Chile’s viticultural map is framed by the Pacific Ocean and its cool Humboldt Current, the Andes, and the Atacama Desert, creating conditions radically different from one valley to the next. Viña Carmen has staked its identity on exploring that diversity through its Carmen Gran Reserva line of wines.

Founded in 1850, Viña Carmen is one of the oldest wineries in South America and a pillar of Chilean wine history. The Gran Reserva range expresses that heritage by pairing specific grape varieties with the regions where they shine brightest — single-vineyard, estate-grown wines that give a geography lesson much more interesting and delicious than any textbook. Chardonnay from the limestone soils of Limarí Valley in the north stands beside Sauvignon Blanc from cool, foggy Casablanca. Cabernet Sauvignon and a new Cabernet Sauvignon–Cabernet Franc blend represent Maipo, Chile’s undisputed heartland for Bordeaux varieties. Carmenère chimes in from Colchagua. And a Carignan from Maule, drawn from head-trained old vines planted in the 1950s and dry-farmed in the arid interior of Melozal, portrays Chile’s historical frontier spirit.

The lineup is a statement of terroir-first winemaking, each wine defined by its variety and origin as expressed through contemporary winemaking. French oak adds structure and complexity without overwhelming fruit or place. The resulting wines sell for around $18.99 at Total Wine & More, a price point that has made them consistent bestsellers since the national retail chain began stocking them in 2018.

As of December 2025, Carmen has entrusted the Gran Reserva range to a new winemaker: Pablo Prieto Sánchez, 29, who has been with the winery since the 2022 vintage. His appointment signals not a change in direction but a deepening of the line’s existing character.

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Prieto Sánchez grew up steeped in wine culture — his parents founded Chile’s first dedicated wine magazine, Guía de Vinos de Chile, in 1996, the year he was born. By his mid-teens he had decided that someone in the family needed to actually make wine rather than just write about it. He studied viticulture and enology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, then worked harvests in California, Burgundy and Chile, with stints at Ledson Winery & Vineyards, Domaine Seguin-Manuel, Kingston Family Vineyards, and Viña Tabalí—where he also came to appreciate the Limarí Valley’s potential for world-class Chardonnay.

When he joined Carmen’s winemaking team in 2022, he began learning the full sweep of the winery’s portfolio, from entry-level wines to its high-end labels. Five vintages later, he describes the experience as foundational. “You need time to [explore] the places that you’re working in, the grapes that you’re vinifying, in order to fully understand them,” he says. “Gran Reserva embodies the essence of Carmen: tradition, consistency, and a constant drive to evolve.”

Prieto Sánchez’s goal is to preserve freshness and varietal precision without sacrificing weight or complexity. “Gran Reserva wants to show the variety in the right place in Chile, showing the freshness and the delicacy of the variety, without losing the elegance and weight,” he explains. The viticulture team is a central part of that equation; as harvest nears, Prieto Sánchez spends significant time traveling among the winery’s far-flung vineyard sites, tasting grapes as they ripen.

One development worth watching is the Cabernet Sauvignon–Cabernet Franc blend, which Prieto Sánchez helped champion from his first harvest at Carmen. The inaugural 2022 release was an 85/15 split; the soon-to-be-released 2023 vintage goes equal parts, a deliberate move to give Cabernet Franc more room to assert itself. Prieto Sánchez is an unabashed evangelist for the variety. “Cabernet Franc—I would keep an eye on Chile and Cabernet Franc,” he says. “They’re developing great.” He describes it as bringing structure, freshness, a hint of herbal complexity, and what he calls “backbone” — the quality he prizes above all in a wine.

His personal favorite in the Gran Reserva lineup, however, is the Chardonnay. Limarí Valley, roughly 400 kilometers north of Santiago, sits at an unusual intersection of marine influence, desert heat, and calcium-rich limestone soils (unusual in Chile) — conditions that produce tightly wound, mineral-driven whites with genuine aging potential. The wines remind Prieto Sánchez of his experience in Burgundy. “Chardonnay from Limarí is just outstanding,” he says, noting with evident delight that a bottle of such quality can leave a store shelf for under $20.

For Viña Carmen, the United States is a critical market—the winery is positioned as the leading premium Chilean brand in the country, with the Gran Reserva line its flagship offering in the all-important value-premium segment. Prieto Sánchez spends part of his year traveling to U.S. retailers, sometimes pouring wines directly to consumers on the shop floor. “I spend days on the road giving tastings to people,” he says, “and I think it makes a difference.”

With a young winemaker who grew up inside Chile’s wine world now steering the Gran Reserva range, Viña Carmen is betting that authenticity and terroir clarity — delivered at an honest price — will project the range into its next phase, strengthening its relevance within Chilean wine while boosting its international presence.

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In my previous post, I wrote about disease-resistant, cold-hardy hybrid grape varieties Melissa and Parker Aellen are tending in their family’s experimental vineyard in central Maryland for their label Simple Theory Wine Co. The vineyard showed promise because the vines, only in their second leaf, survived the April 21 freeze that killed a lot of vines outright throughout the Mid-Atlantic, including at the Aellens’ primary vineyard, Linganore Winecellars. In this post, I address the elephant on the crush pad: Even if these vines thrive, will anyone buy the wine?

When I began visiting wineries in Virginia and Maryland in the late 1980s, a decades-long debate over the future of viniculture in the eastern United States was winding down. Team Vinifera — led by Dr. Konstantin Frank in New York and R. Treville Lawrence in Virginia — prevailed over Team Hybrid, led by Philip Wagner of Boordy Vineyards in Maryland.

Wagner advocated French-American hybrid varieties as better suited for the climate in the eastern U.S. and easier to grow than the European vinifera varieties. Frank, Lawrence and other fans insisted the European vinifera vines could indeed thrive here and produce superior wine. The debate even echoed some of the vitriol of Europe, where hybrids had been banned not just as inferior to vinifera but also allegedly toxic.

My wife and I visited Hood River Vineyards in Oregon around this time. That winery was known for its fortified fruit wines, and we giggled over its Marionberry wine (which was delicious), because Marion Barry was the notorious mayor of Washington, D.C. We waited patiently for our tasting while another young couple enthused to the tasting room manager about their recent trip out east and the surprising variety of wines they encountered. “They have all these hybrids we’ve never heard of,” the woman marveled. We snickered quietly, because well, we knew better, or thought we did.

Improvements in viticulture and a desire to make world-class wines helped push vinifera to ascendence in the eastern U.S. Today, French-American hybrid varieties are rare in the Mid-Atlantic. You can find the occasional Traminette, Seyval or Vidal Blanc, often in a dessert wine, and Chambourcin still has its fans for juicy, light-bodied reds. In New York, Baco Noir and Chelois, a light red, are holdouts. But vinifera is king.

Vinifera is also expensive to grow, because it’s susceptible to downey and powdery mildews, requiring frequent spraying of fungicides to prevent the diseases from getting hold of the vine canopies and grape bunches. This is especially a problem in the rainy, humid climate of the Mid-Atlantic.

In 2011, the Wine Bloggers Conference was held in Charlottesville. This was a big deal for Virginia wine, as many bloggers from around the country were having their first exposure to the Old Dominion’s vino. The main tasting was held on the lawn at Monticello and featured an appearance by “Thomas Jefferson” himself. The mercury soared over 100F that day, so tasting conditions weren’t ideal. I recall hearing several bloggers from the West Coast asking winemakers “How many times have you sprayed this year?” The questions were so persistent that some winemakers, already irritably sweaty, were visibly annoyed.

I mention the Oregon and bloggers anecdotes because they’re relevant to the current discussion of hybrid varieties. Hybrids are back on the agenda, but the same questions persist: Can they make great wine? And will people buy them?

Today’s discussion of hybrids differs from the earlier debate in two ways:

• The varieties are different. The science of creating genetic crosses has evolved, and more recent varieties have a greater component of vinifera DNA than the French-American hybrids of old. This should improve their quality (more like vinifera varieties), while the American DNA offers protection against phylloxera and American plights like downey and powdery mildew.

• Varieties can be created with specific characteristics in mind. The University of Minnesota developed several winter-hardy varieties — the best known are Frontenac and Marquette — designed to survive harsh winters. These are popular in the northern Midwest and New England. So-called PiWi varieties are bred to be resistant to disease and reduce the need for pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. They are developed mostly in Germany and Italy and also popular in Austria’s Styria region. They are also gaining interest here in the United States.

Skeptics remain. After I posted my previous piece, Jordan Harris, winemaker at Point of the Bluff Vineyards in New York’s Finger Lakes, commented that hybrids are less profitable than vinifera.

“Marketability and value matter,” said Harris, who has made wine from hybrids and vinifera varieties in Virginia as well as New York. “For an independent grower, the value of hybrids is often 1/3 or less of vinifera varieties.”

The newer varieties “have even less marketability than more popular hybrids . [and] in the tasting room, the ceiling on price is also way lower than vinifera,” he added.

The Aellens share these concerns as they tend their experimental 5-acre vineyard near Mt. Airy, Md. The bulk of their planting is two varieties developed by Vivi Cooperativi Rauscedo in Fruili, Italy, called Merlot Kanthus and Cabernet Volos. These are crosses of those vinifera grapes and something called 20-3, with resistance to downy and powdery mildew and cold hardy down to -24C.

Parker Aellen said they chose these varieties because some wineries in Europe had made wine from them to critical acclaim and in the hope that consumers would respond to their familiar names. The other varieties they planted, Monarch, Helios and Johanniter, won’t have the advantage of familiar names and may be best used in blends if at all.

As Eric Aellen, Parker’s father, quipped, “No one’s going to buy a wine called Johanniter.” (Sounds like janitor?)1

They hope to make wine from these vines in 2027. Only then will they know how the wines will taste and whether customers will like them. But Melissa Aellen said customers at the Simple Theory tasting room in Frederick, Md., like those West Coast bloggers in Charlottesville, frequently show interest in how the wines are made, including sustainability and chemical use in the vineyard.

And like that young couple in Oregon back in the 1980s, younger consumers today may not have inherited their parents’ biases against hybrids. The interest in sustainability and willingness to try something new could create a ready audience if the quality is there and the message is compelling.

After all, if the wines are good in the glass and the farming is better for the environment, why should we cling to old convictions that hybrids are inherently inferior to vinifera?

The Aellen family has been meeting consumer demand for three generations at Linganore Winecellars, from off-dry and sweet wines to fruit wines and dry table wines. They’ve also grown experimental varieties developed at Cornell University. With Simple Theory, they aim to help define the next era of Maryland wine. These disease-resistant varieties may be part of that era.

“We’re not just shooting from the hip,” Melissa Aellen told me. “We’ve been doing this for 50 years. Customers will be receptive.”

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Parker Aellen found a Monarch vine with a small cluster of black grapes and offered berries to me and his cousin, Melissa Aellen.

“Still needs time, but pretty good,” Melissa said as we chewed the pulp and spat the seeds onto our hands. They were green and unripe. But yes, the juice was tart and tasty, just needing a little more sugar to balance the acid.

The Aellens won’t be making wine from these vines until next year, Mother Nature willing, but the vines’ survival offered some optimism in a depressing vintage. This 5-acre experimental plot, three miles west of their family’s main vineyard at Linganore Winecellars near Mt. Airy, Maryland, is planted with about 6,000 vines of fungus-resistant and cold-hardy grape varieties. Commonly called PiWis — a shortening of the consonant-heavy German term for fungus-resistant — they belong to a group of hybrid varieties developed over the past decades in Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States for their ability to resist downey mildew and powdery mildew, two scourges that keep growers on their tractors applying chemical sprays during wet seasons. They are also meant to be cold-hearty, resistant to the severe winters we’ve come to associate with “polar vortex” here in the Eastern U.S.

The hope for these disease-resistant, cold-hardy varieties is that growers will be able to drastically reduce chemical use in the vineyard and that the vines will be resilient against drastic weather extremes brought on by climate change.

Melissa and Parker Aellen are the third generation of Linganore Winecellars, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. They run the winery and a sister project called Simple Theory Wine Co. along with their fathers, Anthony and Eric Aellen, respectively.

In an average year, they might harvest about 270 tons of grapes from their 80 acres of vineyards at Linganore. After the April 21 freeze, they expect to have 30 tons. There won’t be any Cabernet Franc this year, or Barbera or San Marco. Their 4-year-old planting of Malbec was frosted down to the trunk, so there will be no crop this year or next. They will have some Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, but mostly from secondary and tertiary buds, so the grapes are ripening unevenly. August hasn’t been kind, with rains every few days dumping four inches of water on the vineyards, creating disease pressure and diluting the grapes.

In Maryland alone, the April 21 freeze is estimated to have cost wineries $14 million in lost retail sales, according to the Maryland Wineries Association. Like the Aellens, growers across Maryland and elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic are preparing for a diminished harvest, dealing with uneven ripening of secondary and tertiary bunches and now increased disease pressure from the August rains, while assessing impacts on future vintages and planning for replacing vines that were killed altogether.

At least at their experimental plot, the Aellens won’t have much replanting to do. The varieties there — Merlot Kanthus, Cabernet Volos, Helios, Monarch and Johanniter — survived the freeze, with just a few casualties. These were grouped together, Parker explained, suggesting that some rocky areas of the vineyard had prevented the vines from establishing their roots fully and left them vulnerable.

Also promising: The Aellens had sprayed the vines only once, early in the season to protect against black rot. In a normal year, they might have sprayed their vinifera vineyards six or seven times. Rain and humidity create conditions ripe for downey and powdery mildews, and sprays need to be applied after a substantial rainfall. The fungus-resistant varieties are thus easier and less expensive to grow, and have a lower environmental impact from chemical use.

