Veritas Vineyards & Winery

When my husband and I arrived at Veritas Vineyards and Winery for the final Supper Series and Harvest Celebration in mid-October, I thought I’d prepared him for the evening. But as we approached a sea of round tables set for family-style dining, he was visibly horrified—visions of passing dishes and making small talk with strangers clearly dancing in his head.

As we mingled in the tasting room, the sun dipping behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, the mood began to shift. With each bite of Chef Andy Shipman’s hors d’oeuvres—a crispy buttermilk fried-chicken slider on a Martin’s roll, slathered with Duke’s mayonnaise and tangy smoked kraut—we began to feel at home.

“Family-style is the format that not only works the best, but I think people enjoy it more,” Shipman later explained. “It forces you to talk to your neighbor, talk to someone you don’t know. The communal nature of the dinner—I think people really enjoy that.”

And Shipman was right. By the time we reached our table and passed the first platter of aromatic garlicky green beans, all fears had dissolved. That sense of comfort isn’t accidental; it’s integral to the Veritas experience.

“When you’re here, you’re family” may be a slogan for a familiar Italian chain, but at Veritas, it’s literal. The winery, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024, remains a true family-run operation. Founders Andrew and Patricia Hodson planted the vineyard’s first vines, and today, their children bring that vision to life: Emily Hodson is the head winemaker, George Hodson serves as CEO, and Chloe Watkins completes the family affair as project manager.

The familial spirit even extended to the menu, crafted by Shipman with his own family memories in mind. Drawing inspiration from his mother’s classic pot roast, Shipman elevated nostalgia by marinating Seven Hills short rib in Veritas claret and RC Cola—a nod to when his dad brought home the coveted soda. For an extra layer of influence, he credited his college friends’ study abroad experience in Spain—they were all drinking kalimotxos, a blend of cola and red wine. The result? A kalimotxo pot roast that was tender, savory, and bursting with flavor, paired perfectly with Veritas’ 2013 petit verdot.

This year’s harvest, completed on the very day of our dinner, brought in 300 tons of grapes in just seven weeks—a record-breaking timeline. Winemaker Emily Hodson explained that the unusually compressed harvest was the result of a hot, dry growing season abruptly concluded by Hurricane Francine, which was followed closely by the catastrophic Hurricane Helene.

Veritas Vineyards and Winery doesn’t shy away from frank discussions about how climate change is reshaping the wine industry. In an August 2023 blog post, Andrew Hodson wrote, “Bottom line on climate change affecting our weather—it’s hot already, and it is going to get hotter and inevitably wetter.” His prediction rang true.

Such extremes have forced Veritas to adapt. Emily has been a driving force behind research initiatives to address these challenges, including a collaboration between the Virginia wine industry and the USDA. The winery’s work focuses on breeding disease-resistant grape varieties better suited to the region’s increasingly unpredictable climate.

George, who serves as president of the Virginia Wineries Association and vice chair of the Virginia Wine Board, is passionate about strengthening the regional food system. While his sister specializes in the science, George focuses on fostering collaboration among producers, chefs, and wineries.

“I would love to get to a place where the food and wine community is almost inseparable,” George shared. “It’s about making sure our food producers, our chefs, and our wineries are all talking, growing, and collaborating. My mantra is always a rising tide floats all boats.”

Veritas’ 2025 Supper Series will bring this vision to life with a foodways focus, pairing regional chefs with local producers to celebrate the interplay of Southern food and wine. “There are so many people in our region doing innovative and interesting things in Southern food,” George said. “We want to bring in folks who are exactly that.” He hinted at future collaborations with the Trainum family of Autumn Olive Farms and their heritage pork, the Walker family of Smoke in Chimneys and their spring-raised trout, the team at Seven Hills Food, and others.

Each supper will reflect the unique personality of its chef or producer, from the menu to music. George recalled a memorable September dinner featuring Canadian chef Michael Hunter, where the culinary experience was paired with Wu-Tang Clan chamber music.

This creative approach invites diners to connect more deeply with the people and stories behind their meals. “We want to give chefs and producers the freedom to make each night their own,” George emphasized. “It’s about celebrating their craft, creativity, and the connections we all share.”

