Luca Paschina – C-VILLE Weekly

By Paul H. Ting

There’s something alluring and gratifying about continuing a best practice that originated in the ancient world, and the 2021 Virginia Governor’s Cup winner is a prime example.

On March 9, Governor Ralph Northam presented the award to Barboursville Vineyards for its 2015 Paxxito. The Cup is given to the top-scoring wine in the annual competition, which this year saw more than 100 wineries in the state submit a total of 544 wines for judging. Winemaker Luca Paschina accepted the award, flanked by Fernando Franco, viticulturist at the winery since 1998, and associate winemaker Daniele Tessaro.

The 2015 Paxxito is a sweet, dessert-style wine made with moscato ottonel and vidal blanc and a production technique called passito. Passito is perhaps best known because of vin santo, a style of wine that has been produced in Italy since at least the Renaissance era. Paschina calls it an “ancient method of winemaking” that “requires lots of labor,” including picking and sorting the individual grapes by hand.

In short, passito involves picking grapes relatively early to preserve their natural acidity and then laying them out on straw mats or perforated wooden trays for drying. Historically, this occurred by exposure to sunlight and wind, but Paschina admits that the often-unpredictable weather in Virginia has led the winemakers to actively circulate air for drying. Barboursville started using passito in 2001, and now has a Paxxito Barn where the process occurs. As water is removed, the shriveled grape gains concentration of flavor and sugar (sugar concentration can be as high as 47 percent by the end).

In addition to requiring intensive manual labor, the process also results in less wine produced. Paschina says that, despite this, “the reward is big,” as volume is exchanged for concentrated flavors and a dense mouthfeel. The resultant wine is sweet and unctuous, with intense aromatics and flavors of honey and dried fruits, such as peaches and apricots. On the finish, the acidity takes over, leaving an impression much like a sweet-tart candy.

Founded in 1976 by the Zonig family of Italy, Barboursville was the fifth winery started in the state of Virginia. In 1990, Paschina joined the winery from his home in the Piedmont wine region of Italy. Despite the fact that Paschina has been behind three previous Governor’s Cup winners, it’s obvious from his emotional words that this award still brings him great pride.

For the local wine industry, the Cup is widely considered the most prestigious annual competition. Now in its 39th year, the competition’s rules require, among other things, that wines entered be produced with 100 percent Virginia fruit. Wines are subject to a strict blind-tasting process with a panel of well-qualified judges, and those wines that score 90 points or higher are awarded gold medals, of which there were 96 this year.

The top 12 wines make up the Governor’s Cup Case, and the top wine is then awarded the Cup. According to Paschina, the Virginia Governor’s Cup is “one of the most stringent competitions in the United States.” This year, Barboursville was also recognized with two other wines in the final case (2016 Octagon red blend and 2019 Vermentino Reserve), and received three additional gold medals (2019 Sauvignon Blanc Reserve, 2017 Paxxito, and 2017 Octagon), for a total of six.

An examination of the complete list of gold medals and the composition of the final case reveals a local wine industry that is growing, exploring, and continuing to mature. A wide range of wineries is represented from all geographic areas of the state, with both well established and familiar names, but also wineries that have only recently launched. In addition, an increasing diversity of grape varieties is seen, both red and white, including ones that are not traditionally associated with Virginia such as vermentino, nebbiolo, moscato, and tannat.

Six gold medals, three wines in the Case, and a fifth Governor’s Cup. For Barboursville Vineyards, these results reinforce its standing as one of the pillars of the Virginia wine industry.

2021 Virginia Governor’s Cup Case
2015 Barboursville Vineyards Paxxito
($35, winemaker Luca Paschina)
2016 Barboursville Vineyards Octagon
($55, winemaker Luca Paschina)
2019 Barboursville Vineyards Vermentino Reserve
($23, winemaker Luca Paschina)
2019 Bluestone Vineyard Petit Manseng
($24.50, winemaker Lee Harman)
2016 Breaux Vineyards Meritage
($45, winemaker Josh Gerard)
2016 Breaux Vineyards Nebbiolo
($62, winemaker Josh Gerard)
2019 Carriage House Wineworks Petit Verdot
($31, winemaker Michael Fritze)
2017 R.A.H. Wine Company Series 1
($35 for 375ml bottle, winemaker Maya Hood White)
2017 King Family Vineyards Mountain Plains
($70, winemaker Matthieu Finot)
2015 Michael Shaps Wineworks Meritage
($50, winemaker Michael Shaps)
2014 Trump Winery Brut Reserve
($80, winemaker Jonathan Wheeler)
2017 Veritas Winery Petit Verdot
($45, winemaker Emily Pelton)

The Governor’s Cup Case is used by the Virginia Wine Board Marketing Office to promote Virginia wine. VWBMO recently announced the creation of the Virginia Governor’s Cup Gold Medal Trail, which includes all 47 wineries, cideries, and meaderies that received a gold medal. More information can be found at taste.virginiawine.org.