While these vines look promising given the difficulties of 2026, the Aellens still don’t know what the wines will taste like, or whether consumers will buy them. We’ll look at that question in my next post.

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Cheers to Bars! Research from Oxford Economics and AB InBev looks at the economic and social contributions of bars and pubs in five countries: the US, the UK, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea and concluding these watering holes support 2 million jobs, add more than $125 billion to the collective GDPs and $40 billion in tax revenues. But there’s more: the researchers estimated bars generate $4.9 billion in additional social value.

“Drawing on a survey of around 1,000 bar going consumers in each country, the report examines how and why people use bars today—from routine socializing to significant personal and cultural moments. Across markets, the findings show a clear pattern: 77% of respondents agree or strongly agree that bars help bring people together by creating a shared atmosphere, 72% agree or strongly agree that they make a positive local economic contribution, while three in five have celebrated a milestone in a bar. Together, these findings highlight the central role bars play in bringing people together and supporting social connection, while regional differences shape bar culture in the different markets.”

I learned of this report through a LinkedIn post by Derek Brown, a leader of the “mindful drinking” movement and advocate of non-alcoholic cocktails. Brown argued eloquently that the current crisis for bars isn’t just because of a market downturn in alcohol consumption but results from “a decades-long erosion of social infrastructure.” And the social benefits of bars don’t necessarily derive solely from alcohol, he added. Here’s part of what he wrote:

[B]ars are essential to our social interactions and our communities. We need to support them now more than ever.

That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in alcohol alternatives. I know this alone won’t bring people back to bars, but it gives people another option, another reason to be there.

Ultimately, the goal is to make room for everybody at the bar so that we can have the kind of communities and society we want. One where we’re sharing stories, drinking delicious drinks, connecting with each other, and experiencing the best in life.

Grab a drink tonight, with or without alcohol, and support your local bars. It’s good for you and it’s good for them.

Best wineries in every state, ranked by Tasting Table. A good list — hard to argue with any of the choices (though I might propose some other candidates) — and many wineries I haven’t heard of to continue my “Drink Local” quest. As I’ve always said, “Look for wines from around here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be.”

Maybe we shouldn’t be blaming our kids: New market research finds Gen Z is drinking after all, but the Boomers are cutting back, or falling off, or falling over … The Drinks Biz reports.

Your leaf canopy should be at least SPF 50: Jessica Dupuy reports in SevenFifty on a new scourge of climate change: sunburned grapes. And she tells us how to detect it in the glass. Creosote — yummmm…

What if wine goes away? Henry Jeffreys, in “Drinking Culture,” imagines a dystopian future in which The New Prohibition has won and we’re not drinking anymore. “Civilisation will go on if we continue down the path to sobriety, it just won’t be a lot of fun,” he concludes.

The calendar tells a tale: Danica Leminski, aka Winethologist, discusses how the ban des vendanges, published August 12 by the Comité Champagne and setting the dates for the champagne harvest, tells a story not only of this vintage but also how the region has been adapting to earlier harvests due to climate change. And by coincidence, the ban des vendanges was issued the same day of the solar eclipse in Europe, letting her riff on the solar, biodynamic and champagne calendars.

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Serra de L’Home, the property’s old name, dates back to 1645. The estate sits at 300 meters altitude, with calcareous, sandy-loam soils bordered by forest, scrub and olive trees. When I visited in late November 2023, the property seemed to show mostly potential: The vines were slumbering and bare after the harvest, and a decrepit farmhouse testified of work still to be done. Mostly, the land looked parched from years of drought.

That all changed in 2025. The farmhouse, now restored, is occupied and the farm tended full-time. And a generous 714 mm of rain during the season brought the farm to life. The vines showed renewed vigor and produced the Can Sumoi 2025 Xarel-lo, which is now in the United States.

Simply put, this is one of the most compelling white wines I’ve tasted in years. It didn’t announce itself from the glass — rather, it drew me in for a second look and taste, then teased me with a different flavor or aroma at every sip. There was jasmine, acacia, lemongrass, beeswax and ginger, but never all at once and always ephemeral, as if the wine refused to reveal its true nature until I proved worthy. No oak — about 20 percent of the juice was fermented in concrete, lending a sappy, savory texture. There was no hurry to drink it. Each sip lingered on my palate as I tried to decipher its riddle. The wine transformed over three evenings, never quite the same and yet relating a consistent narrative.

I wrote about my visit with Raventós in The Washington Post two years ago, and this reflection on his wines applies also to his Xarel-lo from Can Sumoi:

“Can we taste ancient geologic history in the wines of Raventós i Blanc? That’s up to our imaginations, perhaps, but imagination is an essential part of wine appreciation. These wines could come from nowhere else, interpreted by someone dedicated to conveying the essence of the Earth to our glass, through the vehicle of grapes. We need to be receptive to the message.”

My unicorn pairing with this wine would be the arctic char at Steirereck restaurant in Vienna, Austria. (IYKYK) But I’m sure I could find something worthy of it in Barcelona.

Can Sumoi 2025 Xarel-lo (12.7 percent abv) is imported in the U.S. by Potomac Selections. Retail price should be around $30.

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Hello, everyone! My name is Dave McIntyre and welcome to WineLine Live, a five o’clock happy hour edition. I am pleased today to welcome Michael Kaiser, a dear old friend of mine and supporter of local wines back when we had an organization called Drink Local Wine that promoted the idea of wine from around here, wherever here happens to be. So thank you for joining us. Michael is here today in his capacity as the Executive Director of WineAmerica, a national trade association representing American wineries. Michael, welcome.

Michael Kaiser 00:00

Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. The first Drink Local Wine event I went to was in Colorado, in 2012. In my position, I’ve been lucky enough to have wine from almost every state, but that was great to see like-minded people — local food was a thing, so why wasn’t local wine a thing? I think that’s something that, through my work with WineAmerica, became a passion — just kind of a natural progression.

Dave McIntyre 00:00

I think the situation of local food but not local wine has gotten a little better, but there’s still a lot of work to do in a lot of places — so we can keep the message going. Michael, please tell us a little about yourself, how you came to work for WineAmerica. You’re not new with the organization; you’ve been there for quite some time, and I’d like to know how you came to that position, then we can talk about the organization itself.

Michael Kaiser 00:38

Yeah. So, I was born and raised — not to go too far back — in New Jersey, and I moved down to Washington, D.C. like so many people did, to go to graduate school. That was 1999, so I’ve been in D.C. longer than I was in New Jersey. I’m a D.C. native, I’d say now. I live by what’s going to be the new RFK Stadium — the old RFK Stadium — with my wife and two sons, 17 and 14. I went to American University and graduated with a master’s there. I worked for a couple of lobbying firms doing legislative tracking, research, and bill tracking. In 2006 I was actually working as a tour guide here in D.C. on Segways — I don’t know if those are still a thing, but I did that for a summer. I had an agency searching for a more permanent job for me, and they said, “Hey, there’s this winery trade association that needs someone to handle regulatory affairs.” The alcohol industry is regulated through the Treasury Department, primarily through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — a bureau within Treasury — and there’s a bunch of rules and regulations that all alcohol producers have to follow. They needed someone to interface with them. I didn’t know anything about wine, but I took the job. That was July of 2006 — so, do the math, it’s 20 years and one month with the organization. Over the last 20 years I’ve done a lot of different things with the organization — primarily, for the last 12 years, our legislative affairs and lobbying work, which I’m still doing in my current job. Then this May I was made executive director and given the reins to head the trade association — about a week and a half ago, actually; it was announced on Tuesday last week. At the end of July, our outgoing president, Jim Trezise, who’d been with the organization a long time and was also head of the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, stepped away from WineAmerica. He’s still very active in the industry, and I’m excited to see what he does next. That’s kind of how we got to where I am right now. So — what is WineAmerica?

Dave McIntyre 04:09

Before you get into that, let me add a little context — I used to work for a regulatory agency, and people who aren’t in Washington maybe don’t live and breathe this stuff. Every industry has regulations that affect it, local, state, and federal. But alcohol, because of our history with Prohibition, has particularly strange regulations, so it’s important to have representation here in Washington. With that context, tell us what WineAmerica is, what it does for wineries, and the benefits consumers get from your work.

Michael Kaiser 05:05

Yeah, that’s a good point. Alcohol is unique in that we have 50 states — 52 counting D.C. and territories — plus the federal government, each setting their own rules and regulations. From a federal standpoint, every wine label has to be approved by the TTB before it can go to market, and there are federal excise taxes that producers need to pay. To answer your question — what does WineAmerica do? We’re a nonprofit trade association, a 501(c)(6), which means we’re allowed to do advocacy. If you’re a winery in the United States with a federal basic permit, you can belong to our organization. Dues go from $500 up, way up, and what that gets you is representation here in D.C. from a government affairs standpoint. If there’s an issue that would impact your business, adversely or positively, we work on the wineries’ behalf — it could be a tax break, or money for research into new grape varieties, or pest management, like trying to stop the spotted lanternfly. We represent wineries from across the country, but our bread and butter is wineries outside of California, because California wineries also have the Wine Institute, a California-only trade association that also has a presence here.

How does this impact the wine consumer? If taxes were to go up on wine, producers might have to raise prices, so the consumer would pay more for their favorite wines — if we can help prevent that, that’s how our work gets down to the consumer. Another example is grape research: wineries are always trying to figure out what they can grow, and that has a trickle-down effect. As a value-added agricultural product, the work we do is important, and it benefits not just the producers but the people who consume that product.

Dave McIntyre 08:46

I want to welcome everybody who’s joined us, and remind everyone you’re watching Dave McIntyre’s WineLine Live with Michael Kaiser, executive director of WineAmerica, the national trade association representing U.S. wineries. Now, about the Wine Institute — that name might be more familiar to a lot of people. They represent wineries in California, and a lot of what they do may benefit wineries elsewhere, but those interests aren’t always exactly the same, and wineries elsewhere have other concerns.

Michael Kaiser 09:40

That’s right. We’re at the point now where the industry has grown so much in the last 20 years that almost every state has its own trade association for wineries — there’s the Washington Wine Institute, the Oregon Winegrowers Association, the Texas Wine and Grape Growers Association, all doing work in Olympia, Austin, and other state capitals. But the Wine Institute is unique in that they work in Sacramento, but also here in D.C. and across the country. There’s a lot of overlap with issues important to the entire industry, but each state has different things important to it. As an example, wineries here in our region — Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the Mid-Atlantic — had that devastating frost in April that’s going to hinder so many wineries this year with the ‘26 vintage. One of the things we’re doing currently is trying to get them some disaster funding. There’s not really much of a frost issue for grapes in California.

Dave McIntyre 11:02

I was just attending some events in Maryland — the Maryland Wineries Association and the state Department of Agriculture were honoring six of their pioneering wineries from the ‘70s and ‘80s that laid the foundation for the state industry’s growth. They’re estimating that the April 21 freeze will cost Maryland wineries about $14 million in lost retail sales this year, with ramifications felt for years beyond that. There were some dire early assessments about vine kill — people are now realizing maybe it’s not so bad, but the effect on the 2026 vintage is overwhelming. They also talked about state laws that had to change to allow wineries to pour samples for visitors, sell a glass of wine, or have tables and chairs for people to sit at when they visit a tasting room — those weren’t allowed in the beginning. So that’s the network of regulations wineries have to deal with. Those were pretty formidable, probably because nobody was thinking about wineries when the regulations were devised years and years ago. So wineries had to come in and say, “We’re doing something new, we need this changed” — and WineAmerica is that voice on the national stage, right?

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Michael Kaiser 13:14

Maryland’s a good example of a state that’s grown but also had to deal with a lot of those antiquated rules. They’ve been lucky — their former executive director of the wineries association is now the secretary of agriculture there, so he understands the industry. I think he was the first person representing value-added agriculture appointed to that position, so he’s got a unique perspective. That just shows the overall value of trade associations — at the state level and the federal level. But the problem trade associations will always face is that the work we do benefits the entire industry, not just the people who belong. That’s a sacrifice those of us who work for trade associations make — we believe in what we’re doing, we believe in the industry. But not everybody’s going to pony up the money to belong, and I get it — particularly right now, when people are trying to cut costs, and the first thing to go is often the association dues.

Dave McIntyre 16:01

Well, how many members does WineAmerica have currently?

Michael Kaiser 16:07

Yeah, right now it’s around 400. It’s not what it needs to be, but one of the things that’s been good for us is that we also have an association membership. The Maryland Wineries Association, for example, is also a member of WineAmerica — that doesn’t mean their individual members are also members of ours, but the association memberships are what really give us national reach. The Wine Institute is a member too, and that’s really our grassroots network. When we’re working on an issue and trying to get something passed, we tell the state associations, and that way we can mobilize hundreds, if not thousands, of wineries.

Dave McIntyre 16:57

It’s like an old-fashioned phone tree. Let’s look back a bit on some of the accomplishments of WineAmerica over the past several years — what you’ve worked on and the changes you’ve been able to get through Congress or the TTB. What are some of those?

