Tag: Jake Busching

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Taking root: An itinerant winemaker settles in at a new Earlysville vineyard

Central Virginia winemaking veteran Jake Busching takes a break during the harvest at Hark Vineyards. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Jake Busching has a killer grin. It’s cozy and sly, a knowing, amused-by-the-world look that a salty old sea captain might wear. Except in Bushing’s case, it’s the smirk of a sweaty farm-tractor driver. I know this because I’m sitting down with him fresh out of the vineyards, where he’d been hedging—trimming back the wild growth on grapevines that could be his to tame for many years—and, um, sweating.

After 20-plus years of peregrination that included creating his own wine label, consulting, teaching, and working at half a dozen of the better wineries in the area—including Jefferson, Keswick, Pollak, and Michael Shaps—Busching has thrown in his lot with two ambitious Virginia wine newbies. Showing me around the new Hark Vineyards production facility—as big as an airplane hangar—the winemaker’s grin flashes into a wide, proud smile.

“Whaddya think?” he says, throwing his arms wide. “My new home.”

A great wine starts with great fruit. The 2019 harvest in central Virginia has been very good, owing to little rain and lots of heat and sunshine. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Aaron and Candice Hark planted grapes on the property here, in Earlysville, in 2016. After graduating from the South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina in the early aughts, the Harks moved to Charlottesville and co-founded the education-related software firm Maxient. While also active in philanthropy and the arts (Candice is a founding member of C’ville Gives and on the board of the American Shakespeare Center), the Harks are not mere dabblers in wine.

By hiring a top gun like Busching and investing heavily not only in their vineyards but also in a state-of-the-art, solar-powered production shop, the Harks have established themselves as serious entrants into the local industry. They have also done their homework, attending viticulture classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College—where their instructor was none other than Busching. “We hit it off and they asked me to be their consulting winemaker,” he says. “I was in flux with my label and they offered me a home alongside them at their facility.”

Smart move by the Harks, a great new opportunity for Busching—sounds like a win-win. Coming off a very good harvest this year, Busching is poised to move out of the background and stand—publicly—among the better winemakers in central Virginia.

In the run-up to the winery’s opening, planned for October, we spoke with Busching about wine, creativity, family, and settling down—so now you can say you knew him when.

Knife & Fork: The lore is that you were traveling with your band, Entropy, landed in Virginia in 1993 at age 23, and decided to stay because it was warmer than your native Minnesota. True?

Jake Busching: I sang in that band, an alt-punk-fusion kinda thing. We used it primarily as an outlet for a lot of crazy creativity. We were together for four years or so. Very cathartic and exploratory for the entire group.

You’ve said that you remember drinking your first bottle of wine around that time, a jug of Chianti you picked up for $7 from a 7-Eleven, after finishing up a late-night restaurant shift in Richmond.

That was honestly my first step onto the wine path. The Chianti moment thrust me into thinking about the provenance and the process of wine. I could taste something beyond the pleasure of alcohol and began to wonder about the “how” in the experience of wine. It was a single pivotal moment in a very pivotal time.

In 1997, a few years after the Chianti epiphany, you started working at Jefferson Vineyards. How did that come about?

I was working at Sunbow Trading company in downtown Charlottesville, doing rug sales and care, when I met Stanley Woodward, the owner of Jefferson Vineyards. He would come in weekly, after lunch at the C&O, and sit and have tea with me and talk about the tribal rugs and art in general. He was a fantastic artist and free spirit. He asked me to come to work on his estate as the farm manager’s assistant after a few months of “tea talk,” because we had such a great rapport. At that time Michael Shaps [of Michael Shaps Wineworks] and [vineyard consultant] Chris Hill had both recently joined the team there. I fell in with them and began to learn viticulture.

You’ve since bumped around a bit in your wine career—grower,  winemaker, consultant, educator, new-project-guy. Which roles do you relish the most?

I am a creator at heart. The process of launching a creation and seeing it come to life thrills me. That could mean a single bottle of wine from dirt to glass, a meal from shopping cart to table, or a 10,000-case winery from napkin sketch to full production.

The latter is your new adventure, Hark Vineyards. It’s quite a different gig than making wine under your eponymous label, which you’ve done for a long time. What has that taught you?

