Stepping Up to the World Wine Stage, Virginia Finds its Footing

When the Bouygues family, owners of the Bordeaux Second Growth estate Chateau Montrose, decided to acquire an American wine business, they didn’t purchase in California or Oregon as so many other wealthy French firms have typically done. Instead, they headed to Virginia, where they bought RdV in 2024, renamed it Lost Mountain and added it to their Eutopia Estates portfolio. It was an impactful indication of how far the commonwealth has come on the world wine stage.

After years of slow, steady improvement, the wines of Virginia have, when viewed across a wide range of producers, risen to their own impressive level.

Earlier this month, we met with more than a dozen top producers throughout Virginia, including Southwest Mountain Vineyards, Glen Manor, Linden, Pollak and King Family Vineyards, among many others. We tasted with winemakers, walked the vines and explored what has caused this notable shift.

This tasting report includes more than 300 reds, whites, rosés and sparklers – mostly current releases – from wineries we visited and a swath of other producers, too. Twelve wines earned ratings of 94 points and above.

Cabernet franc showed beautifully throughout, as did red blends in general. Among white wines, petit manseng, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay defined what site specificity means for Virginia bottlings. Wineries like Lost Mountain, Early Mountain, Michael Shaps, Barboursville and Veritas all earned high scores with their offerings.

Many producers excelled with both reds and whites, and Early Mountain is a prime example of this. It’s owned by Jean and Steve Case, relies on viticulturalist and winemaker Maya Hood White and boasts an accomplished culinary program and stunning tasting room. They produced the highest-scoring white wine in this report, the Early Mountain Chardonnay Virginia Quaker Run Vineyard 2022, as well as a number of other reds and whites that scored in the 90s.

It became clear that the best wines coming out of Virginia – notably from the terrific 2023 vintage but also from others, including some great ones from the more difficult 2022 – belong in the conversation alongside top examples from around the country. Even many bottlings that aren’t meant to stand the test of time in the cellar managed to find a sense of accuracy and charm.

It’s been a long time coming.

A Growing Sense of Confidence

Joshua Grainer MW, the managing director and winemaker for Lost Mountain, which is based in Fauquier County, about an hour's drive west of Washington DC, has had a front-row seat to many of the changes that have helped shape the industry from his perch at the highly respected winery.

He stressed that the people growing the grapes and crafting the wines have gained a sense of confidence over the past years, with the wines evolving from having a reputation in the early 2000s of “being pretty green, pretty underripe, pretty weedy.”

As such, he and RdV founder Rutger de Vink, a former U.S. Marine and venture capitalist in New York City, decided to go in another direction.

In those early days, Grainer recalled, they wanted to make a statement about their wines, so they “leaned toward power” as much as possible.

“We’ve pulled way off that since then and look a lot more toward elegant suppleness of tannins and structural profiles,” he said. “The wines have become more confident. They don't speak quite as loudly, but I think they have a lot more to say.”

The RdV Vineyards Middleburg Lost Mountain 2022, for example, has plenty to say: it’s a blend of cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc that’s fresh, crunchy and structured, and promises to evolve for a long time to come.

That’s the case among so many of the most compelling wines being produced in Virginia these days. It’s a phenomenon that can be seen in upcoming regions around the world, as an initial focus on power and drama often gives way to a greater attention to detail, to expressing the minute differences from one vineyard, one block, one vintage to another.

This change is as much a result of vine maturity and farming as it is of winemaking.

“Vineyard evolution has helped that as well,” Grainer said. “I would say somewhere around 2014 to 2016, we started to see a really different profile within the wines in terms of root systems getting developed, starting to get a little bit more maturity behind the vines; there’s a lot more evenness of growth.

“So part of Virginia's story – and that which we love – is the variation of vintages we get here between rains and heat and all that type of stuff, and the timing of it. And so we're never looking to eliminate that, but the consistency of quality within that framework of vintage variation is a lot more even now that the vines are older.”

Even U.S. President Donald Trump and his family have been longtime believers in Virginia’s wine world. They purchased the Trump Winery in Charlottesville in 2011, and today the approximately 1,300-acre property is planted with 200 acres of vineyards. Politics aside, the wines, both sparkling and table wines, are very good to outstanding quality.