Michael Kaiser 17:29

I think the biggest thing we got done in years with the organization was the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act — it’s a mouthful, but it was a comprehensive bill that created a bunch of tax breaks for the alcohol industry, finalized and made permanent in 2020. We started working on that in 2015. By the end of 2017, as so often happens in D.C., we got a two-year version of the bill. Before that there was what was known as the small producer tax credit, a carve-out for small producers to pay a lower excise tax on wine — in the wine industry we’re taxed just for the fact that we produce something. You pay a tax basically because you’re producing it. But —

Dave McIntyre 18:39

— and small producers are, I imagine, the vast majority of who you represent, because anything outside of California, New York, Oregon, and Washington is probably going to be a small producer.

Michael Kaiser 18:55

Yeah, of the roughly 10,000 wineries in the country, you could say 9,000, maybe 9,500, are small producers — there are obviously a couple of big ones. The difference is between paying $1.07 a gallon versus seven cents on the wine you produce. This bill got rid of the small producer credit and expanded the credit for everybody — not just wine, but beer and spirits too, since we all pay different excise tax rates; spirits pay the highest, beer the lowest.

That was 2017, and then two years later, in ‘19, we got a one-year extension, taking us to 2020. We all know what happened in 2020 — with COVID, tasting rooms got shut down, and a lot of wineries pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales, whether shipping or, in cases like Maryland and Virginia, local delivery under special exemptions. Wineries needed this tax break to continue. So at the end of 2020 we got it into one of those big omnibus bills that gets done at the end of every year, and it was made permanent. The wrinkle was that this was right around Christmas, and we expected the president to sign it — he said he wasn’t going to. There was a threat of a government shutdown, so there was a stretch of about three days where we thought it wasn’t going to go through. In the end he did sign it, and that —

Dave McIntyre 21:11

— that’s something that happens in Washington. It’s part of a big omnibus bill, and someone can put up an objection to something in the bill — and all the small policy wrapped up in it can suffer or get blocked for something that has nothing to do with the merits of the argument itself. And that’s —

Michael Kaiser 21:35

— to illustrate that even further: we had close to 80 senators and over 300 members of the House on this bill, bipartisan. You’d think with that kind of support it would’ve been passed and signed into law on its own, but issues like this always get folded, as you said, into larger things that have nothing to do with them.

I’d say that was probably the single most important and significant thing I personally worked on for the organization, and it came at the right time. Getting that made permanent in 2020/21 meant mid-size producers wouldn’t see thousands of dollars in tax increases, which would have been detrimental.

Some of the other issues we’re always working on are agriculture issues — trying to get money for research and pest management. The spotted lanternfly is a big problem here on the East Coast, and now it’s becoming a California problem too.

One of the newer things we’ve had to work on is pushing back on what I’d call a neo-prohibitionist narrative that’s out there now — a direct threat to our industry. People drink alcohol for enjoyment, and people have been consuming alcohol moderately for thousands of years — that’s the vast majority of consumers — but now, all of a sudden, it’s become a big negative issue.

A great way to illustrate how this crept into federal policy: every five years there’s what’s known as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans — R.F.K. Jr. had a big role in this with his new food pyramid — basically the government recommending what you should and shouldn’t eat, and how much. It’s done jointly by the USDA and Health and Human Services. Alcohol had been in the guidelines for a long time, with recommendations that if you do drink, a man can safely consume two drinks a day and a woman one, where a “drink” was defined as a 12-ounce beer around 5% alcohol, a five-ounce glass of wine at 12–13%, or 1.5 ounces of spirits. For many years that’s what was considered safe consumption. Make no mistake — the guidelines weren’t pro-alcohol, and they weren’t recommending people drink two drinks a day; they were saying if you do consume, don’t have 14 drinks in one sitting.

It also said certain people shouldn’t drink at all — there are obvious health risks. That’s how it was for many years, including the last edition, from 2020 to 2025. The process works like this: Congress authorizes and funds certain studies. What was authorized through Congress was a study by NASEM — the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — where experts studied the health outcomes of alcohol consumption. The Biden administration also had HHS do a separate study, for the first time not authorized by Congress, through the Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking, or ICCPUD. We all want to prevent underage drinking, but that’s completely unrelated to health outcomes, and the people contracted to do that study were critical of any alcohol consumption. NASEM looked at actual health outcomes; ICCPUD looked at societal outcomes too — drunk driving, domestic violence, anything bad that could come from overconsumption — not just health outcomes.

We said, this isn’t how the process is supposed to work — Congress approved the NASEM study, not the ICCPUD study, so this was out of the ordinary, and we didn’t want to see the ICCPUD study used to formulate the guidelines. In the end, USDA and HHS decided to use only the NASEM study. The two studies had very different findings — both said there’s an increased risk of certain cancers if you consume alcohol, but the NASEM study also found lower all-cause mortality among moderate drinkers, meaning they tend to live longer, which may be tied to diet and activity level. The ICCPUD study, paraphrasing, suggested any alcohol consumption raises your risk significantly. Both agreed that if you don’t drink, you shouldn’t start.

What did change in the new guidelines, which we did not advocate for, was that they got rid of the two-drinks/one-drink guidance, and now the guidelines just say “consume responsibly.” It was kind of a blessing and a curse for us to be in there — you wanted to be there to say what you could safely consume, but if we’d been removed entirely, that would’ve looked bad for the industry.

Dave McIntyre 29:40

This again seems like a Washington story — it’s an important issue, and you and the other organizations lobbying on behalf of consumers and producers focused your opposition on process, saying this isn’t the way to go about it. And you were effective. But for me, this whole issue — you mentioned drunk driving and underage drinking — we litigated all that years and years ago, with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The message was: consume, but don’t drink and drive, don’t operate a forklift, as we read on the back label, don’t drink when you’re pregnant, don’t get drunk at the office Christmas party and make a fool of yourself, don’t take advantage of other people if you lose control. That’s a message of responsible consumption, and that’s changed with this new prohibitionism — I’ll call them neo-prohibitionists. The argument now is that there’s no safe level of consumption, that a sip of Riesling is going to give me cancer or increase my chance of getting it. If you look at the numbers, that’s not really the case. Just today the Washington Post had a column by their brain-health columnist promoting the argument of no safe level of consumption. The political message is changing, and that worries me both as a policy matter and as a wine lover. It’s moving away from “know your limits and consume responsibly” toward “don’t drink at all.”

Michael Kaiser 33:04

Yeah, a couple of things you touched on I want to comment on. What I’d call the neo-prohibitionist, anti-alcohol crowd — whatever you want to call it — lumps all alcohol consumption into one big monolith, as if having a glass of wine is the same as someone having five vodka tonics in one sitting, or having one beer at a baseball game is the same as someone drinking a six-pack or a twelve-pack every night. The vast majority of people do it moderately, and that’s what we encourage, not just for health reasons but for societal ones. They also lump all alcohol producers together, so a tiny winery in Maryland or Pennsylvania gets equated with “Big Alcohol” — “Big Alcohol killed the dietary guidelines” is basically the narrative. But you’re right, it wasn’t about the outcome, it was about the process — we’d have dealt with whatever the outcome was, but the process was the problem, and that’s a microcosm of a lot of this.

At the same time, people are consuming less alcohol overall. One of the other issues we’re working on currently is the prevalence of hemp-derived THC beverages. I won’t get into the full nuance, but these were technically made legal through the last farm bill, eight years ago, which legalized hemp cultivation — there’s a loophole where if you extract THC and reinfuse it into a product, it’s technically not cannabis but still has THC in it. You’re seeing these sold at places like Total Wine, at grocery stores, gas stations, or shipped to your house — it’s basically federally legal cannabis, which wasn’t the intention of that law. That’s gaining popularity, and we’re not — to use the prohibitionist word ourselves — we’re not against these products existing, but there’s really no regulation for them.

That’s just an example of the outside threats the wine industry is facing. For a long time it was ready-to-drink cocktails supposedly killing the wine industry — there’s always something that’s going to kill the wine industry — and the industry does need to adapt better than it has, quite frankly, in certain respects. But there are legitimate concerns and threats out there.

Dave McIntyre 37:05

Yeah. In our conversation before we went live, you mentioned that two consecutive presidential administrations have had a president who doesn’t consume alcohol, which is unprecedented, at least in your time, but probably for all time. Trump has a winery — or his son does — but he’s imposing tariffs and doing other things we haven’t mentioned yet that are impacting the wine industry. So —

Michael Kaiser 37:57

Yeah, it was interesting — we’re talking about Trump, Biden, Trump, basically, and both have been friendly and adverse to the industry in different ways. Under the Biden administration, there was an executive order about the marketplace with a whole section on alcohol distribution, instructing the federal government to look at what could be done to alleviate issues alcohol producers were having with distribution at the state level. Since that was Biden-related, Trump canceled everything tied to it. But I also mentioned the tax bill — Trump signed that into law, in his first term. So those are two positive things, one from each administration. On the negative side, the Biden administration had that study I mentioned earlier for the dietary guidelines, and now, for wineries that export, the biggest issue is that we’re not exporting much of anything right now, which is directly related to tariffs.

If you’re a winery in Indiana, you might ask, “Why should I care about tariffs? I don’t export.” Well, you care about your ability to get tanks and barrels, and you care about distributors having problems because they can’t sell certain imported wines — that hurts their ability to sell your wines too.

The other argument I hear from the administration and others is that people will just switch to American wine. Probably not, because in a lot of cases American wine is more expensive. Here’s the example I always use: say you’re an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and you want small producers from a certain region in Italy to go with your cuisine. You’re not going to switch — you’re going to keep buying wine from Italy, which just means the cost gets passed to the consumer. It doesn’t create a new market for your wine if foreign wines aren’t available. Conversely, a grocery chain like Safeway is going to stock what sells, so they may look to a similar wine from California, South Africa, or South America to replace a European wine — they’re not going to suddenly go with a Virginia wine instead. The biggest thing I tell wineries is that you want your wine on store shelves, but there’s got to be a shelf for you to put it on, and if the cost of importing wine goes up too much, that shelf doesn’t just open up for domestic wines either.

Dave McIntyre 41:27

Yeah, okay, so we’re still feeling the impact of tariffs, and I imagine that’s still high on your agenda for WineAmerica in the coming year. What other issues will you be working on?

Michael Kaiser 41:45

Well, looking ahead — we’re going to have a new Congress next year. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. If the Democrats retake the House and the Senate, or just one of those two, there’ll likely be a lot of investigations into the last two years. The concern is whether there will be any actual governing happening, or more of what we’re seeing now, with investigations into how tariffs were implemented, for example.

The things that come up every year are primarily funding issues, and one thing we’re concerned about going forward is disaster relief funding — whether it’s the freeze here in the Mid-Atlantic and New York, or fires in Washington, Oregon, California, and now Idaho, we always have to seek disaster funding relief when that happens. One thing we might look at in the new year is establishing that funding on a standing basis, since we need it every year. Wine grapes are what’s known as a specialty crop, versus a row crop — specialty crops are things like strawberries, apples, and grapes. Row crops tend to get most of the farm and agriculture subsidies, so what we hope to do is get a dedicated disaster relief fund for specialty crops, along with management and mitigation funding.

We’re also going to have to see if more anti-alcohol measures come through Congress. The other side, if you want to call it that — I hate using that term, since I don’t know that there really are “sides” in this — is very organized. And with the volatility of this administration, in terms of predictability, and how that plays out with a different Congress, that could have an impact on everybody in the industry.

Dave McIntyre 45:04

And there is a bipartisan Congressional Wine Caucus.

Michael Kaiser 45:13

It’s primarily in the House, but senators can belong too. Mike Thompson from California is the chair — he represents Napa and part of Sonoma County, and is also a grape grower himself. Currently Dan Newhouse from Washington State is the Republican co-chair. It’s very bipartisan — we’re lucky that wine isn’t a divisive issue. As I mentioned with the craft beverage bill, we had close to 80 senators and over 300 House members on it. That’s an advantage of working in this industry — we work with everybody. I think the fact that the Wine Caucus is one of the larger caucuses in Congress is an example of how the industry has grown, and of the bipartisan nature of who we represent.

Dave McIntyre 46:41

And they have good parties.

Michael Kaiser 46:43

Yeah, we haven’t had a tasting in a while — I think you came to one when we did do it. We get wines, staff, and certain invited guests like yourself, and it’s a good way for congressional staff and members to taste wines they probably would never have tasted otherwise. Last time we did it, we had wine from Vermont, and we’ve had wine from places like Alabama and Louisiana, and just —

Dave McIntyre 47:29

— and South Dakota wine, at one a few years back — that was my first chance at that. It’s pretty cool.

Michael Kaiser 47:40

Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but we’re talking about maybe bringing it back, so we’ll see.

Dave McIntyre 47:46

All right, well, we’ve almost filled the hour — funny how fast the time goes. Is there anything else you’d like to add? For the few people who’ve joined us in the last few minutes, thank you again for joining WineLine Live with Michael Kaiser of WineAmerica.

Michael Kaiser 48:10

I’ll give both a professional and a personal view. Professionally, I think it’s important for wineries and the wine industry to have a trade association that represents them in D.C. On the personal side, I’d say: try something you’ve never had before. If you’re in a new city, or traveling, go to a local winery and see what it’s like, or try the local wine on a restaurant list, whether you’re traveling for work or pleasure. Just be open to exploring — I know we like to romanticize this, but it’s true: you might taste an IPA and it’ll basically taste like an IPA, but a Chardonnay from Virginia is going to taste different from a Chardonnay from Oregon. I want to see more consumers be willing to try that, and it’s gotten a lot better. I think the industry is in a good spot, and it’s gotten better over the years, but we’re still not all the way there.

Dave McIntyre 49:53

Right, so more to come in future years and future discussions. Final question: what is Michael Kaiser drinking when nobody’s watching?

