Anthony Aellen, who helped his parents Jack and Lucille open Linganore Winecellars in central Maryland in 1976 and over the next five decades helped establish it as one of the best-known producers in the state, retired on Sunday.

“My first day of being here unpaid, because that’s just probably what I’ll do, is Monday,” he said, laughing, during a lengthy interview late last week.

He officially leaves it primarily in the capable hands of daughter Melissa, the third generation to run the winery, located a little less than 5 miles from historic New Market and about 50 miles northwest of Baltimore.

The timing, he said, was her suggestion, one she made when she returned to work at the winery in 2017 after following her father’s orders to start her career elsewhere, which took her to producers in Indiana, New Zealand, and Oregon before returning home.

“We started talking about retiring, so I don’t like constantly work until I’m dead,” he began, as always very comfortable as the storyteller. “She goes, ‘you know, dad, you’ve got to retire and, you know, you and mom can go out traveling and whatever.’ I was like, OK. And she said, you know, ‘the best time to retire would be the end of August of 2026, because that would be 50 years from when you started the winery with grandpop.’

“And, it’s like, yeah, OK. I was 17 the year the winery started, and this is basically the only job I’ve ever had, and watched the business grow and watched the business grow. And now it’s like, yeah, OK, now we’ve got other crazy people in the next generation to to take it on.”

Six acres of grapes were planted in 1972 on the farm, covering 230 acres, that became home to what was originally Berrywine Plantations / Linganore Winecellars (the legal corporate entity remains Berrywine Plantations, Inc.), and the winery opened in 1976 in the lower half of a 19th-century post and beam barn that previously housed the farm’s dairy operation.

In 1977, Maryland’s first wine festival was held there, and a year later, to meet consumer demand, they introduced the state’s first semi-sweet grape wines along with honey and pure fruit wines, according to the winery bio. By 2000, they were producing more than 100,000 gallons and farming 40 acres of grapes, and in the years to follow would add a banquet facility and a brewery.

For all of the Aellen family’s contribution to the state wine industry, the Maryland Wineries Association and Department of Agriculture recognized Linganore Winecellars and five other legacy producers in July for laying such a successful foundation for dozens of others to follow.

Asked if there was ever a point along the way when it looked like the business wasn’t going to make it, Aellen said no, albeit there were plenty of obstacles along the way, starting with it taking two years to get licensed and facing a time when stores around the area, for a time, wanted no part of selling their wines.

Then, Aellen said, his father came up with the crazy idea to hold a festival.

My dad, my mom were on travel. My father worked for the government. And we had a small festival, and they called up [and asked] how did everything go? And it’s like, oh my God, we made $500 this week, you know, and that was just crazy because it never happened before. And then two weeks after that stores started calling us up who had refused to carry us saying, oh, well, can I get that wine on my shelf?”

Turns out those who attended the festival were now going to those stores and asking for more.

He addressed a couple of their other hurdles, because of the laws at the time in Maryland, in the video below. “It’s been like this uphill battle,” he summarized.

Now that “battle” becomes one that will fall more on Melissa, who has started her own label called Simple Theory that’s sold out of a downtown Frederick, Maryland, tasting room. In addition, she and her cousin Parker are concentrating some of their time on experimental grape varieties in the vineyard to combat the climate vagaries and extremes that are becoming more commonplace.

Asked for an overview of the operation as he looks ahead in his retirement, Aellen noted that he sees no major changes in the short term, outside of Red Shedman Brewery — which they opened in 2014 and had to close when it was gutted by a fire in September 2024 — reopening this fall.

“Simple Theory is doing really well. We just took over the the street level space, so Melissa and Parker have that project going on,” he said. “Not enough bandwidth, I do believe, to get into distilling. “

As far as production, he’s content.

“It’s funny because I always thought [about] getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, my sights were to try to get as large as we could get,” he said. “And in 2014, Melissa came back from New Zealand, where she worked for a 7-million-gallon winery. They’re the largest winery in New Zealand. …. and [when she got back], she goes, “Dad, yeah, we really don’t want to get that large.”

It was the work outside Maryland that Aellen said was essential for Melissa to take over Linganore Winecellars and its accompanying businesses. He said that a few months before she would graduate from Cornell, he had read an article that “scared the crap” out of him, stating that 98 percent of family businesses fail at third generation around the world.

The first generation gets it started, and the second generation grows up with it and gets it established. and the third generation is then educated and makes the mistake of returning right away to the family business with an attitude that there are things they won’t do because they are the owner’s son or daughter.

“And it kills morale, like in an instant,” he said.

“So I told her, I said, you’re graduating in six months and you’re not going to work here. Long pause. I said, you’re going to work out in the industry for three to five years. Be an employee for an employer. And you need to know every rung of the ladder. So when you come back, if the person at that bottom rung isn’t in, that’s what you’re doing that day, and you’re fine with it because you just need to keep everything going.”

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Steve and Stephanie Pence both grew up in farming: Steve helped his grandparents on their family farm and Stephanie was an avid horse rider.

In 2003, they found the perfect property to nurture that farming background, only miles from both of their childhood homes. The 160-acre farm is located in Rockingham County, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley AVA.

They began planted vines in 2015, and added more in 2017 and 2022.

Their oldest son Tyler had the inaugural wedding for The Columns at Six Penny Farm venue in 2007, according to the winery bio. Those nuptials have become a part of the fabric there, as has Brix & Column Vineyards, which opened in 2017.

Located at 1501 Dave Berry Road in McGaheysville, the winery is open seven days a week.

They sell wine by the glass and bottle, offering flights of 5 wines for $16, these are available in red, white, and sweet. They also offer our Foundation Flight which allows our customer to choose 5 wines for $20, according to their website.

Stephanie brought the winery the Brix & Columns 2024 Viognier and 2024 Cabernet Franc to the East Coast Winemakers Summit on Aug. 4. That Cab Franc earned a gold medal in the 2026 Virginia Governor’s Cup competition.

Emailed several questions, Stephanie provided these answers:

Q, Is the description of the vineyard on the website up to date? Tell me about the walking path. Self-guided, I assume?

A, We have 16 acres under vine on our 160 acre farm. Our lower vineyard flanks either side of the driveway with plantings of Cab Franc, Petit Manseng, Chambourcin and Vidal Blanc. The upper vineyard is located on the northern section of our farm where we grow Viognier, Chardonnay, Petit Verdot and Tannat. We have a walking path around the farm that gives you a closer look at our vines.

Our walking path is a 1.2 mile path around the lower field and vineyard. Many of our guests enjoy the mountain views as they walk. We have several regulars who bring their dogs to walk weekly. If you are feeling more adventurous, our upper vineyard is also accessible, though a bit more hilly.

Q, How old is the Music and Mimosa series and what led you to creating that?

A, Our Music and Mimosa series started about three years ago. It is every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm. We had been offering seasonal mimosas and one of our staff members came up with the idea. We have jazz a few Sundays each month. We find many of our wine club members or other locals like to come and spend the afternoon with us. Looks like music there is pretty much Fridays and Sundays? Yes, we have music every Sunday. Friday night music is March through November. Our Friday night guests enjoy the evening either winding down from the work week or starting off a vacation weekend. If the weather is nice we have our musicians play outside on our large back patio. Views of the Blue Ridge mountains with our landscaped hydrangeas and Crepe Myrtles make an ideal setting for our guests.

Q, How many weddings do you do there a year? You two must not stop, between the events and the winemaking and vineyard work. Manage to get away at all?

A, This year we decided to limit the number of weddings we are doing so we can enjoy more time with family and friends and give ourselves a little rest. We are hoping to keep the number to about 8 to 10 weddings a year. Recently we enjoyed a trip to Acadia National Park/Bar Harbor. It was a much needed getaway before the start to a busy fall.

Q, I try to ask just about everyone I feature: What’s the vibe you strive for there?

A, We are a laid-back farm/vineyard in a classical Virginia farm country setting located in the central Shenandoah Valley surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Massanutten Peak. We take pride in our Virginia roots and try to support local artisans/products. An example of this is we had large farm tables made from trees sourced from our family farms and produced by a local furniture maker. What are a couple of your best-selling wines? Our best wines vary seasonally. We recognize that wines age and change in bottle. Currently our Petit Verdot has hit a sweet spot and is selling very well. Typically our White Brix (off-dry white), Viognier and Cab Franc are the best sellers.