Virginia Tech’s impact on what, where and when to grow

You’ll often find a university at the epicenter of many of the world’s great wine regions. Learning institutions help drive and fund research and increase wine quality. Since 1905, the University of California, Davis has conducted vine and wine research just outside of Sacramento. Its findings have had an immeasurable impact on winemaking in Napa and Sonoma. Hochschule Geisenheim University, a wine-focused institute since 1872, sits in the heart of German wine country and has a far-reaching influence throughout Germany. The University of Bordeaux offers a master’s in vineyard and winery management or a doctorate in oenology and viticulture. Cornell University offers programs in viticulture and has buttressed the explosive wine scene in the Finger Lakes region. In Virginia, we have Virginia Tech, where a significant part of the agriculture program focuses on grapes.

VT’s influence on Virginia’s wine industry can, at times, be difficult to pinpoint. Much of the research and information is freely available online, so winemakers may read an article, apply that knowledge in their own vineyard, and you’d never know that VT had a subtle impact on the wine you drink. In speaking to movers and shakers in the Virginia wine scene, their responses indicated two main areas where VT’s research shapes our industry: viticulture and winemaking research results that winemakers can apply to their products, and VT’s site selection-tool that helps wineries pinpoint great places for grape growing.

At VT, “Tony Wolf and Bruce Zoecklein (now retired) were major contributors to the Virginia wine industry’s growth and improvement in the 1990s and 2000s,” says wine writer Dave McIntyre. “Their research influenced the selection of vineyard sites and grape varieties, as well as techniques in the wineries.”

When I contacted Joy Ting, enologist at Michael Shaps Wineworks, and asked her about VT’s impact, she laughed because she was holding Zoecklein’s article on sparkling wine, which she was in the middle of referencing before tackling a sparkling wine project.

“For me, [the] biggest impact has been the breadth of information about which Bruce Zoecklein wrote,” says Ting. “It doesn’t matter what question I have about wine chemistry, Bruce has written a paper about it. His academic research was vast, but he also wrote Enology Notes, a free online database of short articles collected from his newsletters over the years. It’s a great topical reference for all things wine chemistry. If that wasn’t enough, Bruce was (and still is, despite his retirement) always available to answer questions personally.”

Emily Pelton, winemaker at Veritas Vineyards & Winery, graduated from Virginia Tech and studied with Zoecklein. As a founding member of the Winemaker’s Research Exchange, Pelton maintains a commitment to research and its practical application to Virginia wine.

Virginia’s unique climate faces a host of challenges that many other wine regions don’t confront, such as hurricanes, humidity, hail, frost and local pests such as turkeys, bugs and deer. “When I read the enology literature, much of the work is done in areas whose viticulture is so different that I wonder if the results really apply here,” Ting says. “Also, some of the grape varieties we feature are not widely used elsewhere in the U.S. (viognier, cabernet franc, petit manseng). Virginia Tech helps bridge that gap. The research they do is driven by the issues we see here.”

“Tony Wolf’s research at his experimental vineyard near Winchester, along with his regular updates on weather conditions and disease threats, continue to help growers cope with the challenges Virginia’s tricky environment throws at them,” says McIntyre.

“Their work with vineyard pests and controls has made clean wine making possible,” says local winemaker Jake Busching, with Michael Shaps Wineworks. “We are constantly finding new things that like to damage our fruit. Virginia Tech has been there to find fixes and new methodology for remediation every time.”

VT’s focus on local challenges for vineyards offers practical and custom-tailored research results to winemakers around the state. The application of this research has, in part, been the wind in the sails of Virginia’s recent wine boom.

VT has also developed “a site-selection tool that helps you to see if a specific plot of land is good for growing grapes,” notes Ting. “It basically allows you to locate the plot by address or latitude and longitude, then use a drawing tool to specify where on that site you want to plant. From there, it uses nationally available climate and soil databases to help you see if the site is suitable for grape growing. Since site selection is so important, this is a great first step.”

Ben Jordan, winemaker at Early Mountain Vineyards, thinks the future of higher quality in Virginia wine is to secure the best vineyard sites that aren’t necessarily right next to the winery. He points to VT’s online site-evaluation tool and Wolf as a resource in site selection. “I have been trying to find an awesome site so we can push quality,” he says.

Like so many other wine centers around the globe, the academic world has the ability to ignite a complex and vital relationship between those who study wine and viticulture and those who operate wineries. Many of the world’s great regions thrive because of a healthy link to universities, and it will be fascinating to see how the relationship between Virginia Tech and local wineries continues to develop in the future.