Michael Kaiser 50:16

I’m kind of a sucker for what’s known as a macro beer — like a Budweiser. I love going to a baseball game and getting a Budweiser; there’s nothing romantic about that, but there’s a time and place for it. Obviously I drink wine, and different wines, but honestly, it’s probably a cheap beer.

Dave McIntyre 50:57

Okay, that’s fair enough. A lot of winemakers will tell you they can’t make good wine without a lot of beer. All right, having said that —

Michael Kaiser 51:06

— I do love craft beer too.

Dave McIntyre 51:08

Yeah, yeah. When I go to the ballpark, I’m looking for the local brew. All right, well, Michael, thank you again for taking time out to talk to us. And congratulations on your new position at WineAmerica. From this conversation today, I think we all know the organization is in good hands, and we look forward to inviting you back to check in on developments from time to time.

Michael Kaiser 52:19

I also want to point out, I have a shirt on that says “Drink Virginia” — I support every event.

Dave McIntyre 52:30

Yeah, well, I’d add New York, South Dakota, and a few others we’ve mentioned — Vermont, Texas. So thanks everyone for joining us, and for the thumbs-up and the likes and everything. Stay tuned for more on Dave McIntyre’s WineLine.

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The series of commemorations, held over two weeks in late July, were an opportunity for reflection by a community facing serious headwinds at a time when it is gaining momentum and market acceptance.

The six legacy wineries were Basignani Winery, Boordy Vineyards, Elk Run Vineyard and Winery, Fiore Winery & Distillery, Linganore Winecellars and Loew Vineyards. Frequently mentioned among all the speechifying were other influential Maryland wineries that have not survived to this day: Montbray Cellars, Byrd Vineyards and Woodhall Cellars.

“You walked, even crawled, so we could run,” said Melissa Aellen, third-generation winemaker at Linganore and president of the Maryland Wineries Association, which co-sponsored the events with the Maryland Department of Agriculture. “My generation can move forward at lightning speed because of the groundwork you all laid in the past.”

“When you started, there was no industry to speak of,” said Kevin Atticks, Maryland’s secretary of agriculture and former executive director of the wineries association. “There were a handful of pioneers trying something out, and through your diligence you have made this industry the national success story it has become,” he said.

“The challenges you overcome in every vintage — and you’ll get through this one as well — are remarkable, and a guide to other industries just getting started,” Atticks said.

He was referring to the devastating freeze that struck the Mid-Atlantic region the morning of April 21. Janna Howley, the current executive director of the wineries association, estimated the freeze would cost Maryland wineries $14 million in lost retail sales from the 2026 vintage. But the freeze will be felt for years to come as wineries assess long-term damage to their vines and even replant some vineyards.

As recently as the turn of the 21st century, Maryland had only 12 wineries. Today, that number has reached 75, with about 1,000 acres planted to grapevines, Howley said. (By the final ceremony, the number bandied about was “75-80,” after The Wall Street Journal posted a favorable writeup of Maryland wine that put the total at 85 wineries.)

That growth over the last quarter century was possible in large part to the work of the families honored in July. Not only did the early winemakers have to convince skeptical consumers that wine could be made in Maryland, they struggled against unfavorable regulations that stymied efforts to create a new agricultural industry.

“We couldn’t offer samples or sell a glass of wine,” said Rob Deford, whose family has owned and operated Boordy, the state’s oldest winery, since the early 1980s. “We couldn’t have tables and chairs, or we’d be a restaurant.” Alcohol distribution laws in the late 1970s and early 1980s limited wineries to selling one quart per year to each customer; this was later relaxed to one quart per product, which led to an explosion of SKUs and may help to explain why some wineries make so many wines even today. (That limit was eventually dropped.)

To change that hostile regulatory climate, winemakers founded the Maryland Wineries Association in 1984. The association held an annual wine festival to build its market and began lobbying extensively in Annapolis. Mike Fiore of Fiore Winery recalled how testifying before a legislative committee was the most terrifying experience of his life. (This from a man who emigrated from Calabria and had a long career as a health physicist at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant, during which he planted a vineyard and started his winery in his spare time.)

Much of the association’s success came in the 20 years it was helmed by Atticks, from 2002-2022, before he was tapped for his state post by Governor Wes Moore. Atticks presented each winery with a citation honoring their contributions.

“You planted the first grapes, championed legislative change, and established the very foundation of what has become a thriving industry,” he read from the citations.

“Your deep commitment to local agriculture, education, and land stewardship has been instrumental in elevating Maryland into a world-class wine destination.”

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Six Pioneers

Of the six legacy wineries, only Boordy and Linganore sport bright, modern facilities most tourists would associate with wine country. The others still feature a modest pioneer vibe, with the air of inviting you to their home or their patio for conversation over a glass of wine. And pizza at Basignani, if you time your visit right.

Basignani Vineyards: Bert and Lynne Basignani celebrated their wedding in 1974 by planting 60 vines on their property in Sparks, Md., north of Baltimore. Bert, a second-generation Italian-American of Tuscan heritage, had been unhappy with the grapes he bought from California for home winemaking, so he decided to grow his own. Over the years, the vineyard grew and he sold grapes to a few wineries until 1985, when he and Lynne took the plunge and opened Basignani Vineyards. Their best wine is the Lorenzino Reserve, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, though at the reception there was worthy buzz about a limited-release Nebbiolo. The winery is open Saturdays and Sundays, and some weekends Bert heats up a wood-fired oven and slings a limited number of Tuscan-style pizzas. (“None of that Neapolitan stuff!” he says.) 15722 Falls Rd, Sparks, MD 21152. If you go and don’t score a pie, just a few miles down the road is Jake’s Grill, a decrepit hole in the wall with amazing pit beef sandwiches, a Maryland treasure.

Boordy Vineyards: Boordy is Maryland’s oldest winery, founded in 1945 by Philip Wagner, a Baltimore journalist (Yay!) and a champion of French-American hybrid grape varieties along the East Coast. Wagner sold the winery in the early 1980s to the Deford family, who relocated to their property in the Long Green Valley north of Baltimore and began concentrating on vinifera varieties. Two decades ago, Rob Deford, the second generation of the current ownership, added a vineyard near South Mountain, in central Maryland’s Catoctin range, where Boordy’s top wines, labeled Dry Bench Reserve and Landmark Series, are now grown. Rob’s son, Phineas Deford, is the third generation now active in managing the winery. Visitors are welcomed daily at the winery in Long Green Valley. 12820 Long Green Pike, Hydes, MD 21082. And if you’re still hungry, Fast Eddie’s Pit Beef is just a short drive away.

Elk Run Vineyard and Winery: Founded in 1983 by Fred and Carol Wilson in central Maryland’s Frederick County, Elk Run was an early champion of vinifera grape varieties in Maryland, and still is one of few wineries in the state to grow Pinot Noir. Elk Run’s estate vineyard along Liberty Road in Mount Airy has the enchanting name of Cold Friday, a name dating back to when the property was part of a land grant from the King of England to Lord Baltimore. It was Fred who called Janna Howley and suggested honoring the pioneers “before we all die.” His son, Julian, is currently handling the vineyard and winemaking. 15113 Liberty Road, Mount Airy, MD, 21771.

Fiore Winery & Distillery: Mike and Rose Fiore planted their first vines on their farm in Harford County, near the Pennsylvania border in northeastern Maryland, in the early 1980s, to make wine for themselves. When they couldn’t sell the extra grapes, they established Fiore Winery in 1986. Mike was the first to plant Sangiovese in Maryland, and after testifying to the Maryland legislature, he became the state’s first distillery licensee. Today, Fiore Winery & Distillery makes outstanding grappa, including an oak-aged version. Fiore’s rye whiskey ignited Maryland’s craft spirits industry and helped establish rye as the signature state liquor. And his 2014 Sangiovese, poured at the reception honoring his achievements, was quite lively for a 12-year-old wine. Open daily. 3026 Whiteford Rd., Pylesville, MD 21132.

Linganore Winecellars: Jack and Lucille Aellen bought 230 acres of an old dairy farm near Mount Airy, Md., in 1971. The next year, they planted 6 acres of vineyards, and in 1976 they opened Linganore Winecellars. To build their market, they held wine festivals on their property, and shifted from dry to sweet wines to meet market demand. Today the second generation is in transition: Anthony Aellen, the older son, is approaching retirement and will be handing the reins to his brother, Eric. The third generation is already involved, with cousins Melissa and Parker Aellen moving the winemaking back toward drier, more classic European-styled wines and creating their own label, Simple Theory, to showcase innovative wines and new varieties adapting to climate change. Open daily, with several events and festivals throughout the year. A brewery onsite is under reconstruction following a fire and should reopen this fall. 13601 Glissans Mill Rd., Mount Airy, MD 21771.

Loew Vineyards: Loew Vineyards has Maryland wine’s most compelling story, and recently is making some of the state’s most compelling wines. Winemaker Rachel Lipman can lay claim to being a fifth-generation winemaker as she helms the winery founded in the early 1980s by her grandparents, William and Lois Loew. William, whose given name was Wolf Löw, was born into a family of mead producers in Lvöv, Poland, now known as Lviv in Ukraine. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and started the winery as a retirement project after a career with the U.S. government. Since Rachel took over, she has modernized the modest production facility, greatly improving the wines, including a fantastic Cabernet Franc and a stunning 2025 Chenin Blanc to be released this fall. She has extensively researched her family history in Poland and this year received kosher certification for her meads, making Loew Vineyards this country’s first kosher meadery. Open Fridays-Sundays and federal holidays. 14001 Liberty Rd., Mt. Airy, MD 21771.

Additional Reading:

Susan also loves wine and is happy to offer me a home base to explore wineries whenever I visit. So when I imposed on her for a weekend in May, we visited a few of my favorite producers, including Jamie Kutch. (We also visited Smith-Story and Inman Family. More on those visits in future posts.)

I tend to favor small, literally “mom and pop” wineries making soulful wines and striving, sometimes struggling, to get their wines before consumers in a tough market. They’re the type of winemakers I most enjoy meeting because they lend a personal, immediate dimension to a beverage that has nourished humankind for eight millennia. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but anyone who believes “wine is just fermented grape juice” is drinking the wrong sorts of wine. You probably have a few similar labels among your favorites; please share them in the comments.

Jamie’s origin story hinges on an event that changed all our lives: He was working on Wall Street as a trader for Merrill Lynch in 2001, and the September 11 terrorist attack prompted Jamie and his wife, Kristen Green, to re-evaluate their life course and head to the west coast.

After Jamie apprenticed at a few wineries, he and Kristen established Kutch Wines in 2005. “I had enough money to make six barrels of wine,” he told me. Since 2012, he has averaged 3,000 cases a year, building a reputation for quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, mostly from the cool vineyards of the West Sonoma Coast and Santa Cruz Mountains. Kristen helps with the business side while maintaining a successful food-and-wine public relations venture of her own. Jamie’s currently pouring 2024 wines, from his 20th vintage. About a third of the wines go direct-to-consumer through his website and club and to some restaurants, while he exports much of the rest to Japan, Sweden, Britain and Norway.

Jamie’s never used new oak, and he’s moved away from full stem-inclusion on his pinots, now averaging about 50 percent destemmed. This technique yields medium-bodied pinot with fresh, spicy cherry flavors and medium tannins.

I won’t go into greater detail here, because Jamie and Kristen will join me on WineLine Live on Thursday, July 24, at 2 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, and I’ll post a transcript later. Their story is interesting because they’ve moved from the business model of buying grapes — a common approach for winemakers who don’t have a large fortune to turn into a small one — to including their own vineyard. During the Covid pandemic (another event that has shaped all our lives), Jamie and Kristen purchased a 12-acre apple orchard just outside Sebastopol and converted 7.5 acres to vines, primarily a Calera clone of Pinot Noir and the Wente clone of Chardonnay. They will harvest the first crop this year, with plans to increase production eventually to 12,000 cases annually.

During our chat, I’ll ask Jamie and Kristen to describe their decision to buy a vineyard and how they are farming it. Spoiler alert — the answer includes “vermicomposting,” which Jamie describes as “biodynamics on steroids.” We’ll also discuss the future of the estate and the first Kutch brandy, a small-production distillate of Pinot Noir.

Here are the wines I tasted with Jamie at a picnic table at the edge of his vineyard, where he plans to host intimate, appointment-only tastings in the future.

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I have neither method nor madness to the selection process; I just sort of go somewhere in the basement and start rummaging around. So for the first of those two steaks, I found a 2012 Napa Cabernet Sauvignon which unfortunately tasted of all its 15% alcohol and nothing else. Then a 2014 Merlot from McLaren Vale, which tasted like something, but not anything I’d want to put in my mouth.

So I dug deeper and found an old friend I’d purchased in a previous lifetime: Cousiño Macul Antiguas Reservas Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, from Chile. This bottle probably cost me $15, but more likely less on sale, about 17 or 18 years ago. I had visited the winery in early 2005, and have been friends with the importer, Alfredo Bartholomaus, since before that. Many years ago, I attended a vertical tasting Alfredo conducted of this wine, so I knew it could age well.

And it did — at least, it was alive and offered more than the previous two wines had. The color was brick and the fruit was faded and candied, but it displayed good acidity. The remaining fruit still danced with the tannins of the steak and brought a smile to our lips.

