that control the taste of the grape and ultimately the wine. In the vineyard, the trellising, disease resistance, cold tolerance, myriad site concerns, irrigation and other factors play into the flavor of the grapes.
In the winery, the age of the barrels, the type of wood, the length and temperature of fermentation, whether the juice moves by a pump or gravity flow and whether whole berries, whole clusters or grapes without skins are fermented all influence the taste of the wine. Not to mention, most important, the variety of grape and blend of wine.
For all that Virginia’s vintners fiddle with the factors to approach the essence of grape, many sidestep one aspect: the farm as living organism.
All over the world, progressive grape growers use simple biological techniques to further refine grape growing. But in Virginia, vineyard managers commonly believe, for example, that 20 fungicide sprays in a season do not influence the character of their grapes.
Brad McCarthy hopes to change some things. His five-acre Blenheim Vineyard is open to the public only by appointment, and his A-frame winery overlooks pretty country. McCarthy’s grown up in the business, and at 38 he has a top-shelf reputation as a winemaker. “I have been working in vineyards for 19 years, I’ve spent most of my career in cellars,” he says. At White Hall Vineyards, he nabbed two Governor’s Cups—the state’s most prestigious wine award—in the winery’s first five years.
McCarthy is famous as a winemaker but says, “It’s all in the vineyard. I am kind of the anti-winemaker. If I have to make wine, there are problems in the vineyard and I am having to work it.”
He’s trying to bring international techniques and a different business model to the local industry. Many wineries sell as much as 90 percent of their wine from tasting rooms. “Once you have someone across the tasting bar in a beautiful setting,” McCarthy says, “… you can sell them anything.” He wants to rely more on independent growers and produce wines that sell in wine shops, “like all the wines in the world.”
The exuberant and curly-locked McCarthy is a plant geek, jumping up to grab a seed box, change the music or pour some wine. He smokes while he drinks—heresy—and admits he’s a maverick.
He experiments with a growing method called biodynamic. Conventional agriculture dismisses biodynamics as modern alchemy and so much hocus-pocus. But McCarthy saw the best vineyards in France doing it and his interest was piqued. Biodynamics treats the farm as an organism and works to bring all elements into balance, using farm animals to recycle nutrients, for example. Biodynamics translates into more sustainable and ecological growing practices and incorporates many organic principles. McCarthy still sprays but his vineyard is “organic where we can [be].”
“It starts with the soil,” he says. He’s sent his soil for microbial analysis, bucking the farmers’ holy trinity of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. He’s sowing a plant mix that includes other men’s weeds—yarrow, crimson clover and alfalfa—to attract beneficial insects. He’s trying to work with nature, not against it.
“To be at a point in your life where you are dynamic with nature, the involvement with your environment and the world around you, I find endlessly fascinating,” he says. “There are endless variables. You never know how it is going to go.… My life is dynamic.”
Bill Moses carries the business end of the wine stick. The CEO of Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyards and chair of the Virginia Wine Board is retired from the entertainment business in New York, “where they don’t bother to stab you in the back.”
Moses is happy to discuss Wine Board initiatives, but not Kluge Estates. (They’ve had enough, thanks.) Moses’ co-chair on another wine board, the Wine Study Work Group, was the State Secretary of Commerce. With some money and friends in high places, the wine business should be going somewhere. But of all the wine sold in Virginia, only 4 percent is made here. The Wine Board’s goal is to double that in the next decade.
One proposal of the Wine Study Work Group is a Vintners Quality Assurance label that would set minimum standards for labeling, say, a “chardonnay” a Chardonnay. Kluge Estates is also working closely with Piedmont Virginia Community College on a vineyard-management technical course.
The Wine Board runs interference with county boards of supervisors that try to limit winery operations. A farm winery license permits an unusual combination of agriculture, processing and retail sales. Some localities have tried to limit the number of events a winery can hold, the number of cases they can produce or whether they can have a restaurant.
“As chair of the Wine Board, there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t have a problem with a board of supervisors somewhere,” Moses says. Greene and Nelson counties are generally tolerant of wineries, but Moses’ Kluge Estate has butted heads with the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors on its attempts to build residential housing at Kluge Estates.