The lessons and hardships are all related to funding and having enough time to do all of the jobs at once. [Winemaking] is a near-impossible endeavor unless you are financially independent or have minions who work for smiles. Having done this for 20 years, for myself and other folks, has allowed me to find my voice, and unleashing it into bottle has been creative bliss.

You’ve managed to go your own way while still being very connected and respected in the community. What advice do you have for others who’d like to travel a similar path?

Do not burn bridges, and leave your ego at the door. I find that most folks that get into the winemaking thing are often assertive creative types that like to take ownership of what they are doing. You have to learn where to draw that line and remember to honor the goals and voice of the project you are working on. I learned that very clearly while doing custom-crush for 16-plus clients at once. Each place needs a voice and you have to just fall back and be a part of the chorus. Also, get someone to sell the wine for you! Otherwise you’ll have no time for living.

How do you expect your life will change now that you’ve joined Hark Vineyards?

I’m in the process of trying to slow my life down a few notches, from that of consulting road warrior back to winemaker. I’m digging in and really excited about working with the Harks to both launch their 100 percent estate-grown label and still do my vineyard-sourcing winemaking for my own wines.

What should we expect from Hark?

We bottled two vintages of Hark Vineyards–labeled wine this August, including chardonnay, cabernet franc, petit verdot, and merlot. Future wines will include pinot gris, petit manseng, cab sauv rose, red and white blends, and vidal blanc. I have been winemaker for all of these wines and am really excited about the level of excellence we have achieved so far.

Hark’s production facility can manage a comfortable 6,000 cases but will be able to produce 10,000 once the public facility comes on line. The vineyard property is maxed out at 18 acres and should give us 4,500 cases of estate-grown fruit within three more years.

When can people begin visiting Hark and tasting the wines?

We are planning to have pop-up sales days through the fall at our production facility. There are also some limited-ticket farm dinner plans in the works. But we are targeting spring of 2021 for a tasting room opening. The Harks are big fans of the outdoors and inspirational landscapes. The building promises to be a unique design for our area, and will emphasize the property’s beautiful views.

You strike me as a Renaissance guy—you majored in music, had a band, cook, write. Do you have other cultural pursuits?

I am a curious human. I get a little obsessed with a process and find myself driven to be adept or beyond, then I tend to move on to another thing. Wine has such a broad span of skills and interests that it’s been the one pursuit that keeps my interest piqued. My favorite thing to “cook” is a bottle of wine. Open it, see what it has to say, plan a meal around it, and execute. Could be scallops or fish or a piece of meat over a fire in the yard.

You’ve been involved with Virginia wine for more than 20 years. What do you think you personally have contributed?

I hope that I’ve been a part of raising the bar for Virginia wine from the cottage industry it was in the early days to the highly respectable industry it is now, whether through grape growing, winemaking, or just continuing to be stubborn about pushing the bounds of industry standards.

Hark Vineyards, 1465 Davis Shop Rd., Earlysville. Jake Busching Wines are available at the winery and through jakebuschingwines.com and at local restaurants and retail stores.

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Living

Magic is being made with Honah Lee Vineyard’s grapes

Honah Lee Vineyard’s mountaintop location produces “lush and plump” fruit, including viognier and petit manseng, that is increasingly coveted by winemakers. Photo by Haley Jones

When Vera Preddy and her late husband, Wayne, purchased their property on Gibson Mountain in 1985, they never imagined they’d end up in the wine business. Their 150-acre farm was once part of Windholme Farm, and when they moved onto their parcel, they christened it Honah Lee, after the idyllic place described in the 1960s folk song “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” They started raising cattle and built a house, and later, on a neighbor’s suggestion, decided to get into the turkey-raising business.

Poultry has been a staple industry in the area for centuries (Honah Lee sits about four miles north of Gordonsville). In 1794, a Gordonsville tavern became known for serving chicken. In the 1840s, a railroad stop was established in the town, and by the 1860s locals sold chicken through the windows of stopped C&O trains.

The Preddys raised chickens in the past but switched exclusively to turkeys because they stay put. “When we had hens, they were sneaky and they’d get out,” Preddy says.