A few weeks later, when we didn’t really feel like cooking and the forecast carried no whisper of severe storms,3 we decided to take the second steak out of the freezer and fire up the grill. This time, I had found another old friend. A 2003 bottle of Mariah Zinfandel from Mendocino Ridge in northern California. My wife and I were fans of this wine in our early explorations, and I must have forgotten this bottle when my wine writing efforts took off. Readers may recognize the name, as Mariah Vineyards is the home of Michael Frey and Nicole Dooling and their label, DIRT Wine. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Michael and Nicole, along with Nicole’s parents, Dan and Vicky Dooling, who planted the vineyard in 1979 and have been its stewards ever since. And Michael was recently my guest here on WineLine Live.

Dan’s 2004 Zinfandel more than lived up to my memory: The color was turning to ruby-brick, but the fruit was still fresh and lively. The wine had shed any youthful tannins and baby fat, and was svelte in texture and bright with cranberry and raspberry flavors. Age lent a savory note of wild herbs, adding length to the palate. Bravo, Dan!

So the takeaway - don’t forget those gems in your cellar. As Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher would tell you, it’s better to open that bottle than wait for the right occasion that never comes. For me, I’m reassured that I had a pretty good palate in the earlier days of my wine exploration. I still have a few bottles of Cousiño Macul Cabernet, and I’m going to enjoy them soon.

Have you enjoyed similar experiences recently, rediscovering an old favorite that still delights after all these years? Let me know in the comments.

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The wine community has been abuzz lately about its difficulty attracting young consumers. It’s a bit like drug pushers hanging around the school yard wondering where the kids are.

Okay, that’s unfair. Every consumer industry wants to attract new consumers and frets when its core demographic starts dying off. For wine, that core demo is us Boomers, who are beginning to fall off the actuarial table. Or at least, we are theoretically contemplating our mortality by slowing down our purchasing because we realize we’ll never be able to drink it all. (There’s an essay there about whether we ever really intended to drink it or if we just bought it to admire in our luxury cellars and congratulate ourselves on being affluent and smart enough to buy it.)

The catalyst for all this wringing of hands and gnashing of purple teeth was the Silicon Valley Bank’s [2023] annual report on the state of the wine business, released in January. Rob McMillan, the report’s author, has been sounding the alarm for years but the industry hasn’t paid attention. Until now. I suspect his predictions in past annual reports are finally showing up on winery sales ledgers. We see the light of the oncoming train in the tunnel, but we don’t panic until it’s right in front of us.

I’ve written up past SVB reports, in years when they didn’t get the End is Nigh response of this year. I won’t summarize McMillan’s 2023 analysis — you can find it everywhere on the vinoweb and in the original here.

But I do have some thoughts on the generational shift issue, from a left-field perspective. My lens is a book published in 2012 called “Inventing Wine,” by Paul Lukacs. I reviewed it back then for The Washington Post, part of my only appearance in the book review section (aside from my annual writeup of wine books in my regular column). But Lukacs’s thesis has stayed in the back of my mind all these years, because I believe we are re-inventing wine now, in so many ways. More on that in posts to come. [Note to editor: Those posts are still due …]

Lukacs got right to his point in the first paragraph of his introduction: “So while people in different times and places have long drunk the same basic chemical substance, they have done so for a wide array of social and cultural reasons, in the process coming up with very different uses for it. Through its extensive history, wine has played various roles, being everything from a vehicle for spiritual communion to a source of bodily nourishment to an object of aesthetic appreciation. In virtually all of them, it has brought pleasure, but pleasure conceived of in a wide range of ways.”

How did Boomers conceive of wine? It was part of the good life, growing out of post-World War II travel to Europe, culinary exploration ignited by Julia Child. The real Boomer boom came in the late 1980s with the growth of the American wine industry. That’s when I got hooked on wine, in my late 20s, as the Cold War was ending and we appeared headed to an era of global peace and prosperity. The Greatest Generation may have won the war, but we won the post war. Time to party.

Wine was part of the good life. The best, as defined by arbiters such as Robert Parker and other critics, were to be collected and enjoyed, if not consumed, as symbols of our success. Wineries and vineyards became the playgrounds of the wealthy who sought to return to the land, whatever that means. Even “returning to the land” was a symbol of luxury. Magazines such as Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast amplified this aspirational ideal of wine as the ultimate lifestyle. As Lukacs wrote, “an object of aesthetic appreciation.” If you’ve never participated in a “100 point dinner,” you’ve no doubt seen people bragging about them on social media. Wine appreciation at its worst.

Our children see all this as excess. The 2008 Great Recession was a blip for Boomers, but a formative experience for generations hanging on for dear life at the end of the alphabet. (Even that nomenclature hints of the End Times. What comes after Gen Z? Gen Alpha — as in “I am the Alpha and the Omega”?) They don’t envision a secure economic future, even if they will inherit whatever we don’t squander. They haven’t seen the world moving toward peace and stability — their world is school shootings, police brutality, systemic racism, insurrection and disfunction in Washington. They’ve lost faith in their national leaders. (I remember my father saying, “Wow, Nixon lied to us.”) They don’t expect Social Security to help them, and they may not believe the Earth will be habitable when they reach our age. They see us building our wine collections instead of trying to solve these problems. Why should they be interested in overpriced luxury wines? Why would they want to be like us?

Okay, I’ll stop here before I go totally off the rails. When my wife and I got hooked on wine back in the ‘80s and sought out other oenogeeks, we were among the youngest by far in our friends circle. Now we’re among the oldest. Today’s 20- and 30-somethings may or may not discover a love of wine, but it’s not likely to be our wine. It will be wine reinvented on their own terms.

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Dave McIntyre: Give readers a little background — how did you end up farming at Mariah Vineyards?

Michael Frey: I was born and raised in Switzerland, close to nature, and grew up passionate about the environment. I trained in hospitality and worked in the food industry — including for the world’s largest chocolate producer — before deciding at 35 to travel the world. That trip took me from Alaska down through Central America to Peru, where I met my wife, Nicole. Her parents own Mariah Vineyards, and I started volunteering there. One day we had lunch with Paul Dolan, former president of Fetzer Vineyards and a major figure in biodynamic farming, and that’s when I first heard about regenerative agriculture — the idea of restoring ecosystems and biodiversity while still growing an expressive crop. That conversation changed everything, and we went back up to the vineyard and started implementing it.

DM: For context — Mariah Vineyards was planted from scratch by Nicole’s parents, Dan and Vicky Dooling, starting in 1979, at about 2,400 feet in the coastal mountains of Mendocino. How many acres are planted now?

MF: Thirty acres. Mariah is still family-owned and operated — completely off the grid, on solar power and our own spring water. We farm without chemicals and without irrigation, and we were the first vineyard verified by the Savory Institute’s Land to Market program.

DM: What sets “regenerative” apart from terms like sustainable, organic, or biodynamic?

MF: The goal is to restore an ecosystem through farming, not just sustain or minimize damage to it — rebuilding soil organic matter, biodiversity, water infiltration and storage. It’s fascinating to watch biodiversity return to a vineyard, and the benefits go beyond the environment: It builds climate resilience, so the vineyard can handle heat waves, heavy rain, and drought.

DM: So it’s not just about reducing your footprint — it’s actively rebuilding the health of the land.

MF: Exactly. Paul Dolan used to say it’s “farming in favor of life.” We’ve even measured carbon sequestration on our site with a startup, and we’re actively storing carbon, not just reducing harm.

DM: Your label, DIRT, is actually an acronym. What does it stand for?

MF: Directly Impacting Regenerative Transformation. It’s a mouthful, but in an industry that talks about terroir and a movement that talks about soil, it’s a name that starts conversations.

DM: You also talk about “radical transparency.” What does that mean to you?

MF: I think transparency is the missing ingredient in wine — the missing piece for engaging a younger generation and for creating broad regenerative impact. Younger consumers read labels and want their purchases to align with their values, yet our industry allows roughly 76 additives and processing aids during winemaking without requiring most of them on the label. You can spray glyphosate and still hold a sustainability certification. You can put “America” on a bottle when a quarter of the juice didn’t come from the U.S. After eight years of measuring soil health, plant sap, and chemical residues in our wine, I’ve seen how hard it is for consumers to tell genuine outcomes from greener marketing. I think the path forward is giving people the information to make conscious purchasing decisions.

DM: Practically speaking, what should a consumer look for on the shelf?

MF: It’s genuinely difficult to navigate the wine aisle. You can trust a knowledgeable source, look for credible certifications like Regenerative Organic Certification, or — best of all — get to know your farmer, the same way people do with food. On our website we have a transparency page where we publish everything: an annual ecological outcome verification with the Savory Institute (measuring water infiltration, biodiversity, and soil health), sap analysis to check for nutrient deficiencies in the vines, and testing for 576 chemical residues in the finished wine — including glyphosate, which can turn up even if you never spray it, just from drift or rain. Measuring something only matters if you also publish it.

DM: Is this kind of intensive, data-driven regenerative farming scalable beyond a 30-acre vineyard?

MF: Absolutely — though I’ll admit I’m biased. Vineyards that aren’t working on climate resilience right now are going to fall behind; it’s not a question of if but how quickly we adapt. Regenerative farming is highly site-specific, so I’d encourage growers to start small: trial a block or even a few rows — try cover crops, stop tilling — measure the results, and scale up what works. That’s the idea behind the One Block Challenge we’re involved with here in Mendocino. We did the same thing ourselves: we tested eliminating cultivation on a few rows, measured the impact through plant sap analysis, and once we saw it worked, rolled it out across the whole property. We didn’t do this only to save the planet — it was also about building climate resilience and differentiating our fruit. We’ll never compete on quantity, so we compete on quality.

DM: Readers on the East Coast often hear that organic or biodynamic farming is much harder in a humid climate. Do you think regenerative practices translate to tougher regions?

MF: It’s completely site-specific — and that circles back to transparency. “Regenerative” isn’t a legally defined term, so anyone can claim it. On one end you have producers who are organic, with social and animal welfare built in, genuinely pushing things forward. On the other end, you could spray glyphosate, bring in a couple of sheep once a year, and still call yourself regenerative. What works at Mariah, with our 90 inches of rain and up to 12% soil organic matter, won’t look like what works in Paso Robles. But every farmer can start with a baseline: measure your soil, count your biodiversity, and find your own path from there.

DM: How much weight should consumers put on certifications like Regenerative Organic Certification or Savory Institute’s Land to Market?

MF: Certifications are essentially a substitute for trust — if we had true transparency industry-wide, we wouldn’t need them as much. I was drawn to the Land to Market verification because it’s outcome-based rather than process-based; many certifications reward optimizing a process year over year rather than proving an actual result. I believe in hard measurements. That said, Regenerative Organic Certification does great work, including social and animal welfare components, though it takes real resources for a small producer to participate. Biodynamic certification is also meaningful. Personally, I buy organic wine too — there’s a whole spectrum here, but I believe strongly in a chemical-free approach.

DM: Is “regenerative” at risk of becoming a buzzword — greenwashing, essentially?

MF: Yes, honestly, I think so — at least within regenerative viticulture. It would be wonderful if claims were based on documented outcomes rather than marketing. There are so many growers doing genuinely great work, and it bothers me that it’s so hard for a consumer to tell them apart from the greenwashers.

DM: Should some of this transparency be required rather than voluntary?

MF: It would be nice. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with winemaking techniques or processing aids in general — there’s room for low-intervention wine and room for wine made to taste consistent every vintage. But labeling what’s actually used, and tracing where the fruit comes from, would serve consumers well — even if it’s not necessarily in every brand’s interest.

DM: After eight years, do you feel Mariah has “arrived” at a regenerative state, or is the work ongoing?

MF: That would be a nice problem to have — there’s always room for improvement. Right now we’re working on biodiversity, breaking up our monocrop with hedgerows, pollinator habitat, and trials of low-growing flowers beneath the vines on eleven rows, based on research showing beneficial insects can move up to 20 meters into a vineyard. If that works, we’ll roll it out across the property. And the work never really stops — the site keeps changing. We’ve had our coldest year and, the following July, a heat wave. That constant adjustment is part of the beauty of farming a vintage-driven wine: it never tastes exactly the same twice.

DM: Have you noticed the regenerative shift show up in the taste of the wine itself?

MF: The biggest change came from stopping irrigation and dry-farming the whole site — it produces more compact clusters and, I think, better quality. If I had unlimited resources, I’d love to run nutrient-density testing on the fruit through fermentation, the way it’s done in meat and dairy, to actually track quality alongside farming practices — but without a broader benchmark to compare against, and given the cost, that’s not realistic yet. What we do have is outside validation: our first DIRT vintage received strong ratings, and the second is getting great reviews too, which gives us some proof we’re on the right path.

DM: DIRT currently makes a Pinot Noir, a Sauvignon Blanc, and just released a Chardonnay from Italian clones — Trentino and VCR10. What led to that choice?

MF: We’re mainly grape growers, so plantings have followed the market — mostly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay now, with some Sauvignon Blanc and Primitivo. The Italian clones were my mother-in-law’s idea — she has Italian roots. We also have French clones 76 and 96 on the property, and some clients have fermented both separately and blended them with great results.

DM: Where can readers find your wines?

MF: At dirt-wine.com — we ship direct to consumers and are currently looking to expand distribution. The site also has our blog and our transparency page with all our test results, plus a way to reach me directly.

DM: Last question, one I ask everyone: what does Michael Frey drink when nobody’s watching?

MF: I’m biased toward European wines — a good white Burgundy, and I’m a big Nebbiolo fan right now. Lately I’ve been leaning more toward whites than reds. A good Riesling from Germany or Austria really excites me too. And from California, the Tablas Creek Grenache Blanc.