Q, So, along with everything else, welcome to the Virginia Wine Board. How long is one on the board, and what are a couple of the biggest challenges you hope the board can address (or maybe is addressing now) while you are on it?

A, I am very excited and honored to be serving on the VA Wine Board. It is a four year term, with an optional second term. I am happy to represent the Shenandoah Valley with Lee [Hartman], as we have had limited representation on the board from our area. I think many wineries are struggling with a downturn in visits to their tasting rooms resulting in decreased sales. I hope we can bring more attention to Virginia wine, showcasing the excellent wines we are making from our vineyards. There have been large strides in our industry over the last couple years, and I hope we can build on that.

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It seemed like the best way to cover a visit to Lost Mountain Vineyards in Virginia’s Fauquier County was mostly stick to what the cellphone was able to capture during a visit on what turned out to be an unusual sunny day in what has been an exceedingly wet month in the state and, frankly, across much of the East Coast.

As one friend who spends a lot of time in the vineyards wrote me in a text earlier Friday, “This vintage could be a ratter if [the rain] doesn’t shut off.”

The Lost Mountain visit was high on my list of this year’s priorities, especially since the sale of what was originally RdV Vineyards in June 2024 to Martin and Olivier Bouygues, their first purchase of a winery outside France.

Josh Grainer, now the managing director who remained the winemaker following the sale, carved out the time several weeks ago to provide insights in the vineyard before taking us into the tank room and the underground cave where the wines are casked and stored. It was also a rare bottling day (there are three a year, for each of the three wines — Lost Mountain ($225), Rendezvous ($110) and Friends and Family ($50). The 2024 vintage of Lost Mountain was being bottled that day.

Has much changed for Grainer since the sale? Not when it comes to the vineyard, he responded, and that’s fine with him.

“Farmingwise, nothing. We’re planting a little bit. It’s more on the intention of the brand recognition and the marketing down the line that’s changed than anything, and that is the desire to make this a brand that’s known outside the Mid-Atlantic, and so national, eventually international distribution. That, to be said, we need to grow while maintaining the quality that we can. And so we’ve got in total almost 4 acres going in, which again we started at 16, so it’s another another little chunk. It’s 20-something percent more growth on the hill, but it kind of maximizes all of the potential of this hillside that we have right now.” It remains, he added, “a stunning office” to call a daily workplace.

“And then, in terms of how we operate, our members have been our members, and so they they’ve stuck with us through the transition and that sort of stuff. And like I said, with the vineyard team, they’ve been here since the start with me, and so the way we farm, the way we do things, hasn’t really changed. … Pierre [Graffeuille, CEO of Château Montrose], who ultimately oversees the entire group of wineries that they have, said, ‘we like what you do, just keep doing it.’ I said, OK, I know how to do that.

“So, with that being said, I get a few more trips to France. Go into the cellar, and you’ll see our our sister winery’s wines showcased here as well now, and so our members have access to those. So I drink better, and I get to travel.”

In this video, he talked about a January freeze and April frost and what have had only minor effects on this year’s yield. As he said, “All in all, I really can’t complain. Mother Nature had us dance, but it’s better to be lucky than good sometimes, I guess.”

“Lucky” aside, he talked in this video about combating climate change with the addition of wind fans on the horizon. “It’s a pretty clean, efficient and environmentally friendly way of mitigating frost,” he said.

As for how harvest is going there, he wrote this in a Thursday email: “This week has been absolutely amazing: low humidity with cool mornings and warm days - ideal ripening conditions, so no complaints on my end. We may or may not get a shower this afternoon as the warm front passes through. Then we’ll be pretty hot next week, which may give the remaining whites their call-in, but the reds will likely still head into mid-September. Both skin phenolics and chemistries are moving fast this year, so I don’t foresee it being an extended vintage ... but Mother Nature ultimately gets to decide that, and we’ll dance as we need to. So far so good!”

There are 2,000 club members who are part of two membership levels: Envoy (4 bottles a year) and Ambassador (12 bottles a year). As he said above, they have access to the wines of Lost Mountain’s sister wineries, which were on display in the library on the lower level. Grainer provided a bit of background on the wines in that room.

Finally, Grainer offered a step-by-step introduction to the bottling process taking place that day.

While maybe a cliche question, it was asked anyway: Could you ever have imagined that joining Rutger de Vink, a fellow apprentice at Linden Vineyards in 2004, for this new venture would lead to this?

“Ahhhh, no. I knew Rutger always has big intentions, and he was a guy who knew how to dream big,” said Grainer, a Master of Wine. “I gotta be honest. I was like, let me see what happens with this. Let’s go with it. I had dreams at one point of going out and doing this on my own and that sort of stuff, and I fell in love with this place. I was like, I don’t know if I can do better than this. This is a great place to farm. I make the wine I want to make. I get access to great wines of the world. So, what more do I want? Right? I don’t need my name on a bottle.”

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When Dr. Konstantin Frank founded the Finger Lakes winery in 1958, Riesling quickly became one of its defining varieties. Alongside it, he planted Rkatsiteli, an ancient grape he knew well from managing vineyards in Ukraine.

Believing the two complemented one another, he interplanted them and eventually created a blend that became a personal favorite of the Frank family. That history serves as the background for a second release of what the winery is called Ethos, which blends the two grapes.

It also marks an exciting first for the family: the Riesling and Rkatsiteli were harvested together and co-fermented rather than blended after fermentation.

Says fourth-generation family member Meaghan Frank, the vice president of the Hammondsport, New York, winery: “Ethos represents the two halves of Konstantin’s story. Rkatsiteli connects us to where he came from, to his life in Ukraine and the varieties he knew before coming to the United States. Riesling represents where he was going. It was one of the grapes he believed could transform the Finger Lakes, even when conventional wisdom said European varieties couldn’t thrive here.”

Third-generation family member Fred Frank, the winery president, remembers as a child working in the original planting of Riesling, with Rkatsiteli vines mixed in.

“These vines were first planted in the 1960s as a field blend, which is common in older European vineyards,” he says. “In honor of Konstantin, on the 60th anniversary of the winery, we introduced the 2021 vintage of Ethos, which was a blend of 60% Riesling and 40% Rkatsiteli. Although the original vineyard planting no longer exists, we tried to duplicate the field blend by harvesting and fermenting the two varieties together, allowing the vineyard and vintage to speak as one. The 2025 vintage of Ethos marks only the second vintage of this special wine, continuing a tradition rooted in the earliest days of the winery. The 2025 Ethos is a wine with remarkable depth and complexity, which is a great testament to Konstantin’s pioneering spirit.”

Per the wine notes, Riesling contributes vibrant citrus, floral aromatics, and precision, while Rkatsiteli adds texture, aromatic depth, and an intriguing layer of exotic fruit. Fermenting the varieties together allows their individual characteristics to develop as one wine, expressing the harmony of the blend from vineyard to bottle, the winery says.

The 2025 Ethos is now available through the Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery website and retails for $39.99.

The winery, located at 9749 Middle Road, is open daily.

Says Meaghan: “Putting those two grapes together feels like bringing Konstantin’s past and future into the same bottle. It’s his Old-World experience meeting his New World vision. As the fourth generation of my family at the winery, that idea means a lot to me. We’re constantly trying to balance those same things: respecting where we came from while continuing to experiment and pushing forward. So, Ethos isn’t about recreating the past for nostalgia’s sake. It’s taking an idea Konstantin had decades ago and asking what it means today.”

Among the producer’s recent accolades:

• Featured several weeks ago on the list of USA Today’s 10 best wine tasting rooms across the United States.

• Named to the Daily Meal’s list of the 12 best wineries across America in 2026. Two other East Coast wineries that were included were Old Westminster in Maryland and Ankida Ridge in Virginia.

• As part of the Finger Lakes, featured two days ago on the aliciatenise.com list of 10 best wine vacations in the US.

• In 2025, for the fourth time, ranked No. 1 as the Best Winery Tour in America by USA TODAY‘s 10Best Readers‘ Choice Awards, thanks to its immersive 1886 Wine Experience.