Moses is well positioned to understand the effect of wineries on rural preservation. In 2004, Kluge Estate’s proposal to build 32 homes on its agricultural land created an uproar in the neighborhood. The special-use permit for Vineyard Estates was denied, but Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses were undeterred. They’re now building Vineyard Estates in accordance with regular zoning codes. (Moses would like to point out that they’ve also set aside some land in a conservation easement as well. King Family Estates has, too. Many winery owners say they’d like to follow suit.)
“People pass their vineyards through generations,” he says. “No one subdivides and puts on housing complexes because the value of the land is in the yield, not the subdivision rights. We think this type of farming…lends itself to more aggressive rural preservation than almost any other type of work.”
On the Wine Board, Moses’ job is to help all the local wineries succeed. “We can’t be a great winery from nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats,” he says.
Kluge Estates will be well positioned when the water starts rising. Last year they added 44 acres of grapes (they started with 34). In the next two years, they’ll plant another 130 to 140 acres, for a total of about 265, producing 50,000 cases a year. If all goes as planned, they’ll be the largest winery in Virginia and one of the most significant on the Atlantic Coast.
In Nelson County, there’s an small winery that represents both the industry of the past and of the future. Afton Mountain Vineyards started in 1988. Tom Corpora, owner of the vineyard, pulls up to an interview on his tractor. The old Chardonnay vines in his yard are thick as heads at their base. Corpora is an elder statesman of Virginia winemaking and a cantankerous old farmer, weathered as
a root.
“I don’t know whether people can get into it the same way we did now,” he says slowly. “Now people are coming in with a lot of money.” Large lots in Nelson County can sell for $20,000 an acre, and it costs at least $10,000 an acre to convert bare earth to vineyard.
Before he got into wine, Corpora was a journalist working for United Press International and NBC. He was the bureau chief in Vietnam at the end of the war and then in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Sinko. (She’s the enologist, or winemaker, at Afton.)
When we walk around his vineyard on April 15, the buds have just broken to reveal newly hatched leaves.
For all the growth in the industry, Afton Mountain is one of the few Virginia wineries actually turning a profit. Corpora laughs about new vineyards spending big bucks to build more shelves in a warehouse; an educated guess says less than half of the 21 local wineries are profitable. What with waiting for the harvest, the winemaking and aging, it can be three to five years before there’s any income to start recouping capital. It’s eight years minimum to break even, and that’s a
big success.
“If you have to go out and buy land to put in a vineyard, there is no way to make the numbers work,” Virginia Tech viticulture professor Tony Wolf says. “I wouldn’t do it.”
But Tom Corpora’s got it all: 11 and a half acres looking back across a valley, southeast exposure, a slope just so and great natural beauty. “You can see it on foggy days,” Corpora says, “where you get a buildup of fog down in the valley and we are clear here. The same happens with cold air. It will just drain out
past us.
“It is hard work and the work doesn’t get easier and I don’t get younger. So…but yeah, this has been good,” he whispers and stops.
He looks out the window. “ You can see that we have a wind again… This is a good life… It is something that I can continue to enjoy doing as long as I breathe.”
Grape expectations
What do grapes need to flourish?
Vines will grow anywhere, but grapes prefer conditions just so—watery but not too wet, sunny but not too hot, cold enough to impede pests. Professor Tony Wolf at Virginia Tech has mapped the best sites by topography, slope, aspect (or orientation), air movement and soil.
Altitude is the controlling factor. Cold air can kill a year’s crop or, worse, a whole vine. Cold air gathers in low-lying valleys so the best site, surprisingly, is the side of a mountain, where the air always moves.
Grapes prefer morning light. A convex site drains better than a concave one. Grapes don’t like their feet wet, so drainage is important. Everyone in the wine craft speaks with great passion about the beauty of a great site. It is one of the great romances of wine, the idea that you can taste on the palate the place where the grapes are grown, the terroir. Professor Wolf makes a science of the art. “I take a clinical view,” he says, “You have one chance to get it right.”—L.P.