DM: Any chance of Nebbiolo going into the ground at Mariah?

MF: Not right now — farming 30 acres regeneratively is already plenty of work, and we’re focused on optimizing what we have. Let’s talk again in three years.

Read more from Michael and Nicole, including their own detailed account of Mariah’s regenerative journey and links to their full data, at dirt-wine.com. My next live conversation is scheduled for July 23rd with Sonoma County winemaker Jamie Kutch — stay tuned.

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Temperatures here in the Washington, D.C., area are locked in at more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the next few days, and at this time of year there’s always a chance of thunderstorms. Our dogs, Ringo and Spicey, don’t want to go outside, where the surface of our flagstone patio registered 140 degrees at 2:50 p.m. this afternoon. Even the chipmunks they love to hunt are shunning the heat for the cool safety of their burrows.

The political atmosphere is also tempering enthusiasm for the July 4th celebrations this year, which is a shame since this is the nation’s 250th birthday. President Trump has put his personal stamp on the festivities, which his critics bemoan as more political rally than national celebration. Trump’s supporters don’t see partisanship (no one sees bias they agree with) and accuse the critics of being unpatriotic America haters.

Maybe we can still agree on wine and its ability to bring us together and remind us what we have in common? It’s hard to argue politics with your snout in a glass, after all.

This Saturday, I’ll be celebrating the 4th by queuing up some John Philip Sousa marches and sitting in front of a fan with an ice-cold glass of American sparkling wine. Will you join me?

I don’t have a bottle of Iron Horse Vineyards’ Spirit of ‘76 Cuvée 2019, a special bottling to honor the winery’s 50th anniversary and the nation’s 250th. But there are many other American bubblies to celebrate with. Here are some of my favorite producers:

Virginia: Thibaut-Janisson

New York: Hermann J. Wiemer, Chateau Frank/Konstantin Frank, Red Tail Ridge, Sparkling Pointe, Lieb Cellars.

Oregon: Argyle, Corollary, Soter.

California: The Big Four (Iron Horse, Schramsberg, Domaine Carneros, Roederer Estate), plus Lichen Estate, Paula Kornell.

WineLine Live! Will Be Back This Month!

In other news, I’ll be continuing WineLine Live! on Substack this month. Next Tuesday, July 7, at 2 p.m. Eastern US Time, I’ll be “talking DIRT” with Michael Frey of DIRT Wine, a certified regenerative producer at Mariah Vineyard in Mendocino County. Michael will share the story of DIRT and his commitment to “radical transparency” and his efforts to prevent “regenerative” from becoming just another greenwashing buzzword.

Later in July, I’ll be joined by Jamie Kutch, who is celebrating 20 years of producing Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, mostly from the West Sonoma Coast, while looking forward to his first harvest from his estate vineyard he planted a few years ago near Sebastopol, California. Jamie will discuss his transition from using only purchased fruit to farming his own vineyard. I’ll even ask him about his new-found love of worms.

I hope you will be able to join me for these discussions, but if the times don’t work for you, look for the videos and edited transcripts on Dave McIntyre’s WineLine.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

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And there was Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and a filmmaker and environmental advocate in her own right. To be honest, Cousteau was the draw for me to this event, rather than the wine. I was curious not just to have a brush with celebrity but to learn about the connection between the wine and Cousteau’s work in ocean conservation.

The wine was La Grande Bleue by Gérard Bertrand, an IGP Mediterranée white blend of Rolle (Vermentino), Grenache Blanc, Viognier, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. It was delicious, with firm acidity and a whiff of jasmine and orange blossom over a core of salinity that suggests the Mediterranean to a thirsty writer with wanderlust. It was a perfect remedy to Washington’s early summer heat and a versatile partner to the excellent menu prepared by the chefs at The Oceanaire, which included a variety of sustainably sourced seafood accented with French, Latin and Asian flavors, thoughtfully notated with the name of the boat and its captain that harvested each fish.

Bertrand is a major force in southern France, with 16 estates. He’s a leading advocate of organic and biodynamic viticulture, so his environmental cred is real. He launched La Grande Bleue last year in partnership with Oceana, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit champion of ocean conservation. The wine is now available in 49 countries, and reasonably priced at $20 SRP in the United States with its profits supporting Oceana’s work. The Bertrand-Oceana partnership has promoted awareness of sustainable fishing practices in several countries, including France, Germany and the Netherlands.

“The Mediterranean is a life-giving sea, a source of inspiration and a precious heritage,” Bertrand, who was not at the dinner, said in a statement. “As winegrowers, we understand that everything is interconnected: soil health, biodiversity, climate and the oceans. This is why, just as we do across our biodynamically farmed estates, we view our commitment alongside Oceana as a long-term endeavor. We will continue supporting their actions and raising awareness among our partners and consumers about the importance of protecting this shared resource: the sea.”

Cousteau, a senior advisor to Oceana, spoke briefly about her illustrious grandfather and how he invented scuba diving and underwater cinematography to tell the story of life in the oceans, a life that she said is increasingly endangered by pollution (largely plastics) and overfishing.

“The ocean triggers something in us that is eternal and universal, and as we witness the demise of almost 50 percent of life in the ocean, it’s important that we shift away from a conservation mindset,” Cousteau said. “When you’ve lost almost half of something, it’s not enough to protect what you have left. Restoration of abundance is the ambition we must rise to.”

This struck me for two reasons. It echoed arguments for regenerative farming and viticulture, the idea that we should not simply be trying to lessen our impact on the environment, but actively taking steps to rejuvenate the health and vitality of the soil, air and water we depend on.

And yet, Cousteau’s message seems so out of touch with the current zeitgeist in this country. Washington was preparing for the annual July 4th festivities, all the more meaningful this year with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The government that’s hosting these celebrations views the environment not as a treasure to be nurtured and regenerated, but as a resource to be plundered as rapidly as possible for comfort and wealth.

There’s nothing I or anyone else can do to change this outlook except to speak up and to vote, of course. But we can also make individual choices in our daily lives that reflect our personal values, quiet statements that, little by little, can make a difference. So I asked Cousteau why, in the face of government indifference and hostility, should individual consumers favor wines that carry environmental certifications or foods that tell us who raised the pigs or caught the fish.

“Where your food comes from, how you nourish your body has a direct impact on the abundance of life on our planet,” she said. “Nourishing our bodies also nourishes our spirit. That’s what’s so beautiful about wine and food, the act of coming together and communion, knowing that taking care of the Earth and the ocean is also taking care of ourselves and the people that provide us the food.

“I just think as a society it’s a direction we need to move in. Breaking bread, sharing wine in religion or the culinary arts used to be loaded with meaning and celebration,” Cousteau said. “Maybe we’ll start to value them more and do things that can bring them back, because it’s not too late.”

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The mood was subdued, given the adverse market trend of Americans buying and drinking less alcohol, declining winery tourism (most Virginia wine is sold at the wineries), high costs from inflation and tariffs, and the growing anti-alcohol movement in the media and public health sectors. The devastating freeze of April 21 not only deflated hopes for the 2026 vintage, but also raised existential concerns for some. Custom crush brands, with no investment in vineyards or winery facilities, could be especially at risk, at least to the extent they are products of boom times in sales and grape crops.

And yet there was confidence that despite the current conditions, Virginia wine is strong enough to pull through.

I was on the panel for the opening session, titled “Virginia in Context: A Comparative Grand Tasting.” The session was moderated by Jay Youmans MW, and we were joined on the podium by Winn Roberton, head sommelier at Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak restaurant in Washington, D.C., and Cheron Cowan of Wine Enthusiast magazine. We tasted 10 wines in five pairs, each pitting a Virginia wine blind against a “benchmark” wine from elsewhere. The audience was asked to guess the variety and which wine from each pair was from Virginia.

This was a “Judgment of Richmond” style tasting, and Jay noted the recent 50th anniversary of the influential Judgment of Paris that saw California wines triumph over French counterparts. He also recalled that Steven Spurrier, who had organized the Paris tasting in 1976, had keynoted a Virginia Wine Summit on the same stage in 2012. That visit ignited Spurrier’s love for Virginia wines, which continued until he passed in 2021.

But in a very real sense this wasn’t a JOP re-enactment. Virginia no longer needs to “beat” France or California. Virginia has demonstrated that it can produce world-class wines, so the question we were asking — implicit in the title “Virginia in Context” — is where does Virginia stand at present in the global wine scene.

The snapshot we got from these five pairings showed Virginia producing wines comparable to its European counterparts in quality. No surprise that Virginia’s wines tasted riper than Europe’s and racier than California’s. As one pairing demonstrated, Virginia also produces wines that have no counterparts elsewhere.

Many people noticed that Virginia also offers value, confounding a common complaint among consumers that “local wine costs too much.” In four of the five pairings, the Virginia wine was significantly less expensive than the other. I’ll append the list of the wines and my more detailed impressions at the end of this article for paid subscribers.

The Commonwealth of Wine

With quality and context established, how to get the message out against the economic and cultural headwinds? In a panel on market trends, moderated by Frank Morgan, author of the Drink What YOU Like blog and manager of the Virginia Governor’s Cup wine competition, discussion turned to the idea of promoting a signature variety. As I’ve written here before, New York is campaigning on “NY Cab Franc Forward,” and Livermore Valley trumpets Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc as its premier varieties. Jason Wilson noted that most wine regions are best known for a single type of wine and argued that a broader approach dilutes the message and confuses consumers.

Virginia tried that approach about a decade ago, briefly declaring Viognier the state grape. That campaign died quickly, and Viognier was the uninvited uncle at this year’s gathering, nowhere to be seen and never mentioned. Virginia makes some fantastic Cab Franc, of course, but its real strength is blends, and that message well, kind of blends in with all the other noise out there.

About 10 minutes after the trends panel ended, I had an idea. (Always, always, always …) I chased down Annette Boyd, who runs the Virginia Wine Board’s marketing office, and proposed “The Commonwealth of Wine.” It would nod to Virginia’s history as well as wine’s ability to bring people together and promote community, or as Lisa Granik put it, provide the “social lubricant” to counter the “loneliness crisis” of a society mesmerized by screens and devices. And the wineries need community and its support now more than ever.

You may never hear of “The Commonwealth of Wine” beyond this newsletter, but as the saying goes, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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The Judgment of Richmond

Here are the wines tasted in the morning plenary session, “Virginia in Context,” along with my impressions of how the Old Dominion’s wines compared with their counterparts. Suffice to say, all the wines were delicious — the winners were those of us privileged to taste them.

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Here are some wine articles that have caught my eye recently.

I haven’t done a post like this for awhile, in part because there are several people doing wine news summaries like this. But these articles are especially interesting to me — and I hope to you as well — because they focus on small regional producers, as well as major issues I’ve written about here on WineLine, such as the current anti-alcohol movement I call The New Prohibition. And one sparks my wanderlust.

Aside from my own scrolling here on Substack and elsewhere, I rely on a few news compilations to stay up to date on wine. The Spill is a relatively new one from Tom Wark, who authors the Fermentation newsletter here on Substack. While Fermentation is a great read for anyone wanting to follow industry trends, Wark aims The Spill more at consumers. The articles he highlights are less hand-wringing over current market conditions and more about how to experience and enjoy wine.

More Cab Franc love: Dan Redding, in My NoVa Wine Blog, profiles Virginia winemaker Robbie Corpora and upcoming releases from his new label Podere Piccolo (which, a quick Google search suggests, may easily be confused with an existing Italian winery). “Robbie is making Cabernet Franc that is a unique and exceptional expression of vineyard and growing season – wines with soul and vitality,” Dan writes. (Link)

And Even More Cab Franc Love: Paul Vigna, in The Wine Classroom, profiles 61 Vineyard in Maryland’s Montgomery County, a small winery raising eyebrows for its Cabernet Franc and other wines. (Link)

Coals to Newcastle. Wait, what? Northern California Wine Country is all abuzz about Pierce’s Disease after grape vines infested with glassy-wing sharpshooters were sold are area Costco warehouse stores. No, apparently the wineries themselves don’t buy their vines from Costco, but the invasive insects could spread from home gardens to commercial vineyards and cause as much as $166 million dollars a year in damages, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The infested vines were shipped from a plant nursery in Fresno to Costco stores in 24 counties, including Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Marin. (Gift link)

Alcohol Is Good for You! (Unless it isn’t.): Tom Wark, one of the leading wine community voices against The New Prohibition, reports on a new study that shows light-to-moderate alcohol consumption may have protective effects on cancer rates.

“Heavy drinkers had an increased risk of cancer death, and light drinkers had a decreased risk of cancer mortality, and there was no association between moderate drinking and cancer mortality,” Wark reported in Fermentation. (Link)

But before we could pop open some Champagne and toast these findings, The New York Times reported on a U.S. government study that argues more than one drink a day dramatically increases the chance of premature death. This was the Alcohol Intake and Health study, intended to support the new dietary guidelines, that was withdrawn last year because the Biden administration has appointed noted anti-alcohol activists to oversee it. The Trump administration decided not to submit the report to Congress, but it was published June 9 in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. (Gift link.)

On Tap in Old Tappan? The Winemakers Co-Op, a group of New Jersey wineries, will have wines available by keg in some of their tasting rooms this summer. This is a pilot program aimed at sustainability to gauge customer response. (Link)

“Our member wineries are focused on implementing sustainable initiatives in both the vineyard and winery,” said Danna Shapiro, Executive Director of The Winemakers Co-Op. “Because so much of our wine is sold directly through tasting rooms, kegged wine presents a compelling opportunity to reduce packaging waste while also broadening tasting room selections. This pilot will help us better understand the environmental and financial impact, as well as consumer reception of the format.”