• Across more than a dozen wines reviewed at the beginning of 2026, earned consistent 90–93 point scores from critic James Suckling, showcasing the winery’s rare ability to combine historic vineyards, innovative winemaking, and a deep respect for terroir.

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Unionville Vineyards held its End of Summer BBQ on Sunday, Aug. 23, drawing a crowd to an event that featured a selection of barbecue, chicken drumsticks, burgers and hot dogs from Uncle Eddie's Touch of Sauce and music throughout the afternoon by Michael Montemurro.

It’s one of a number of weekend events that the Ringoes, New Jersey, producer featured this year, which included the:

• Spring Artisan Market in March

• Vineyard Pig Road and Bud Break Bash in May

• Great American Vineyard Cookout on July 4 and the infamous Lobster Bake a week later

Wrapping up the summer/early fall will be Grilled Cheese Saturday on Saturday, Sept. 12, and the Harvest Celebration on Saturday, Oct. 3. Both will run from noon to 5 p.m.

The winery is located at 9 Rocktown Road, in Hunterdon County, about a 10-minute ride from the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge. It’s open noon to 5 p.m. daily.

One of New Jersey’s oldest wineries, the vineyard was planted in 1987-88 and the tasting room opened on April 1, 1993. It farms several vineyards, spread across three of New Jersey’s counties. The two most prominent are its Amwell Ridge Vineyard — where it grows many of its Rhone varieties such as Viognier, Marsanne, Roussanne, Syrah and Counoise — and Pheasant Hill Vineyards, which features two plots — the one is devoted to Chardonnay, its flagship white, while the other includes four different clones of Pinot Noir, as well as the Rhone varieties Mourvedre, Syrah, and Viognier. The latter two grapes are co-fermented in a classic Cote-Rotie style to produce its single-vineyard Pheasant Hill Vineyard Syrah.

There is inside seating in the tasting room and in a second room accessible from the back patio. Picnic tables are scattered across the property.

As mentioned, the Chardonnay has gotten high marks in a number of competitions, as has Unionville’s Bordeaux blends (Big O and Sourland Ridge Red). Its 2024 Marsanne Roussanne Reserve and 2024 Silver Lining Cabernet Franc both showed quite well at the recent East Coast Winemakers Summit on Aug. 4. in Maryland.

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Smith-Madrone Winery became the venue this summer for a Hügelkultur project, designed and implemented by PCI Ecological in collaboration with California Land Stewardship Institute (CLSI) and Fish Friendly Farming.

Hügelkultur (pronounced hyoo-gul-culture) is a centuries-old German gardening method that translates to “hill or mound culture.” It involves building raised garden beds by burying rotting wood, branches, and other organic debris under layers of soil and compost. The technique itself is not a modern invention. Variations of burying logs, branches, and woody debris beneath planting beds have been practiced in parts of Germany and Eastern Europe for centuries, probably dating back to the Middle Ages as a practical way to dispose of wood while improving poor soils.

Here’s a link to more detail on the basics of the winery, which was founded by Stu Smith in 1971. Located in Napa County, its wines are made entirely from the dry-farmed estate vineyards surrounding the winery on top of Spring Mountain, which sit on steep slopes at elevations between 1,300 and 2,000 feet, with dramatic views to the north, east and south of the Napa Valley.

Stu Smith is the general partner, as part of a management team that includes his brother and winemaker, Charles F. Smith III, and associate winemaker François Bugué.

The Hügelkultur term was first published by German gardener Herrman Andrä in 1962. The technique achieved worldwide recognition through Austrian permaculture pioneer Sepp Holzer, who adapted it for steep mountain landscapes much like those found at Smith-Madrone.

So how did Smith-Madrone arrive at this project? According to a PR release, the winery survived the 2020 Glass Fire as an island in a sea of incinerated forest. The winery’s 38 acres of vineyard are surrounded by forests on all sides. Those forests, consisting of hardwoods — oak, madrone, tan bark, bay trees — were virtually destroyed by the Glass Fire. Most of the Douglas firs on the property were also destroyed; those that survived were killed by a subsequent invasion of bark beetles.

In the ensuing years, said Stu Smith, only minor hand work was done in these forested areas, enough to keep poison oak under control. The vineyard crew assembled piles of branches and dead trees into burn piles — some tree trunks were as big as 3 to 5 feet — but this could only take place during the winter (i.e. when burning is permissible). The winery was looking at years of work to clear the debris.

“We had to figure out a way to somehow efficiently clean up the forest,” Smith said.

In late 2025, Natalie Reed of Fish Friendly Farming approached the winery with an idea that would also involve Will Johnson and the team at PCI Ecological, an ecological consulting and construction contractor based in Sonoma County.

The problem was how to clean up a dead forest and to handle that economically, considering it’s a steep site, angling up to 45% slopes, northeast-facing, well-drained, composed of red Aiken Stony Clay Loam soil. And, after that, regenerate it.

From this context came the novel idea of using the Hügelkultur technique, suggested by CLSI and PCI.

“Our challenge was to get rid of the fuel load,” Smith said. “In the summer we can’t burn but we can get heavy equipment on these steep slopes, which we can’t do in the winter.”

The Hügelkultur process started with defining a 14-acre section of the forest and then digging trench-shaped holes as wide as 6 feet and as deep as 5 feet, according to the release. The PCI crew operated an excavator that moved the wood and cut it into smaller pieces, which were then “buried” in these “grave sites.” The bigger material went first, in the bottom, and the smaller debris on top. The dirt that had been dug up was then piled back on top. It would act as an erosion control barrier and as a filter, allowing the wood to decay and release carbon into the soil. The wood buried in these mounds were hardwoods, primarily Douglas fir.

Johnson said that this was the first project where they used the modified Hügelkultur mounds, noting that “PCI has been designing and building restoration projects since 1985.”

PCI landscape architect Mike Jensen added, “One of the goals of the project was to combine stormwater protection with fuel reduction, and according to PCI Ecological, this was successful. Over the course of 1 ½ weeks, the PCI team built several sturdy Hügelkultur mounds and cleared and re-purposed a lot of woody debris, stabilizing with straw and wattles.”

Smith said that “this project is a great example of how complex farming in the mountains in Napa Valley is. I was honored to be chosen by PCI Ecological and the California Land Stewardship Institute to be the home for this work. This combined so many complicated variables — the forest, wildfire mitigation, wildlife, vineyards, steep slopes, forest boundaries and more.”

Smith-Madrone Winery is a pioneer of mountain farming as well as dry farming in the Napa Valley. Of numerous accolades accrued over the years, this past summer saw the winery’s 2021 Estate Chardonnay become a finalist in two different Judgement of Paris Tasting re-creations — one in New York, conducted by Patrick Cappiello, and the other at UC Davis, organized in conjunction with Harvard.

Two East Coast wineries — Waltz Vineyards Estate Winery from Manheim, Pennsylvania, and Meadowbrook Winery in Oldwick, New Jersey — were also finalists in the tasting at UC Davis.

The Smith-Madrone vineyard is located in the Spring Mountain District American Viticultural Area (AVA).

It’s known for its dry Riesling although it also makes Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Rosé and a proprietary prestige cuveé, Cook’s Flat Reserve.

The property had been planted to vineyard in the 19th century, although when Stu arrived, all that remained of the original vineyard were small redwood grape stakes and a towering allée of olive trees competing for sunlight with the 100-foot tall Douglas fir trees, according to the winery history.

In 1972, the brothers planted the first 20 acres (5 acres each of Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir) on their own roots, which was unusual at the time.

Smith-Madrone’s first vintage of Riesling, the 1977, won Best Riesling in the Wine Olympics, an international tasting organized by the food and wine magazine Gault Millau in Paris in 1979.

The other partner in this project, California Land Stewardship Institute, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to planning and implementing environmental stewardship, restoration, and enhancement programs across private and public lands and waterways. Its work includes applied scientific studies, landscape scale stewardship, resource monitoring, and recommendation of best management practices. CLSI also operates the Fish Friendly Farming Environmental Certification Program and administers a range of conservation grant programs, working with agricultural producers and land managers to strengthen long-term soil and watershed health.

Prunuske Chatham, Inc. (PCI Ecological) is a full-service ecological consulting, restoration, and construction firm based in Sonoma County, California. For more than four decades, PCI has planned, designed, and implemented projects that protect and restore natural ecosystems while supporting the needs of local communities.