Raise a glass to 2019: Winemakers reflect on a great vintage

Like all agricultural endeavors, growing grapes is subject to the vicissitudes of weather. In Virginia, after a difficult 2018 harvest (because of rain, rain, and more rain), 2019 was good—some would say great—thanks to timely precipitation and stretches of warm, sunny weather.

“This vintage is a beautiful gift to the faithful farmer,” says Luca Paschina, the winemaker at Barboursville Vineyards. “We will be celebrating this growing season for many years to come, for giving us white wines of great intensity and fragrance and reds of unquestionably long age-worthiness.”

Part of this optimism flows from a sense of relief after 2018. Overcast and wet conditions can present serious challenges in both the vineyard and the winery. Lack of sunlight hinders the fruit’s growth and ripening, decreasing sugar content (it is this sugar that is fermented into alcohol), and producing grapes that lack flavor and can taste “green,” or undesirably vegetal. High moisture can also allow mold, mildew, and disease to take hold, leading to damaged fruit and diminished yields. In one of the sadder images of 2018, some winemakers simply left grapes to rot on the vine, because they had burst from too much water and, regardless, the ground was too soft to move harvesting machinery into place.

The next growing season could not have arrived fast enough. Chris Hill, who has been cultivating grapes in Virginia since 1981, says that better vintages share “the common thread of dry weather from mid-August through mid-October.” In his opinion, 2019 should be compared to great vintages such as 1998, 2002, 2007, 2010, and 2017. But Kirsty Harmon believes 2019 is the best vintage since 2008, when she started as winemaker at Blenheim Vineyards.

Joy Ting, research enologist for the Winemakers Research Exchange (and this writer’s wife), explains that, in addition to a dry season, an abundance of sunlight helped to ripen fruit much earlier than in previous years. “The white grapes came in quickly since daytime temperatures were high and sugar accumulated rapidly,” she says. “A little bit of rain and slightly lower temperatures allowed the red grapes to stay on the vine. This led to very good flavor and tannin development.”

Ting also puts forth a theory, shared by a number of winemakers, that the exceptionally wet conditions of 2018 led to higher groundwater levels in 2019, compensating for rainfall one to three inches below average last July through September. Winemakers Emily Pelton at Veritas Vineyard and Winery, and Michael Heny at Michael Shaps Wineworks, agree with Ting. “I was thankful for all of the rain that we had in 2018,” Heny says. “We had so much groundwater that the vines [in 2019] had everything they needed.”

But what about the 2019 wines? High quality, fully ripe fruit picked when the winemaker thought it had achieved optimal conditions (rather than because the next storm was coming), should lead to high quality, aromatic whites and full-bodied, age-worthy reds. It’s impossible at the moment to recommend specific bottles from the vintage—because, well, the wines are unfinished and unbottled—so I asked winemakers which 2019 wines held the greatest promise. “I feel that, in general, red wines more acutely express the quality of a vintage,” says Nathan Vrooman, winemaker at Ankida Ridge Vineyards. “The white wines coming from the region will be very good, but the red wines will really shine.”

Among those, cabernet franc appears to be rising to the top. Finot says the King Family cabernet franc “performed very well this year.” At Veritas, Pelton calls the 2019 crop “bright and vibrant and full of depth.” Paschina singles out Barboursville’s harvest from Goodlow Mountain, about a mile south of the winery, as perhaps its “most elegant wine of the vintage.” Similarly, Rachel Stinson Vrooman, the winemaker at Stinson Vineyards, points to her cabernet franc as “ripe and concentrated, but also maintaining some of the pretty florals and herbal aromas that I look for.” At Keswick Vineyards, winemaker Stephen Barnard believes the estate’s Block 2 cabernet franc to be “the best expression of terroir yet—savory, extracted, spicy.”

Other varieties to look for in 2019 include pinot noir from Ankida Ridge—one of the few area wineries growing the grape—and chardonnay from Loudoun County’s Wild Meadow vineyard. At Michael Shaps, Heny will use the chardonnay in a vineyard-specific wine; he anticipates the 2019 bottling to rival that of 2015, one of my own personal favorites. Also worth noting, according to Harmon, are albariño, a grape grown mostly in Spain and Portugal that’s still relatively rare in Virginia, and cabernet sauvignon, which the lingering dry heat of 2019 helped to achieve full ripeness and flavor.

With uniformly high hopes for the 2019 vintage, Pelton provides some perspective. “I think it is important for us not to lose sight of how fantastically wine tells the story of the year,” she says. “Great years tend to get all of the attention, but the fact that we get to capture all of the aspects of the fabric of a year—whether it was cool or windy or dry or wet—all speaks to the final product, and I find it thrilling to be a part of that story.”