Winemaker Jonathan Wheeler has been there since before the Trump acquisition. He began working on the property in 2006, back when it was known as Kluge Estate, and his nearly two decades of expertise have allowed him to see how far the industry has come.

“It's been a fun journey to see Virginia wine develop into what it is today,” he said. “Since I arrived in Virginia, the number of wineries has almost tripled. There have been normal growing pains in the industry, but in general I see the quality of wine increasing every year.”

It hasn’t always been easy, he pointed out. “It definitely takes talented winemakers to be able to work through the variabilities in our growing seasons, and all the curveballs mother nature can throw at you on the East Coast. But consumers are now realizing that Virginia wine can hold its own as a wine-producing region, and people are starting to take notice.”

Getting Site Selection Right

For Emily Hodson, the head winemaker at Veritas in Afton, Virginia, site selection has been paramount. Driving through her vines, climbing from around 900 feet above sea level at the winery up to approximately 1,400 feet on Afton Mountain, she pointed out how a wind gap there impacted the character of her vines, funneling air through to them.

“I get some beautiful air movement even when there isn't really a breeze,” which lends a telltale sense of freshness and verve to many of her wines, she said. The Veritas Cabernet Franc Monticello Reserve 2023 embodies that, with its cracked peppercorns, precise acidity and expressive fruit all coming together with elegance and energy.

At nearby Afton Mountain Vineyards, winemaker and viticulturist Damien Blanchon stresses the importance of farming technique.

“I focus most of my time with the guys in the vineyard,” he noted. “That's 70, 80 percent of our work here. We do a lot of biodynamic [and] organic technique. We are not using insecticide, or very low herbicide this year. I'm trying to not do any herbicide at all, so hopefully we can be 100 percent organic by the end of the year. I'm working on a transition phase to be certified; I've been working on that for like 10 years here at least.”

But to achieve that, Blanchon said, “You have to be focused on the vineyard, having a good team, having good observations, do the work in the vineyard. Everything is about timing, for sure.”

That focus on timing allows Blanchon to produce an impressive array of wines, from his bracing, beautiful Bollicini Brut 2022 to a distinctive VDN Tannat, a pure Albariño Monitcello 2024 and much more.

The increasingly keen attention to nuanced, terroir-expressive wine isn’t being felt everywhere, of course. There are any number of producers whose focus remains quantity rather than quality. Stylistically, that can manifest itself in wines that are obscured beneath an overly assertive scrim of wood or lack adequate acidity to balance out the ripeness of the fruit. Some fall flat on the other end of the spectrum, coming off as weedy or unbalanced. But overall, it’s undeniable that quality is very much on the rise.

Luca Paschina, the estate director and winemaker at Barboursville Vineyards, has experienced much of this evolution personally since he began working at the estate in 1990. “A big help comes from a good number of veteran winegrowers who have become consultants or have helped new investors to make the right decisions, most times pro bono,” he explained.

He also noted the strides some wineries in the state have made, dating back more than a decade. “I would argue that some producers had already started, in the early-mid 2000s, to pull away from seeking the high ratings by pushing concentration through severe bleeding or picking overripe. Also, [they began] reducing new oak. This trend has accelerated since then.”

The Barboursville Vineyards Nebbiolo Virginia Reserve 2020 and Cabernet Franc Virginia Goodlow Mountain 2021 both proved his point that top wines don’t need to be defined or dominated by wood to shine.

Paschina also attributes some of the changes to a broadly felt shift in consumer tastes, to wines that are focused less on power than on accurately expressing a sense of place in any given vintage. Today, he added, “The choice of the Virginia wine style and philosophy is logical and natural, because we have allowed it to be led by the rhythm of our weather patterns.”

Other factors have played a role, too, including a confluence of a deep-level understanding of terroir and underlying geology; improving farming techniques that, for many producers, include a reliance on cover crops and a moving away from synthetic inputs where possible; and winemaking that values an expression of the land as opposed to a focus on the proverbial hand of the winemaker.

Organizing the tastings for this report was William McIlhenny, a Virginia native and member of the JamesSuckling.com board of directors. McIlhenny has been following the local wine scene closely for decades. He, too, has been impressed with the evolution of the state’s wine culture. Today, Virginia is poised for a new level of respect – one that it’s been heading toward for several years now. It is finally crossing that threshold.

– Brian Freedman, Staff Writer & Taster

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.