Jensen, PCI’s landscape architect, noted that while they have years of experience doing bioengineering projects using native materials and plants to stabilize slopes and streambanks, “this modified Hügelkultur technique for forestry application use is a first for us and was created for Smith-Madrone specifically. We’re already thinking about how to use this in other locations and how we might tweak the technique in the future with lessons learned.”

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Catoctin Breeze Vineyard in Thurmont, Maryland, has a unique event planned on Saturday, Sept. 19.

Called “To age, or not to age,” the program will explore what makes a red wine’s ability to age. Monika Barman, the wine educator at Catoctin Breeze, will run the event that will start at 11 a.m. in the lounge at the winery, located at 15010 Roddy Road.

Per an email sent out to wine club members, Barman will take a closer look at one of the defining characteristics of Catoctin Breeze’s red wine program: ageability.

Guests will get to taste and understand the blend program at Catoctin while learning the three distinct expressions of wines cultivated with different drinking windows in mind. During this tasting, those attending will explore varying vintages of Catoctin Breeze’s three red blends — Concerto, Nocturne and Fauteux — and discuss what makes each wine different, why they have different aging potential, and how those differences reveal themselves in the glass over time.

It’s a chance to taste not only where the wines are today but where they are headed – and to better understand why certain wines are encouraged to be enjoyed in their youth, while others are meant to be further aged.

The price to attend is $65, include a sampling of six wines and light charcuterie. Club members usually get advance notice on these events, but it looked too interesting to hold off writing about.

So, tickets — for members and nonmembers — can be purchased at this link.

Adam Fizyta, the owner and winemaker of the winery that his parents founded in 2010 when they planted their first vines, with it opening for business seven years later, said they try to brainstorm interesting events to put on for their members. This one was Barman’s idea, he said.

“We figured that it would be fun to highlight the different structures for each of our blends,” Fizyta said. “While Concerto is built to age for decades, our Fauteux blend is meant to be drank now. Why is that? I think our guests will be interested in learning how blending decisions influence the structure of the wine, ultimately defining its ageability.”

As for the year, Catoctin Breeze has experienced the same roller coaster that most mid-Atlantic producers have ridden, with the low point being April 21 and the freeze that laid waste to vineyards and orchards in multiple states.

Here’s a link to what Fizyta wrote on his winery blog on May 13.

A few months later, with some perspective and harvest beginning, the effects of the freeze don’t look as paralyzing as they did then.

“If I had to guess, the blocks that were hit the worst probably suffered a 20-30% loss,” he said Tuesday in an email. “But we won’t know until we pick the fruit, so I’ll report back. All things considered, we feel very fortunate. In fact, our yields will actually be up this year thanks to Cabernet Sauvignon finally hitting its stride in year 5. We were for sure lucky — and we credit that luck to our steep hillside and perhaps some divine intervention.

“Aside from the 4/21 freeze, the summertime heatwaves sunburned a small percentage of clusters which further reduced yields, but only a tiny bit. At the moment we’re battling a wet August and dealing with our Cabernet Franc that has uneven ripening. Today we went through (at about 90% veraison) and dropped all of the under developed clusters. I doubt we got all of them though, so we’ll just be very careful with extraction on Cabernet Franc during fermentation. Probably cooler temps and shorter maceration times. Balanced and fresh is better than over extracted and green 10/10 times.”

Here’s a link to anyone planning a visit to the winery, with details on the “Catoctin Experience” (reservations required), on guaranteeing a table in the tasting room, cru lounge or the adjacent outdoor patio overlooking the vineyard, and also for those who plan to visit without reservations.

The winery offers seated tasting, wines by the glass, and also by the bottle.

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Black River Farms Vineyard & Winery, located just outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has announced that it will be closing on Aug. 30.

Kris and Andrew Warner posted a message on the Black River Farms Facebook page on Aug. 11, noting that they will continue to own the farm property but plan to spend more time with family and friends in addition to traveling more.

The winery, located at 2472 Black River Road in Lower Saucon Township, is open noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

They began planting their vines in 2009 as a hobby and noted in the post that the hobby “has grown tremendously” over that time. “We have been blessed to spend this time surrounded by beautiful grapevines, flowers, vegetables and wildlife, but, more importantly, by an amazing team and guests that have become our BRF Family. Your support and loyalty over the years has meant the world to us, and we are grateful for the experience of providing service to our community.”

They closed their Black River Wine Bar in fall 2025 at the Trolley Barn Public Market in Quakertown, according to a story in the Morning Call. It was one of the market’s original vendors, the story noted.

In addition to its more than a dozen wines, including their signature Chambourcin, they used an on-site distillery to produce craft spirits under the WarDog Spirits label, offered wine slushies and flights, and sold organic produce (including blackberries, tomatoes, and Brussels sprouts), fresh-cut flowers and eggs.

The 17-acre property featured 9 acres of grapevines and eight grape varieties, with their biggest yield coming from their Chamboucin grapes.

In the initial release, Andrew said that "we have been blessed with a site that has helped us grow very healthy and high-quality fruit.. It is a pleasure to share our sustainable and beautiful green space, farm, and vineyard with many visitors."

Among the wines they were making at the beginning were Chardonnay, Kerner, Traminette, Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin, Cabernet Franc, Lemberger and Sangiovese.

Emailed some questions after they opened the winery in 2018, Andrew told PennLive that their entire family was involved in the business, and that they had put together a staff of 20, including a winemaker, vineyard manager and tasting room manager.

Asked then how much time the business was taking, he replied, “The vineyard and winery have been very time-consuming but it is a labor of love and we are proud of the beautiful farm that has evolved and the product we deliver.”

Black River Farms has been a member of the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail since it opened.

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Dave Collins was wrapping up his presentation on the Vermentino that he brought to the East Coast Winemakers Summit on Aug. 4 and getting ready to sit down when a memory made him pause and then tell a quick story.

“I had a friend, a buddy of mine, come in about 25 years ago when I was at Breaux,” said Collins, who partnered with owners Randy and Jennifer Thompson to launch BIG Cork Vineyards in Maryland in 2011 and is now its master winemaker and vice president of operations. “He came in, he put two bottles of wine down, and one was a bottle of Vermentino. … that wine blew me away. I never forgot about Vermentino.”

That friend was Stephen Rigby, who was working at Raffaldini Vineyards in North Carolina at the time. After several years of making wine for a fledgling producer called Hauser Estate in central Pennsylvania, he and his wife Joyce headed south again, landing at Boxwood Winery in Virginia’s Loudoun County, where he has started his eighth harvest as the winemaker. His wife is the vineyard manager there.

Rigby, who was told the story a few days later while sitting at a table in Boxwood’s tank room, said he was flattered that Collins still remembered that, all these years later.

It also stirred some fond memories of making Vermentino at Raffaldini, which is located in to the Yadkin Valley wine region and the Swan Creek American Viticultural Area (AVA). Vermentino is a light-skinned white wine grape variety, widely planted in Sandinia, Liguria and Tuscany in Italy. It’s also found elsewhere internationally, including a few spots on America’s East Coast: at Raffaldini and at a couple of other new Italian-variety producers that are sprouting up around that winery, at Virginia’s Barboursville (where its 2023 Vermentino won the state’s Governor’s Cup in 2025) and at least two other producers in the state (see below), at BIG Cork, and perhaps at Va La Vineyards in Pennsylvania, where owner and winemaker Anthony Vietri grows a number of Italian varieties that go into the field blends that have built an avid following.

Raffaldini began its rise to prominence in 2001, when Jay Raffaldini purchased an abandoned farm in Ronda, about 80 miles northwest of Charlotte and four years later opened the tasting room. Rigby, its first winemaker, remembers working at that time with Stephen Lyons and his wife, who he said had “a very small percentage of ownership in the winery.” Lyons was formerly the vineyard manager at Ravenswood in California before moving to North Carolina, according to this November 2025 interview with Skye Lyons, Stephen’s son, who today runs Lyons Vineyard in Santa Ynez, California, with his wife Sarah.

“Stephen did the groundwork, so to speak,” Rigby said, talking about the Raffaldini operation. “He found the property they agreed on. He put in the vineyard. We had all sorts of varieties then. Still do,” noting they planted a number of French and Italian varieties, including Vermentino, Montepulciano and Sangiovese. At the time, Vermentino was difficult to find anywhere. “The closest we could find at that time where it was growing was in Texas,” with a few other plantings in California, he said.