Tablas Creek in Paso Robles, California, switched to kegs in their tasting room a few years ago, citing the savings in expense and carbon footprint by not using bottles. This is something more wineries should do; making wine available in kegs will also help place wines in by-the-glass programs in restaurants.

My corkscrew is my passport: Jamie Knee, aka The Petite Wine Traveler, writes from Cannes. No film festival updates or celebrity sightings, just an evocative ode to the rhythms of the Mediterranean lifestyle, and of course Provence rosé. (Link)

“Rosé here is not merely a pairing choice; it is part of the setting itself, as essential as the sea breeze and the late afternoon light, belonging wholly to the beach clubs and terraces, to the long lunches and the quiet understanding that no one should be in any hurry whatsoever.”

Put your money where the green is: Robert Joseph, in Wine Thinking, looks at data (Ugh! Why would anyone do that?) and concludes that people who say they prefer sustainable or environmentally friendly wine don’t actually shop that way. So the movement toward lighter bottles, regenerative farming and fair treatment of employees and suppliers is coming from governments, writers and the convictions of growers, not from consumers. (Link)

“If, like me, you believe in reducing the use of industrial chemicals, encouraging biodiversity and aiming to shrink your carbon footprint, by all means sign up for the sustainability programme that most closely fits your philosophy. But don’t imagine there’s a huge audience of wine drinkers who’ll be applauding you for doing so,” Joseph writes.

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It also helps to have a charismatic evangelist shouting your virtues from the rooftops, or the vine rows.

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The region is California’s Livermore Valley, and the evangelist is Steven Kent Mirassou, the sixth generation of one of California’s pioneering wine families. The Mirassou family story begins in 1854 in the Santa Clara Mountains south of San Francisco. Mirassou founded Steven Kent Winery in 1996 in the Livermore Valley, and in recent years has become a fervent advocate of that region and Cabernet Franc as its signature wine. He and his wife, Beth Mirassou, co-founded the Cab Franc Guild a few years ago and sponsor an annual Cabernet Franc festival called CabFranc-a-Palooza. Mirassou also extols Cab Franc’s virtues on his immodestly titled Substack, Wine Saves Lives!

The Livermore Valley Wine Community, a winery trade association, and the Tri-Valley Conservancy, an organization dedicated to preserving agricultural land in the East Bay region, have also endorsed Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc as Livermore’s signature wines, even providing financial help to growers who replant vineyards with those varieties. These factors coalesce to shine a bright light of publicity on Livermore Valley.

And thirsty wine writers are responding. If you’ve read much about wine lately you may have seen articles about Livermore Valley producing top-notch wines, especially from Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. You’ll probably hear more about Livermore in the months to come.

It’s not just hype. During a short visit to the valley last month,1 I learned that Livermore is about much more than those two grape varieties. It’s a small but vibrant community that is primed to surprise. And if you’re in the San Francisco area and you don’t want to deal with traffic and high tasting fees, you have an alternative.2

Much to Like

There’s a lot to like about Livermore Valley wine country:

• Easy Access: Livermore is about 35 miles from the San Francisco Bay and an easy drive from San Jose and Silicon Valley as well as Monterey to the south, Sacramento to the north and Lodi to the west. “Easy drive” of course assumes you time your trip to avoid rush hour traffic.

• It’s Small: There are just over 50 wineries, and you might meet the winemaker or owner in the tasting room. That gives Livermore a frontier vibe that more famous regions like Napa and Sonoma have lost. Vineyard acreage has declined from about 4,000 acres two decades ago to approximately 1,400 today, reflecting a move away from selling grapes to larger companies outside the valley toward concentration on estate wines.

• The Wines: Don’t expect big and oaky. And although Livermore is east of the Bay Area, don’t expect excessive heat and ripeness. Livermore wines tend to be balanced and lithe, primed more for the dinner table than the trophy case.

The Livermore Valley is bowl-shaped, rather than a deep V. Driving east from the Bay Area, you don’t get a sense of mountains on either side like you do in Napa. In the morning, you may see fog, demonstrating a maritime influence from the San Francisco Bay, just about 35 miles to the west. The bigger influence from the bay is wind, which barrels down I-580 like Silicon Valley commuters rushing to get home in the afternoons. (Those aren’t frost fans whirling over the Altamont Pass east of Livermore at the entrance to the Central Valley.) The wind accentuates the diurnal temperature shifts and slows ripening, extending harvest into November and yielding balanced wines without the sugar and alcohol spikes common in hotter climes. The wind also thickens the grape skins, lending more color and extraction to red wines.

This Ain’t Your Father’s Cabernet (Sauvignon)

“When I first started making wine 30 years ago the goal was to make the most expensive wine, the biggest Cabernet Sauvignon we can, because we’ve got to compete with Napa,” Mirassou told me. “Now the mission has changed dramatically. A $30 bottle of Cab Franc from Livermore is affordable, it’s delicious, and it increases the amount of joy that’s spread in the world.”3

(I did notice streets named Rutherford and Oakville, but few other indications that Livermore has a lingering inferiority complex about Napa.)

On the choice to tie Livermore Valley’s wine reputation to two signature varieties, Mirassou said: “We are very purposefully building some kind of identity for our growing area.” He has a West Coast perspective on how wide open the field is for Cab Franc, something I take issue with as an East Coaster. But that’s for another article. Livermore has a voice for Cab Franc, with its own expression distinct from the Loire Valley and certainly from Napa. It’s also a different expression than the grape achieves in New York or the Mid-Atlantic.

(There may also be a subtle dig at Napa and “King Cabernet” in the choice of these two signature varieties. Modern DNA research has determined that Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc are the genetic parents of Cabernet Sauvignon. Score one for the old folks!)

Don’t sleep on other varieties. Pruett Farms Winery makes some excellent Chardonnay (ironically from Dijon clones, not the local Wente clone) in a reductive style — racy and energetic.

Iberian varieties also do well in Livermore, if the Verdelho, Tempranillo, Monastrell and Graciano I tasted at Las Positas Vineyards are any indication. Perhaps as a holdover from a time of experimentation before the valley began focusing on two signature varieties, Las Positas has an impressive 17 varieties planted over 20 acres of vines. So while the variety is delicious, there’s not much of any to go around.

At Darcie Kent Estate Winery my group tasted a stunning Hazel’s Block Albariño, which that week won best in show white honors at the California Signature Wine Awards. Darcie and David Kent (no relation to Steven Kent Mirassou or Steven Kent Winery) said they are increasingly focusing on aromatic white wines. They produce citrusy Sauvignon Blanc from the Musqué clone as well as savory Cabernet Franc under Darcie Kent and a sister label, Almost Famous.

Darcie Kent Estate Winery is California in a microcosm. The property was once owned by Bing Crosby. Darcie, the sixth generation of a Swiss family that began making wine in Missouri in the 1880s, is a talented artist whose work adorns the winery’s walls and labels. During the covid pandemic, Darcie and David decided to branch out by opening a dispensary on the property, so there’s one-stop shopping for your recreational needs.

And There’s History, too!

We can’t call Livermore an “emerging” wine region, given that Robert Livermore planted the first grapevines there in the 1840s. The first wineries were established in 1883, and their names are familiar today: Concannon, which first put Petite Sirah on a label in 1961, and Wente, which produced the first varietally labeled Chardonnay in 1936 and is still identified with the Wente Clone of Chardonnay.

“There’s a little bit of Wente in every winery and vineyard in Livermore,” says Julio Covarrubias, a Mexican-born grower who worked for Wente Vineyards for more than 40 years and bought a vineyard from them in 2001 he now calls Casa de Viñas. My group visiting him on a warm May afternoon tasted a delicious Petite Sirah made from his fruit by nearby Mitchell Katz Winery.

There’s also a generational change underway, lending new energy to the valley’s vibe. Wente Family Vineyards, which claims to be the oldest family-owned winery in the United States, is on its fifth generation. Steven Mirassou’s son, Aidan, is involved in the winemaking at Steven Kent Winery, while Aidan’s sister, Sara, is director of hospitality, continuing the family legacy into a seventh generation. Darcie and David Kent’s daughter Amanda is taking a bigger role in running that family winery.

“We’ll never be large like Napa,” David Kent said. “But Livermore Valley is just getting started.”

If You Go:

Livermore Valley is doable as a day trip from the East Bay, maybe even San Francisco itself. For dining, Uncle Yu’s at the Vineyard in Livermore is a winemaker hangout for traditional Chinese-American cuisine, and if the owner’s in a good mood, he may even sing some opera for you. (He’s good!) Nearby Pleasanton also has an In’N’Out.

Golfers can book a tee time at Wente Vineyards, then lunch at The Grill followed by a tasting. (Or, if you’re adventurous, the other way around, I guess.)

In the Glass:

In addition to the wines mentioned above, here are some other Livermore Valley gems I’ve tasted recently.

The Steven Kent Winery Cabernet Franc 2023 Ghielmetti Vineyard Livermore Valley, CA. 13.7%. As with the rest of his single-vineyard series, Steven Kent Mirassou has crafted a sleek, elegant Cabernet Franc. This one has a bit of pyrazine character of the variety, giving a hint of green pepper flavor many Cab Franc fans find appealing (including me).

The Steven Kent Winery Cabernet Franc 2023 Sachau Vineyard Livermore Valley, 13.5%. Ripe and juicy, yet elegant with great structure and texture. There’s a confidence in these wines.

Fenestra Winery, Cabernet Franc 2022, Livermore Valley, 14.1% Juicy, spicy, with black pepper, olive and tea over Bing cherry and plum.

In the News:

Good + Tasty

Cabernet Franc Offers Life's Most Sublime and Quotidian Pleasures

Cabernet Franc is the Pedro Pascal of grapes…

Read more

3 months ago · 20 likes · 6 comments · Kathleen Willcox

https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/06/04/livermore-new-downtown-transformation-development/

https://www.diablomag.com/travel-places/beyond-the-bottle-how-livermore-wineries-build-community/article_00da4ba4-45db-47a7-97e3-da34b18862ee.html

These woeful trees are just one reminder that 2026 is painfully out of whack.

They were victims of the frost, or freeze, or apocalyptic weather event, whatever you want to call it, of April 21, when temperatures plunged to 24F for several hours just days after a warming spell in the 90s shot the world into an exuberant burst of growth.

April frost is not unusual in the Mid-Atlantic. We’re used to the warnings to bring our tomato plants inside and cover our garden beds. We’re not used to losing our maple trees.

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Headlines about the devastation of April 21 focused appropriately on vineyards, with many wineries in Virginia, Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania reporting as much as 90 percent crop loss for 2026 in the initial aftermath. The effects on our gardens illustrate how severe this frost was.

A month later, the impact of the frost on local vineyards still isn’t clear.

“This is my 47th year growing wine grapes,” Jim Law of Linden Vineyards in Virginia wrote in his email newsletter on May 22. “It feels like it could be my first. I truly don’t know what to expect of vintage 2026.”

Law’s Hardscrabble vineyard suffered damage from 0 percent to 100 percent “depending on where you were standing,” he said. “This presents a complexity of vineyard management that I am still trying to wrap my head around.”

It didn’t help that this week, just as surviving vines were pushing secondary tendrils and beginning to flower, the Mid-Atlantic was socked in by several days of cool rainy weather. “Pollination succeeds best under warm, dry conditions,” he wrote.

The rain at flowering is affecting even those vineyards that escaped devastation on April 21 by limiting fertilization and fruit set. While this may not hurt quality, it can reduce quantity in a season already hit hard. “This vintage will likely go down in Virginia wine history as one of the most challenging, if not THE most challenging we have faced,” said Christine Vrooman, co-owner of Ankida Ridge Vineyards near Amherst, Va. Ankida escaped significant damage on April 21 because of its high altitude, but the vineyard was in full flower when this week’s rain set in.

Chelsey Blevins, winemaker at Fifty-Third Winery in Louisa, Va., chronicled the sporadic growth of her Albariño vines after the frost on her Facebook page. “I don’t think we’re going to make much Albariño,” she said. “Most of it will probably go into a blend, if we decide to keep the fruit.” Frosted vines were slow to drop their dead leaves as the cool weather slowed recovery, and some vines were dead and destined to be ripped out — and probably not replaced with Albariño.

At Burnt Hill Farm in Clarksburg, Maryland, vintner Drew Baker decided the freeze was an opportunity — if not an imperative — to make changes in the vineyard.

“Many varieties are starting to bounce back,” he said, including Regent, a hybrid red developed for its resilience in a challenging climate. “For me, it’s becoming a real case study of what works here even after a generational frost event. So, we’re going to make some changes.”

The frost hit especially hard on lower parts of the slope at Burnt Hill, forcing some difficult discussions about replanting at a vineyard that was just beginning to hit its stride. A block of champagne clone Chardonnay, intended for sparkling wine to welcome guests to Burnt Hill, was “largely killed,” Baker said.

“Instead of trying to rehab it, we’re going to remove it and transition that block from vinifera to a more climate-resilient variety.” That involves removing the trellis system and pulling the vines, planting summer buckwheat to feed pollinators and protect the soil. Buckwheat harvested in the fall will be milled onsite into flour to be used in Burnt Hill’s kitchen. The ground will then be replanted with hard red winter wheat which will become bread flour in the spring, when the block will be replanted with a new grape variety.

“In the big picture, we’re taking this as an opportunity to make a change, and that’s what I’m most excited about,” Baker said.

