Tending to Virginia’s Wine Traditions

By Warren Rojas

Virginia Wines

According to Virginia Tech enology professor Dr. Bruce Zoecklein, Virginia winemakers need to quit the intrastate squabbling and square off against world-renowned producers.

“We are competing with wines that are in 7-11 … and they are frequently half the price and twice the quality,” he rails in Walker Elliott Rowe’s straight shooting, “A History of Virginia Wines.”

The gritty tome traces the Commonwealth’s path to viticultural contender—Virginia ranked eighth in U.S. wine production in a 2008 Department of Commerce report—from its colonial roots (Rowe’s research suggests that the first successful Virginia vintner was actually Cleve Plantation Charles Carter, whose 1762 bottling scored a gold medal from the Royal Society in London) to its resurgence in the 1970s (wine gurus Archie Smith, Lucie Morton, Doug Flemer and Gabriele Rausse are heralded) to today (Rowe checks in on nascent make-your-own-wine property, Vint Hill Craft Winery).

Along the way, Rowe collects thoughts and insights about the local wine trade from old hands (Linden Vineyards founder Jim Law confides that he’s sworn off West Coast wines “because Europe is our benchmark”) and would-be soothsayers (wine entrepreneur Michael Shaps deems cabernet franc “Virginia’s unofficial red grape,” but prognosticates that “petit verdot is the direction the industry is going”).

We’ll drink to that.

“A History of Virginia Wines: From Grapes to Glass,” by Walker Elliott Rowe. The History Press, 144 pgs., $19.99.

(January 2010)