“That Vermentino, I always loved that grape,” Rigby said. “My ears always perk up when I hear someone talking about it.”

It also caught the attention of Wine Business Monthly, which named Raffaldini one of the top 10 hot small brands of 2009, largely because of its Vermentino. “To this day I think, man, that’s one of the things I’m most proud of,” Rigby said.

Back then, he continued, they were making six to eight wines at Raffaldini, all of them dry, a philosophy that ran contrary to that of other North Carolina producers. “Next thing you know, we were one of the most visited tasting rooms around, so it kind of broke that mold as well.”

Asked about the grape for a story published on PennLive last December, Jay Raffaldini called Vermentino the winery’s “rock star.”

“We make 500 cases annually and it always sells out before the next vintage is ready so we are pushing to 600 cases, which is maximum where the vines are in their young life,” he said when asked about the grape, which they sell as a Vermentino Superiore ($32) and Vermentino Rovere ($26, aged an extra 16 months). “All of my immediate neighbors have just planted it, so I think it could be the state flagship white in the fullness of time.”

Luca Paschina told PennLive in February 2025 after the announcement of the Governor’s Cup win that he planted 9 acres of the grape in 2009, and that he was aware of two other Vermentino growers in Virginia: New Kent and Zephaniah wineries. In addition to making the wine as a varietal, Paschina said he also uses it as a blend in a wine called Nascent (70% Viognier, 23% Vermentino, 7% Falanghina).

Collins is growing 2 acres of Vermentino, crediting Dr. Joe Fiola at Maryland Extension for the suggestion to add it to BIG Cork’s vineyard.

“We had been looking at Vermentino for a number of years,” Collins told those assembled at Black Ankle Vineyards for the summit. “We had it right beside the Verdelho in our experimental block, and they both did really well. Verdelho seemed to be a little earlier, smaller cluster, just really nice and ripe. But there was something about the Vermentino grape that just really caught my eye. It’s just a beautiful cluster.”

Fiola, who emceed the summit, was asked a few days later about the grape, and he couldn’t stop raving about it. He said he talked with Raffaldini about the grape back in the early 2000s, and first planted it at his experimental vineyard on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 2005 or 2006.

“It was just a beautiful plant, just like Dave said. The leaves are big and green, and the clusters are just absolutely gorgeous,” Fiola said during a phone conversation last week. “When you look in the dictionary on what a gold white grape cluster should look like, these are just the perfect shape. The perfect size. Big round berries that turn bright golden when they’re ripe. It’s just a really picturesque variety to grow. Harvest mid-September, which I like. I’m always looking for whites that can go a little bit later, as far as holding their acidity.

“It’s a pleasure to work with in the vineyard. If it gets rained on, because the berries are so big, it can get late-season rot. But almost all large white varieties will do that at some point. But it’s not a major Achilles’ heel.”

The grape also offers the winemakers a great deal of flexibility.

Even the name, he said, sounds like a classic wine grape, letting Ver-men-tino roll off his tongue.

“It’s always done well for me. The biggest problem is just the raccoons absolutely love it, because it’s so aromatic and so it gets so bright ripening, and the aromatics are so nice when it’s ripe that the raccoons will go crazy. And the bees, of course, if there’s any damage at all, the bees come in and they annihilate it.”

Because of the large clusters, the overall yield doesn’t compare to others such as Verdelho, Colombard and Verdejo. “They’re much more prolific in harvest than Vermentino is,” he said, “but it holds its own. It’s not terrible. It’s definitely better than Albarino.”

Added Fiola: “It’s seemingly doing well on a commercial scale for Dave. He’s pretty happy with it at this point. And you know down in Virginia they won the Governor’s Cup with it. And Luca thought his 2024 was better, and that was also in the Governor’s Cup case this year.”

Bottom line, it’s a grape that Fiola is obviously smitten with. “You’re walking down the rows of grapes and you see all of these tiny clusters and this and that, and then you get to the Vermentino and you see this big golden cluster,” he said, adding, “It’s just very, very satisfying, to say the least.”

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Boordy Vineyards had to send its guests inside yesterday as rain began to fell around the time that activities connected to Good Life Thursday were set to begin.

The Baltimore County producer, now in its 81st year, has included the event on its schedule from 4 to 8 p.m. since June, and it will continue through September. What it calls a family-friendly evening features live local music, great food, a bottle/glass/flight of Boordy wines and fresh produce from One Straw Farm.

Co-owner Joan Norman, who met her husband Drew at the University of Maryland, started One Straw Farm in 1985 with the goal of being a consistent, trustworthy, and reliable farm in the Mid-Atlantic foodshed, per its bio. It became one of the first farms in Maryland to be certified organic and over the past 40 years has maintained a steady commitment to being a certified organic single-source grower.

Joan organized the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) pickup site at Boordy Vineyards in 2004 with just a couple of members to see how it would go, and the relationships they formed in that first season were so strong that she shifted her full-time focus to growing the CSA program. Under her leadership and enthusiasm, the CSA program has blossomed to become the main focus of the farm, according to the website.

It’s located in White Hall.

Joan was setting up outside off the front patio around 2 p.m. Thursday, with everything from tomatoes and lettuce to melons and peppers.

CSA pickup runs weekly from 2 to 6 through the fall, and there’s plenty of other produce available for purchase at the winery.

Boordy’s other weekly events will continue this weekend":

• Summer Saturday Soirees offers tasting flights until 4:30 pm daily, with the winery welcoming 21 years of age and older only from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. and families with children from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. That will run for a couple of more Saturdays.

• Sunday Family Days goers from 1 to 5 p.m. through the end of September, with live music, Argentinian cuisine from La Barrita and your favorite Boordy wines.

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Alex and Julia Alvarez-Perez met in 2012 while working in New York City restaurants. They spent many years as sommeliers and restaurant managers, per their website bio, before transitioning to winemaking.

After working at wineries in Austria’s Burgenland and Australia’s Adelaide Hills, they returned to the East Coast and settled in the Finger Lakes. Once back, they created Usonia Wine in 2019, and two years later began farming their own vineyard, currently planted with Riesling and Cabernet Franc vines. They share in the winemaking dutires.

The winery is located at 6963 state route 89, Ovid, New York, aside Cayuga Lake.

Usonia hosts tastings, led by Julia and Alex, on their farm. They last about an hour, include at least five wines, and cost $15 per person (payable after the tasting).

Tastings are currently limited to eight people, and they’re hosted at a communal table. Per the website, please note that it’s a functioning farm. Kids and dogs are welcome as long as they’re well-behaved (dogs) and leashed (kids). There is currently no food with the tastings.

Send an email to gday@usoniawine.com if you have any questions or don’t see availability.

Julia brought a Soon Different 2025 (50% Regent, 30% Aravelle, 20% Aromella) and a 2024 New Suns Red (100% Cabernet Franc) to the gathering of 12 East Coast winemakers that took place on Aug. 4 at Black Ankle Vineyards in Maryland.

She took some time this week to answer several questions sent to her and email them back.

Q, How long did it take to come up with the winery name … and maybe this is a spot, too, to mention the artist of your label. I know I asked you the same thing at the summit. Just love the label.

A, It took us a little while to come up with the name Usonia. At first we tried every possible combination of our names, my maiden name, old family names...none of them stuck. We wanted something clean, preferably one word with a feminine ring to it. My husband, Alex, is from Buffalo, where there are several Frank Lloyd Wright homes, so he had heard of his concept of “Usonia” before. We did a bit more research and we liked the ethos behind it — America as a truly democratic and distinctive space that’s not beholden to European norms or traditions. On a podcast I once heard Usonia described as “America as it could be at its democratic zenith.” When we first started out, we were only working with European vinifera varieties (Riesling, Cab Franc, and Blaufränkisch) but now that we’re working predominantly with hybrids, many of them American bred, I think the concept of Usonia fits a bit better. We think the idea of a hierarchy of grape varieties (i.e. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at the top, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc at the bottom) is nonsense at best and actively harmful to the future of grape growing at worst. We’ve really come to love lesser-known, obscure hybrids because they can grow much easier in our wet, humid climate, can be made into more affordable, accessible wines, and importantly, can make distinctly New York wines. I think this ties into our understanding of what Usonia means.