I wondered aloud to Preddy’s son, Eric Hopwood, if their business model made for a busy fall, going directly from grape harvest season into Thanksgiving turkey season. Hopwood explains that their turkeys are more for lunch meats than the holiday meal. “Our turkeys are about 40 pounds apiece,” he says. “The breast itself is the size of a Thanksgiving roaster oven. We raise turkeys year-round that are antibiotic- and hormone-free, and they go to specialty stores.”

The Preddys were focused on poultry and cattle when they leased a good portion of their land to a nearby winery. Grape vines went in the ground, but after a lease dispute in the 1990s, the Preddys found themselves in the sudden stewardship of vineyards.

“We had to learn real quick about growing grapes and making wine,” says Preddy, so they hired consultant Jeanette Smith. “She was great as far as teaching us how to take care of the vines.”

The Preddys, thrust by circumstance into a burgeoning industry, couldn’t imagine then how much the industry would grow. “There were a few vineyards around then, but now they are like little mushrooms; they’re popping up everywhere,” Preddy says. In 1995, Virginia had 46 wineries. A 2016 press release from Governor Terry McAuliffe’s office announced there are now more than 285 wineries in the state. That’s a 520 percent growth rate over a 21-year period.

As you travel up the mountain, the first vines appear around 650 feet. The vineyard is punctuated by two turkey barns and the colony of gigantic turkeys, then the rows of grapes continue up to the top where you’ll find older-vine viognier at about 1,000 feet.

At first, the Preddys sold their grapes to about 20 different wineries. Then, they narrowed that down to about five or six wineries. Today they work mostly with Michael Shaps Wineworks and Jake Busching Wines.

Life on the mountain began to change focus from grape-growing to wine-making when Hopwood took the reins in the early 2000s. “At the time, I was with the local law enforcement, and I retired from that in 2011,” he says. “That was when we started getting more into the wine business, and we added the event venue.” In 2015, Hopwood first made his wines at Michael Shaps Wineworks and now pours them under the Honah Lee label in his tasting room. Hopwood and his wife, Brandy, also oversee BerryWood Crafters, which incorporates local baked goods and crafts in their wine tasting room.

Hopwood points to the malbec near the top of the mountain as the source of his favorite wine from the property. Aside from the taste, that particular site has a special meaning to his family. “It’s a wonderful place to wake up to every day, the views, the peace and tranquility,” he says. “I often go up there to the top and sit and contemplate life. I take my little 2-year-old daughter up there and she just falls asleep in my arms.”

The perch up top is storied for its views. “At one time, we had a fire tower up here and you could see 360 degrees,” Hopwood says. “It was said that with binoculars you could see the tip of the Washington Monument.”

Mountain fruit is increasingly coveted in Virginia. Though it’s more intensive to farm, vines on sloped mountains have better airflow, which helps prevent frosts, and the soils usually have better drainage. The summit has also captured the heart of Jake Busching, who has been working with Honah Lee fruit since early in his career. Enchanted by the viognier on the mountain, Busching sourced his 2015 and 2016 Viognier from the Preddys.

Joy Ting, enologist and production manager at Michael Shaps Wineworks, also enjoys working with the Honah Lee fruit. “Honah Lee produces fruit that lives up to its whimsical name,” says Ting. “The fruit from there is always lush and plump. Each variety expresses itself fully, from the sauvignon blanc and viognier to the petit verdot and tannat. The petit manseng from Honah Lee has great chemistry, and is versatile enough to make a dry table wine, a sweet dessert wine or anything in between.”

Now, Hopwood is gearing up to begin harvest, which he says could be a record.

“Right now it’s shaping up to be pretty good. But…the summer’s not over yet. We’re watching tropical storms.”

Erin Scala is the sommelier at Fleurie and Petit Pois. She holds the Diploma of Wines & Spirits, is a Certified Sake Specialist and writes about beverages on her blog, thinking-drinking.com.

Categories
Living

Jake Busching’s new label raises the stakes for Virginia wine

Bottling under his new label, Jake Busching Wines, gives the local winemaker an opportunity to use his vast experience in Virginia’s vineyards. Photo courtesy subject

It was while working at Jefferson Vineyards that Jake Busching had his aha wine moment. His epiphany, the Jefferson Vineyards 1998 cabernet franc made by Michael Shaps, remains a true bellwether for Virginia wine—“That’s the one that hooked me,” Busching says. Once he made the connection in his mind between place and flavor, a soil-based winemaking philosophy blossomed, and now the well-known local vintner has a new label: Jake Busching Wines, for which he makes wine from some of his favorite vineyard sites around the state.