These dreary assessments a month later, as well as the visible reminders in our own gardens, should strengthen our resolve to support local wineries this year. Not everyone will have the resources to replant large portions of their vineyards. Surviving vines may not fully recover for a year or more. They need the support of the wine community: Visit an extra winery or two, buy an extra bottle. Ask for local wines at your retailer or favorite restaurant.

For at least a few years, and probably much longer, we will be discussing the impact of the “generational frost” of April 21, 2026, on viticulture in the Eastern United States. This story is only beginning.

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What became known either as the Paris Tasting of 1976 or the Judgment of Paris had modest beginnings, and it almost didn’t happen. British wine merchant Steven Spurrier and his American colleague, Patricia Gallagher, wanted to explore wines from California to mark the U.S. bicentennial as part of their program for the Academie du Vin, Spurrier’s wine school for expats in Paris. Spurrier and Gallagher each traveled to California to scout wineries, and they struggled to get wines to Paris for the tasting. (Anyone who has shlepped wines home from a trip abroad can relate.) They invited some French wine luminaries to come and taste these novel wines from the New World, but only at the last minute did Spurrier decide to do the tasting blind to neutralize any preconceptions about quality. Only one reporter, George Taber of Time magazine, was curious enough to attend.

We all know the results: Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 1973, crafted by Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars SLV Cabernet Sauvignon 1973, made by Warren Winiarski, edged out some of the best white Burgundies and red Bordeaux. Taber’s short writeup in Time magazine excited consumers and winemakers back home. The Paris Tasting proved Europe, especially France, didn’t hold a monopoly on world-class wine or terroir.

In the years that followed, French wineries invested in California, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere. In Mendoza, Nicolás Catena was inspired to find the best sites to grow Malbec and launched a revolution that continues today. Eduardo Chadwick did the same with Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, pitting his own wines against French classics in tastings modeled after the Judgment of Paris.

Years later, Winiarski reflected on the significane of the tasting.

“We were trying to bring wine back from the nadir of Prohibition and elevate it to national consciousness,” he told me. “That tasting was affirmation that it could be done. The official hierarchy did not have the ability to keep people from making beauty wherever they were.”

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History held a dinner last month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris. The museum has highlighted the tasting several times before, including for the 40th anniversary, which I wrote about for The Washington Post, and bottles of the winning wines from Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars are on display in the museum’s exhibit on U.S. food history.

This year’s dinner featured three Napa Valley wineries included in the Paris tasting: Clos du Val, Freemark Abbey and Mayacamas Vineyards. Although their wines didn’t “win” and go down in history, they contributed to the paradigm shift that elevated California and other regions in the world of wine.

Bernard Portet, who crafted the Clos du Val 1972 Cabernet Sauvignon included at Paris, spoke at the dinner of the impact the tasting had on the U.S. wine industry.

“The effect was huge,” Portet said. “Nobody knew about Napa Valley in those days, and suddenly they read about it in Time magazine. In the months after that, we had all sorts of influx of tourists coming to see what we were doing.”

Spurrier often spoke and wrote about the backlash he felt from the French wine community for conducting the Paris Tasting, but Portet said he heard mostly positive comments from his fellow Frenchmen. Many of the visitors to Clos du Val were Bordeaux friends and colleagues of his father, who had been technical director at Château Lafite Rothschild. After the tasting, they were interested in knowing what he was doing in Napa Valley.

I had the pleasure and honor of knowing Spurrier and Winiarski during my wine writing career. Spurrier was a fan of Virginia wines (true to form from Paris, he reveled in good wine from unheralded regions) and we judged the Virginia Governor’s Cup competition together for several years and even traveled together to Okanagan Valley in British Columbia in 2019. He wore his fame well and always made anyone he was talking to feel special, including winemakers as he critiqued their wines.

I met Winiarski when the Smithsonian opened its food history exhibit in 2011. He was a major donor for the museum’s food history program, in part because he wanted to preserve the legacy of the Paris Tasting and his achievement. He was soft-spoken and professorial, and my eyes would spin when he described the golden rectangle as his ideal of a balanced wine. He was generous, though a hard edge appeared when something didn’t live up to his expectations. Every time I spoke to him, I learned something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what. He even gave me his cell phone number, and I wish I had abused that privilege more often before he passed.

And I met Mike Grgich twice. He came to D.C. for some event at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant celebrating a milestone of his winery or career, and I have a treasured photo of me with the two of them (which of course I can’t find now). In 2016, Grgich was too frail from back issues to travel to D.C., but I visited him in Yountville as I was researching my piece on the commemoration.

Spurrier, Grgich and Winiarski passed away since that last celebration, and the memory of the tasting and its impact will fade over time. I’ve even seen some grumbling from within the wine community about the attention Napa Valley still basks in because of it, but I think that misses the point. Yes, the two winning wineries were in Napa, but the real winner was California wine in general and the realization that Europe, especially France, didn’t have a monopoly on world-class wine.

Even today, wine lovers in Virginia, New York, Texas and elsewhere delight in wrapping bottles in paper bags so they can prove to themselves and anyone nearby that their local wines stand tall among the world’s best. Efforts to produce top-class wine in China, Armenia or Bulgaria can trace their inspiration back to the Paris Tasting.

If Spurrier and Gallagher hadn’t done the tasting, or if Taber hadn’t attended, wine would have improved around the world anyway. But progress might have come slower. And the story would certainly be much less interesting if the Judgment of Paris hadn’t prompted the whole world to ask, “Why not here?”

Little known — or understated — facts about the Paris Tasting:

Chateau Montelena is in Calistoga in Napa Valley, and its triumph in Paris has been celebrated as a win for Napa. But its chardonnay was labelled as from Napa and Alexander Valleys, and most of the grapes came from Sonoma County, in Alexander Valley and from the Bacigalupi Vineyard in Russian River Valley. Today, Chateau Montelena continues to make chardonnay in a similar style from Napa Valley fruit.

Many wine lovers today may know of the Paris Tasting from the movie “Bottle Shock,” a highly fictionalized account that focused solely on Chateau Montelena and ignored Stag’s Leap’s victory among the red wines. Winiarski refused to cooperate with the movie and was omitted altogether. Grgich also declined, and was consigned to a brief cameo as an older guy wearing a beret. The Barrett family of Montelena participated and reaped the publicity from the movie. Spurrier was portrayed by a sneering Alan Rickman, very much out of character. Years afterwards, Spurrier described the movie as “more bulls**t than bottle shock.”

The best reference about the Paris Tasting is George Taber’s 2006 book, “Judgment of Paris,” which tells the story of the tasting and explores its global impact on wine. Spurrier’s memoir, “A Life in Wine,” includes his account of the event, and the Academie du Vin Library, a publishing imprint founded by Spurrier, has published “Judgment of Paris,” a 50-year retrospective.

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We over-romanticize wine. The idyllic lifestyle, walking among the beautifully manicured vineyards, dining al fresco while turning our large fortunes into smaller ones to live the good life, communing with the land to express its voice in our glass as an expression of fine art. It all sounds as glossy as the magazines that chronicle this utopia.

But dammit, wine is farming, and farming is hard. And Mother Nature is a capricious taskmaster as winegrowers in the Eastern United States learned in late April, ironically just a day before Earth Day.

An stretch of summer-like temperatures in the 90s had encouraged vines to push their buds and tendrils into action. But on the morning of April 21 temperatures plunged well below freezing throughout much of Virginia, Maryland, southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and into southern New York. It soon became apparent that the damage to the 2026 vintage in some areas bordered on catastrophic.

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Growers have reacted to the frost with frustration, resignation and despair, along with a call to consumers to support local wineries in a time of need. If wine is indeed community rather than an industry, it’s time for us to step up. Visit an extra winery or two. Buy an extra bottle or two. As one winery said on social media, “Hug a farmer.”

Locavore restaurants who celebrate their local farmers can help by featuring local wines on their tasting menus or special sections on their lists for higher visibility. Schedule an extra winemaker dinner or two this summer. Help your neighbors get through this.

Spring frost is not unusual in the Mid-Atlantic. Home gardeners know not to put fragile plants in the ground before Mother’s Day. Winegrowers are accustomed to spending spring nights in their vineyards when temperatures dip, ready to light fires, run fans or frost dragons — noisy contraptions that shoot flames briefly along the vine rows to warm the air — to mitigate any damage. The wealthiest may even hire helicopters to buzz the vineyards and keep the air moving. But that Tuesday morning the temperatures dropped too low and for too long and with no wind for any of these measures to help.

“A frost is not a frost is not a frost,” said Nate Walsh, co-owner and winemaker at Walsh Family Wine in Loudoun County, Virginia. “The temperature at 500 feet is not the same as the temperature at 700 feet. The April 21st frost was a radiation frost, where clear skies and calm winds allow heat to escape the earth’s surface and rise into the atmosphere, creating an inversion where cold air from above settles.”

The damage was “nauseating,” Walsh said. “Frost doesn’t frustrate winegrowers. It doesn’t sadden us. Frost fills us with dread.”

A full accounting of the loss will take weeks, until the vines recover and push any secondary shoots for a more limited crop. But initial assessments were dire.

Lee Hartman, winemaker at Bluestone Vineyard in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, described the disaster as a “slow moving train wreck,” beginning with the 10-day forecast warning of plunging temperatures even while the valley basked in early spring warmth. He and his crew made their usual preparations and lit fires to warm the air, but “this wasn’t just a frost. It was a hard freeze.” Even before he doused water on the fires, Hartman was trading messages with fellow winemakers telling of the extent of the damage.

The night was “unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Emma Pope, communications manager at Black Ankle Vineyards in Mt. Airy, Maryland, posted on the winery’s Facebook page. “We’re choosing to be optimistic before we make a final assessment, though we are dealing with the possibility that this year’s fruit is largely if not entirely lost.”

Not far away, the Baker family reported similarly catastrophic damage at their two vineyard sites, Old Westminster Winery and Burnt Hill Farm. “The primary buds appear to be 100 percent gone,” Drew Baker, who manages the vineyards for the family operation, wrote on Burnt Hill’s website. “Across both farms, we believe we may have lost upwards of 100 tons of fruit.”

That could mean roughly 72,000 bottles of wine that will not be produced at Old Westminster and Burnt Hill this year, Baker said. And while that revenue will be lost, expenses, from payroll, equipment repairs, farming inputs and more, remain. The vineyards must be maintained as if they were bearing a full crop in order to keep them in optimal shape for next year.

In Virginia, Jim Law of Linden Vineyards reported his first significant loss since planting his Hardscrabble Vineyard in 1985. Because of the elevation and slope of the vineyard, he estimated the damage at 20-30 percent. Even so, he said, “It is difficult to convey the gut punch of walking the vines after a devastating event like frost or hail. You feel physically sick and emotionally devastated.”

Spring frost damage to vineyards has become a familiar global refrain during the era of climate change, as warmer weather in late winter and early spring nudges vines out of dormancy and promotes early growth. Even “normal” frosts are more damaging than they were when vines slumbered longer into spring. Burgundy suffered major crop damage in 2016, 2017 and 2021. This year, Texas experienced early vine growth followed by a damaging frost, and Champagne recorded its worst frost year since 2003, with an estimated 40 percent crop loss.

With the extent of the damage in the eastern U.S., growers are pleading with consumers to support their local wineries by visiting and buying current releases. In the Mid-Atlantic, those will include many high-quality reds from the outstanding 2023 vintage. We can help the wine community by celebrating that vintage while helping growers survive this one.

I thought about the frost this week as I walked my dogs along the trail in the woods near my house in the Maryland suburbs just north of Washington, D.C. This suburban oasis of nature was not unscathed; lesser celandine, a non-native invasive but very attractive ground cover plant, was scorched in places, as if someone had randomly sprayed herbicide. Some shoots of mountain laurel, our area’s glory in May, withered and browned.

Yet the mountain laurel will still bloom and the woods will be as glorious as ever this summer. The native American grape vines I find throughout these woods will thrive and sprout, continuing their climb through the tree canopy in search of sunlight. If they produce any grapes, they will be well above my sight line, treats for the birds in hopes they spread seeds to help new vines grow.

But vineyards are not natural. They’re imposed by mankind upon the environment, like any other farm or orchard, and therefore more susceptible to the vagaries of nature and climate. The ramifications can be profound.

Think of it this way: If you or I have a bad day at work, most of us can take a hot shower and make it good tomorrow. Winegrowers suffering a frost like that of April 21 in the Mid-Atlantic have just lost most if not all of their product for 2026, with implications for years to come. It’s as though Mother Nature gave them a withering performance assessment after the first quarter instead of waiting until the end of the year.

At Allegro Winery near York, Pennsylvania, owner/winemaker Carl Helrich is planting vines this spring to replace some of the thousands he lost to a hard freeze in 2018. Now, with much of his vineyard once again frosted, “it feels like planting flowers in a graveyard,” he said.

“I spent the last two or three days doing a lot of soul searching about what we are doing here, and so many times on the verge of tears because we care so much about these vines, and I know it’s been really hard on my crew to come out here after spending so many days since November, pruning these vines and getting them ready for the growing season,” Helrich said in a video post on Facebook.

He compared growing grapes in Pennsylvania to the Greek myth of Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill only to start over after the stone rolls back down.

“We think we have everything figured out,” he said. “And then Mother Nature decides to kick us in the ass.”

Please leave a comment here to share your experience with the frost or to show support for your favorite winemakers. And please share this post with your friends to increase awareness about the plight of Mid-Atlantic wineries.

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