Our label designer is Elana Schlenker. We wanted bright, eye-catching labels that incorporated many different fonts (like in many old school Italian labels) and she came up with the grid system. She finds a different illustrator every year, and in the last few years we’ve given them prompts to flesh out the landscape of Usonia. The 2023s were fantastical creatures of Usonia, the 2024s were historical figures (artisans, peasants) of Usonia, and the 2025s are Gods of Usonia.

Q, It sounds like working at wineries abroad sort of created the spark. Was there one thing that made you two decide to open the winery, or just a desire that built up ahead of 2019?

A, Alex and I met working at a wine bar in Brooklyn, and we continued working in restaurants for about six more years before we got burned out. We were both focused on the wine side of restaurants, but got sick of how detached we were from the actual process of making wine and speaking with producers. We also came to realize that so much “somm speak” can be total bullshit (if I’m being honest.) We had traveled a bit together visting producers — some in California where we were living at the time, and a bit in France and Italy — and we always felt the most engaged with wine while tasting one-on-one with the producer and walking through vineyards. I think this really drove home in our minds that wine, first and foremost, is farming. I had worked on farms in Italy a bit in my early 20s and worked a harvest in the Willamette Valley, and I was itching to get out of restaurants and back to winery work. We decided to leave the Bay Area, work a harvest together in Austria, and if we enjoyed it enough we would pursue it in the Finger Lakes. I had never been to the Finger Lakes — Alex had — but we wanted to get back to the East Coast, and it felt like a place with a lot of opportunity. At the time, there were very few producers making low-intervention wines in the Finger Lakes (Bloomer Creek being the main exception) and we thought that was a good niche to explore.

Q, Love the description of the New Suns vineyard. Has the makeup changed since the writeup on the website? And, what is the potential you see in hybrids?

A, Oof, our website is a bit out of date! We started farming New Suns in 2021, which was a catastrophically wet year in the Finger Lakes and really made us re-think how and what we wanted to farm. When we took over the vineyard there were MANY dead spots. After 2021, we began to give hope for vinifera in the Finger Lakes, so we decided to replant hybrids in spots where Riesling and Cab Franc had died. Ultimately this was not the best decision (and we probably should have listened to the people that told us so.) Hybrids are better suited to organic farming, but the timing of Marquette, Noiret, and NY-81 are much earlier than Riesling and Cab Franc and we don’t have the bandwidth to pick them on their own. So, sadly, the animals tend to get to the NY-81 before we can! We will likely rip out the Marquette next year (it was only about 80 vines.) This year we gave in and re-planted Riesling in Riesling, and Cab Franc in Cab Franc.

We also planted one acre of Steuben this year — it’s an old hybrid bred at Cornell in the 1920s. While we gave up on interplanting hybrids and vinifera, we’re committed to planting hybrids in their own blocks. We have roughly another 2 acres that we can plant, and we’ll continue to work with hybrids (though we still haven’t decided which ones yet.) So currently New Suns is 1 acre of Riesling, 2.5 acres Cab Franc, and 1 acre of Steuben, with a smattering of Marquette, Noiret, and NY-81 (now known as Aravelle.)

Our thinking about hybrids really changed when we started farming our vineyard, and once we saw the amount of work (mostly handwork and sprays) that are needed to keep vinifera vines healthy. For us, how you farm is more important than what you farm, so we let our desire to farm organically dictate what we plant. This year, for instance, to farm our vinifera organically and have relatively healthy vines, we’ve sprayed 18 times in the growing season. 18! That’s an insane amount of labor, tractor passes, and spray materials (which, being organic, are more generally more expensive than conventional materials.) While we don’t have a year’s experience farming hybrids, we think we can spray half as many times (if not less) with hybrids. For example, Corey Christie, who grows the Steuben that we work with, sprayed four times in 2024. We’d love to cut back on the inputs and labor in the vineyard, especially considering it’s just the two of us out there. To do this we don’t think we have to sacrifice quality — we think hybrids can make delicious, accessible, affordable, and distinctively New York wines.

Q, What’s the most fun of this venture, and right now the biggest challenge? You sort of referred to the latter in your answer last week?

A, As cheesy as it sounds, I think the most fun we have is when we get to do vineyard work together. I have a full-time job as the winemaker at another winery up the road [Buttonwood Grove Winery], which means Alex is generally on his own in the vineyard during the growing season. On weekends, we usually try to divide and conquer, meaning one of us is working in our tasting space and the other is in the vineyard. It’s rare that we get to spend a few hours in the vineyard together. So much handwork in the vineyard is tedious, or tiring, or just plain boring, so doing it together makes the job go easier, but we get some good time together focusing on our farm. While it’s not the most fun job, hauling out fruit after it’s been picked is definitely the best feeling — the major work of the year is done, and we can stop worrying about the weather (for a little bit.)

Apart from farming grapes in a completely unpredictable, often times extreme, rapidly changing climate — which is no small feat! — I think finding time to get out and sell wine is our biggest challenge right now. We both have backgrounds in restaurants and selling wine, so it comes relatively easily for us, but between my day job, vineyard work, and cellar work (not to mention having some down time for our personal lives) we don’t get to do it as much as we’d like. A lot of our wines are made from obscure hybrids that we don’t list on the label, so they don’t exactly sell themselves (but we also like telling people the story behind the wines.) Our tasting space has been doing well this year, so we’re looking forward to hopefully expanding our hours a bit next year.

Q, What led you to produce the crackling wine? I had never heard of that before.

A, The crackling wine came about as sort of a failed experiment. In 2023 we made a wine that was a blend of Chancellor, Verdelet, and Cayuga White. We fermented and aged the three varieties separately, did a few blend trials, and came up with a version that we liked. After we actually blended it we both found it a bit ... boring. We thought it would be more fun as a sparkling wine, but at that point the wine was dry and finished. We love old school Lambrusco, which is often made in the “rifermentato” style in which you pitch the fermenting must of the current year and add it to a base wine from the previous year. So we did that process but with an incredibly aromatic variety, Diamond (a relative of Concord.) The idea evolved into a “what if we made a Lambrusco style wine, all with hybrids?” We wanted to lean into the grapey, musky side of Diamond. It’s been a hit! “Crackling wine” is just another term for a sparkling wine that has less pressure than Champagne, so this fits the bill AND we think it’s a much cooler sounding name than plain ol’ “sparkling wine.”

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Cullari Vineyard & Winery, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, is officially up for sale.

Owner Sal Cullari, 74, wrote this week in a statement that “after 20 years of operating a vineyard/winery in Hershey and various tasting rooms, it will be necessary for me to retire.”

He continued: “Unfortunately, my age has caught up with me and I don’t have any close relatives nearby to replace me. Therefore, I have decided to put my business up for sale so that potentially someone can continue producing our popular wines into the future. The ideal buyer is an existing farm looking to instantly expand into a Pennsylvania wine market or vineyard, an existing wedding/event establishment wishing to expand with an established licensed winery, or an entrepreneur. My Pennsylvania Limited Winery License is suitable for anyone in Pennsylvania, but given my customer base, optimal locations are Lebanon, Lancaster or Dauphin counties. The sale would include a transferable PA winery license, winery equipment, two functional tasting rooms (Lititz and Farmstead Farmer’s Market) and all wine-related inventory. The license includes the right to open five direct-to-consumer satellite tasting rooms/retail locations across Pennsylvania and self-distribute directly to consumers. However, my existing physical winery and vineyard in Hershey is not part of the sale. Anyone interested in getting more information can contact me directly at 717-571-2376.”

The sale price is negotiable, Cullari said.

A home winemaker while maintaining his full-time job as chairman of the department of psychology at Lebanon Valley College, Cullari left academics at age 52 and eventually opened the winery in 2007. “After 9/11, I just, I don’t know, for some reason, it just kind of changed me and I just thought there would be other things to do rather than teaching for the rest of my life,” he said in a May interview.

Over the next couple of decades, his winery would build a loyal following as the first one to be located in Hershey, at 1251 E. Chocolate Ave., what he called the perfect location.