Having grown up on his family’s Minnesota subsistence farm, Busching is naturally drawn to working with plants. His father worked at a local paper mill and, at home, they raised beef cows. “When you farm in Minnesota,” Busching says, “you have four months of the year to get everything together to survive for the next eight months. That’s where I learned the importance of the dirt.”

He hunted and fished for many of his meals on the farm, and though life wasn’t always easy, the food was good. Busching sums it up: “I ate like a king, but I wore my cousin’s clothes.”

Eventually, he left Minnesota to work in music, and toured with a band. Asked about the circumstances of his move to Virginia, Busching describes 1993: “We [the band] were sick of being cold and poor, so we moved where we could be warm and poor. We ended up in Virginia.”

By 1996, he returned to farm life and landed at Jefferson Vineyards, a winery near Monticello that grows vines planted on the original site where Thomas Jefferson and Philip Mazzei attempted to grow wine grapes in the late 1700s. “What a great way to come into the business,” says Busching. “This is where it all started. Here.”

Wine bottles. Photography in high resolution.Similar photographs from my portfolio:
Jake Busching has also rethought the conduit of wine from winery to consumer. Rather than open a tasting room or sell to restaurants and retail outlets through a distributor, he sells his wine through his website.

As Jefferson Vineyards’ farm manager, he worked with two important founders of the current Virginia wine scene, vineyard manager and consultant Chris Hill, and winemaker Michael Shaps. Hill has had a hand in planting many of Virginia’s vines, and Shaps now has his own Virginia winery, and produces wines in both Virginia and Burgundy, France.

During a brief stint at Horton Vineyards in 2001, Busching worked with a special site he still admires today: Gordonsville’s Honah Lee Vineyard. Planted in the mid-1990s, the site sits on a mountain that rises up in the middle of flat land. “Up top there’s nothing between you and Richmond,” Busching says. Sloped sites, such as Honah Lee, are good for grapes because the angles generate air movement, which helps prevent frost. The vineyards start around 650′ and at about 1,000′ the top of the mountain wears a crown of old-vine viognier.

Busching subsequently worked at Keswick Vineyards, Pollak Vineyards, Grace Estate Winery and Michael Shaps Wineworks, learning along the way about a wide variety of farming methods and grape varieties from around the state.

In 2015, he made a wine from the special Honah Lee viognier grapes he remembered from his early career, and the recently released bottles are his inaugural offering under the Jake Busching Wines label. He’s also released a 2015 cabernet franc made with grapes from Nelson County.

And keep your eyes peeled in May for Busching’s release of F8, a blend of tannat and petit verdot from the upper section of the Honah Lee vineyard. F8, affectionately referred to by its phonetic nickname Fate, is a special bottling because Busching believes there is a larger place for petit verdot-tannat blends in Virginia winemaking. Throughout his career, Busching has championed tannat, and this has impacted the larger wine landscape. Tannat, typically from France’s Madiran region, is a powerful, full-bodied and usually tannic wine that, to Busching, benefits from blending in some deep-fruited petit verdot. He usually finds a sweet spot at around 60 percent tannat with 40 percent petit verdot. Could his signature blend be a way forward for Virginia reds? If it grows in popularity, we might look back and point to F8 as the catalyst.

Busching has also rethought the conduit of wine from winery to consumer. Rather than open a tasting room or sell to restaurants and retail outlets through a distributor, he sells his wine through his website (JakeBuschingWines.com). This is an effective way to directly interface with consumers on their own time, and it’s becoming increasingly popular with winemakers like Busching, who make incredibly small quantities of special wine. (There are just three barrels of F8.)

As a large second wave of Virginia wine producers establish themselves, Busching’s wines stand out because the mentorship of the late 20th-century wine pioneers shines through. Busching’s new label turns the page to a fresh chapter in Virginia winemaking—one that is built on the sturdy ground of past experience, and maybe a little fate.