“We were getting people from Hersheypark, we were getting people from the Giant Center, getting people going to concerts. Plus we had been there 15 years, so we were getting a lot of regular customers stopping literally every day for our wine,” he said.

What ultimately changed for the Calabria, Italy, native, who sources from a small vineyard he planted in 2000 at his home and also from other locations in Pennsylvania and adjoining states (it qualifies as a PA Preferred business) was losing that location when the landlord decided in 2023 to bring in an ice cream shop.

“We really took a hit,” he said.

The winery presently sells from its locations at in Bricker Village, 2 E. 28th Division Highway, Lititz, which is open six days a week, and at the Farmstead Farmers Market, 1976 Laudermilch Road, Palmyra., on Fridays and Saturdays.

Cullari has 35 wines on his list, including Coco Nostra, a chocolate wine that couldn’t be more appropriate for the Hershey area. That one has been the producer’s top seller for almost 15 years.

“Most of our best-selling wines are all unique,” he said. “They’re formula wines. So those would be part of the package.”

Cullari said last year he sold around 20,000 bottles.

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Tom Sinton was raised on a ranch in the Paso Robles, California, area, where his family raised cattle, sugar beets and alfalfa, inspiring his lifelong love of plants, per his winery bio.

When he was 15, he spent a life-changing summer with a family in Reims, France, where he was served wine at every meal. In time, he would establish Shell Creek Vineyards in 1972 on the family ranch, farming grapes for the next 13 years.

While he left wine for a decade and a half, its tentacles never fully detached from him.

His son Rob grew up in the Bay Area before attending UC Davis, where he took a wine course that led him to begin making wine at home by fermenting some El Dorado Mourvedre, and to soon change his major to enology and viticulture.

In 2011, Rob and his father began making wine under the Starfield Vineyards brand.

“Starfield was the name we chose early on. We really started thinking we were not going to be more than a just a custom crush and sourcing fruit from vineyards that we liked,” Rob said in an interview done back in June. But sourcing those didn’t last. “I should have known better than like someone who planted 100 acres in Paso in his 20s was going to not be satiated by making wine from other people’s grapes. And he was not. So we planted our own, and that happened pretty quickly.”

Tom then chimed in. “There were there were reasons for it. When you’re buying grapes in Napa and Sonoma, you get pushed around a lot. We were making some really nice Cabernet, and then Paul Hobbs bought the vineyard and kicked everybody out, and you know, you were sitting there saying, ‘Geez, we spent three years, and we just were honing the winemaking technique, and you’re gone. And then you have to start over. It didn’t work at all. We made Cabernet from Stagecoach [Vineyard] in ‘24. I think our last Napa Cab. We started over there, and it just got, frankly, way too expensive. We paid Gallo $14,000 a ton for that. … we don’t know enough billionaires. Frankly, we may not know any billionaires.”

So a year later, Tom and Rob selected a 67-acre property in the Sierra Foothills, east of Placerville and a little less than an hour’s drive from Sacramento, in the El Dorado AVA, to bring Starfield to its current home.

The winery, at 2750 Jacquier Road, is open daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., offering several tasting rooms, an amphitheater that’s built into the hillside overlooking Starfield Lake, 3 miles of dog-friendly nature trails that take visitors through the diverse landscape of the mountain property, vineyards and gardens, and a new food program featuring Roman-style Pizza Alla Palla.

Rob began working on the winemaking with his father in 2020, and two years later relocated to Placerville to become the head winemaker while managing other aspects of the operation. So far, so good for the vintage, with a growing year that featured a roller-coaster start and has since stayed close to average.

“I think we get our cooling primarily from elevation, and it may be a little bit more consistent than just regular cooling from a storm. So that part has been relatively consistent,” Tom said, responding to a question about their observations of the effects of climate change there. “But definitely, spring is starting a little earlier. We definitely did this year. You know, being a farmer, you get pretty focused on the year you’re in, and like, what’s this doing? Why is this weird? And it’s always a a little weird. But it was warm in March, and then it got cold in April. And right it looks pretty normal. I can’t give you a great analysis of it, but overall, you’d have to believe it’s generally warming up, and that’s one of the reasons we planted most of the varietals we did up here. We wanted strong aromatics, thinking that you’re planting for a long period of time and you’re facing climate change, more is better. So we do get quite a bit of aromatic intensity, and part of that is just the location of where we are in the mountains, I think, for some reason or other, mountain fruit produces. Maybe it’s the absence of other characters or whatever, but you get a distinct varietal character in a lot of the wines. We sort of leaned into that, and we thought we were going to get it, and we have gotten it.”

That Sierra Spice, as they call the influence of their hillside woodland on the wine, is defined in a page in their marketing materials in addition to one of the three vials they send out in the package, which also include soil samples for their Mourvedre and Viognier vines.

“In general, they’re lighter wines. They’re not the sort of heavily extracted Napa style,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t want to necessarily pin that on Napa. I think, if you want to pin it on anybody, you could probably pin it on Robert Parker, who kind of persuaded everybody that you couldn’t sell it unless you produced something that he liked to drink. So they all started doing it."

They planted their vines on the steep volcanic slopes from 2012 to 2017, Tom said, a majority of those Rhone varietals such as Syrah, Grenache, Roussanne, Mourvedre, Viognier, Cinsault and Counoise, all complemented by other varieties including Aglianco, Vermentino, Fiano, Barbera and Tempranillo. Those are divided into 24 blocks, roughly an acre and a half each at an elevation of around 2,400 feet, all sites selected with slope, orientation, shading and temperature in mind.

Starfield’s wines, a majority of them varietals, range in price from $24 to $48, and include a couple of sparklings and a port. They stopped adding much to the lineup, Rob said, when they realized that producing more varieties wasn’t improving sales.

“We do still experiment. We did a light alcohol wine. We are planning to bottle and release a sparkling non-alcoholic wine,” he said. “We did a vermouth that I still need to remake. Generally I think we’re cutting back, I would say, on traditional red and white blends, red and white varieties, to get everything a little bit more in a unique lane, so that we don’t have so many … Grenache, Cinsaut, Counoise, while they are for the really big winos like me and my dad are, which is, part of the thing you go in with is your own palate. It’s fun to taste them all side by side, but I think for many drinkers, it’s apples and apples.

“I think the things that I look for in other wines and winemakers is true to expression of the variety, clean,” continued Rob, whose role continues to expand beyond the cellar, from often installing Ikebana displays in the tasting room to converting his longstanding passion for astronomy and photography into designing Starfield’s new labels, featuring Solargraphs taken with pinhole cameras he built. “At least I can appreciate microbial terroir with dinner occasionally, [but] that’s not really what excites me about someone else’s wine. I’m usually looking for a really nice, clean expression of what I think the grape is, which is partly born out of how we planted the vineyard, which was kind of going around and trying to find, what do these grapes taste like, because you couldn’t find, gosh, I mean now you can kind of find Cinsult, but when we planted it, it was pretty darn hard to find Cinsult to taste. Aglianico was another one. It was like, pretty much the only ones you could find were out of Taurasi in Italy, and I couldn’t tell if that was the grape or the winery I was tasting. So it stuck with me that I really wanted people to taste what I think the grape tastes like. The winemakers that I think deliver that really stick in my head.”

As has been the case since they settled in Placerville, they make the wine at a nearby winery, and “then we give them all the instructions,” Tom said. “There’s a lot of stuff we’d love to do if we had our own facility. Things we would do differently, probably, to have different equipment and that sort of thing. That sort of constrains you, but this is a pretty nice facility we’re in right now.

“Rob’s a big believer in managing the fermentation, which I think is really good,” he added. “And there’s virtually nobody who you employ in that kind of operation cares as much as you do about it, and it can go wrong pretty quickly. I’m sure, as you well know, that that most people who care about it are tasting it once or twice a day, and just checking the fermentation, making sure that it’s all progressing. So those are the sorts of things that you end up doing a lot of. Right now, we’re pretty happy with the situation. I think in the current market, we’re thinking at some point maybe the wineries will become available at a reasonable price, and we might find one. So we’re not ruling that out. We see over in Napa that there’s a fair amount of stuff that changes hands over there, but I I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere near the level of transfers and all that that I think we’re going to see.”

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North Carolina’s JOLO Winery & Vineyards recently won the 2026 Jefferson Cup Best of Show, given out by the Atlantic Seaboard Wine Association (ASWA).

Its 2023 Carolus XII — produced from estate-grown fruit, including 44% Petit Verdot, 33% Cabernet Franc, and 23% Merlot — ranked highest among 389 entries. Located in Pilot Mountain, about 30 miles northwest of Winston-Salem and 100 miles from Charlotte, the gold medal for its red blend was one of five it won in the competition.

New York’s Keuka Spring Vineyards also finished with five gold medals, tying JOLO for most in the competition, and Maryland’s Links Bridge Vineyards LLC netted four.

JOLO proprietors JW and Kristen Ray founded the winery in 2010 and named it for their sons, Joey and Logan, who are both active in the business. They opened the tasting room in April 2014. It’s part of the Surry County Wine Trail and is located in the Yadkin Valley American Vititcultural Area (AVA).

The winery is located at 219 JOLO Winery Lane, and is open Thursday through Sunday.

This award is one of a number this year given out to a 2023 vintage, one that many winery owners and winemakers call their best ever.

Said Ray, “The 2023 vintage was an exceptional opportunity for us to showcase not only the quality of fruit we can grow in North Carolina, but also the level of precision we have developed in both the vineyard and cellar.”

His comments on the creation of the wine, both in the vineyard and cellar, were included in a release from the AWSA.

“We deliberately leaf-pull on both the east and west sides of the fruiting zone each year, just after berry set. This increases airflow around the clusters, improves sunlight exposure and helps us maintain healthier fruit while promoting more even ripening and flavor development.

“During fermentation, we employed traditional pump-overs for extraction and cap management, but approximately halfway through fermentation we also incorporated délestage, or rack-and-return. By completely draining the fermenting wine away from the cap and then returning it over the skins, we were able to continue extracting color, flavor and desirable tannin while helping shape a more polished texture.”

Not skipping any steps, Ray said, “Following fermentation and délestage, the individual components were carefully evaluated and blended. As a final refinement, I used traditional egg-white fining at the extremely restrained rate of approximately one egg white per barrel. It is an Old World technique that I particularly appreciate because, when used judiciously, it can soften the harder edges of tannin and improve texture without stripping the wine of its character, concentration or sense of place.”

The entire family and management team participates in landing on the blend percentages. “Based on that collective feedback,” he said, “we may adjust the blend a percentage point here or there, taste again, and continue refining it until we reach a unanimous conclusion.”

The wine was aged an extended 27 months in French oak before being bottled in January 2026. “Ultimately, CAROLUS XII reflects the balance we constantly pursue at JOLO: ripe, expressive fruit; structure worthy of aging; and enough finesse that the wine is already compelling in the glass,” Ray said, adding, “We are extraordinarily proud to have the Jefferson Cup Best of Show award become part of the CAROLUS XII story, and we sincerely appreciate the recognition.”

In addition to the four grapes above, JOLO grows Chambourcin, Cynthiana, Traminette, Vidal Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sangiovese and Marquette. In 2020, the acquisition of Hutton Vineyards expanded the Rays’ holdings and now serves as JOLO’s production facility. The Rays then purchased RayLen Vineyards and Winery in Mocksville in December 2023 and appropriately renamed it Rayson Winery and Vineyards.

ASWA’s annual competition is the largest in the nation focused exclusively on the wines of the East Coast, covering the 17 states from Maine to Florida that border the Atlantic and including Vermont, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This year’s competition was held the second weekend of August at the Marriott Tysons, Virginia. A total of 10 states were represented in this year’s competition.

The wines competed in individual flights in twenty-nine varietal/blend categories. A panel of 12 judges from around the country scored 389 wines made in the eastern US over the two-day event. The 2026 competition produced 111 gold medal winners, 178 silver, and 81 bronze. ASWA President Grant Crandall said, “Over the years the quality of wines on the East Coast has risen quite steadily. This year provided the strongest group of wines that we have ever judged.”

Here is a quick breakdown of how all the evaluated wines performed:

• Gold: 111

• Silver: 178

• Bronze: 81

• No Medal: 19

• Total entries evaluated: 389

Gold Medal Highlights:

• Top-Performing Wineries: JOLO Winery and Keuka Spring Vineyards led the competition with 5 gold medals each, followed closely by Links Bridge Vineyards LLC with 4.

• Top Wine Categories: Cabernet Franc (Category 330) was the most successful category with 13 gold medals, followed by Bordeaux-Style Red Blends (Category 350) with 11, and Petit Verdot (Category 335) with 8.

Here is the breakdown of how many wines were submitted from each participating state, ordered from highest to lowest representation:

1. Virginia (VA): 226 wines

2. New York (NY): 70 wines

3. Maryland (MD): 45 wines

4. North Carolina (NC): 20 wines

5. Florida (FL): 10 wines

6. Rhode Island (RI): 7 wines

7. Pennsylvania (PA): 4 wines

8. New Jersey (NJ): 4 wines

9. Delaware (DE): 2 wines

10. Vermont (VT): 1 wine

Across all participating states, performance varied significantly by grape variety. While red Bordeaux varietals dominated the total medal count, native and hybrid grapes like Carlos, Norton, and Riesling achieved the highest percentage of top honors.

Here is a breakdown of how the top grape varietals performed:

• Cabernet Franc (55 entries): This was the most widely entered grape in the competition. It performed exceptionally well, securing 18 gold medals and 26 silver medals.

• Petit Verdot (31 entries): A standout red performer, earning 13 gold medals and 13 silver medals.

• Chardonnay (42 entries): The leading white wine by volume, taking home 9 gold medals and 19 silver medals.

Here’s the list of wineries, and the wines, that earned a gold medal and Best of Class:

The Vineyards and Winery at Lost Creek, Leesburg, VA, Sparkling Vinifera Wines

CrossKeys Vineyards, Mt. Crawford, VA, Sauvignon Blanc

Southern Revere Cellars, Louisa, VA, Chardonnay

Keuka Spring Vineyards, Penn Ya, NY, Gewurztraminer

Lakewood Vineyards, Watkins Glen, NY, Riesling

Jefferson Vineyards, Charlottesville, VA, Viognier

James River Cellars, Glen Allen, VA, Petit Manseng

Vint Hill Craft Winery, Warrenton, VA, White Vinifera Blends

Ingleside Vineyards, Oak Grove, VA, Albarino

Penn Oaks Winery, Cooksville, MD, Other White Vinifera Varietals

Lakewood Vineyards, Watkins Glen, NY, Blush/Rose Vinifera

Private Label Cellars, Catharpin, VA, Merlot

Vint Hill Craft Winery, Warrenton, VA, Cabernet Sauvignon

Bright Leaf Vineyard, Cabernet Franc

Slater Run Vineyards, Upperville, VA, 335 Petit Verdot

Potomac Point Winery, Stafford, VA, Tannat

Cane & Vine Wine Cellars, Geneva, NY, Syrah/Shiraz

JOLO Winery, Pilot Mountain, NC, Bordeaux-Style Red Blends, overall winner

Lakeridge Winery and Vineyards, Clermont, FL, Sparkling Hybrid/NA Wines

Accord Vineyards, Linden, VA, Vidal Blanc

Lakeridge Winery and Vineyards, Clermont, FL, White Muscadine/Scuppernong

Moliandra Vineyard, Deposit, NY, Other White Hybrid/NA Varietal

San Sebastian Winery, St. Augustine, FL, Blush/Rose Hybrid/NA

Effingham Manor and Winery, Nokesville, VA, White Interspecific Blends

Fifty-Third Winery and Vineyard, Louisa, VA, Chambourcin

Links Bridge Vineyards LLC, Thurmont, MD, Norton

Moliandra Vineyard, Deposit, NY, Red Hybrid/NA Blends

Benmarl Winery, Marlboro, NY, Sweet Blush (RS > 4 %)

San Sebastian Winery, St. Augustine, FL, Port-Styled Wines

Winning wines are traditionally showcased at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California. ASWA board members host dinners in California with industry professionals to highlight the strengths of eastern wines, give educational presentations at UC Davis and additional California venues, and bring focus to Atlantic Seaboard wines through a leading wine and food radio broadcast. Additionally, the wines are regularly featured at the Eastern Winery Exposition and other events.

The sterling silver perpetual Jefferson Loving Cup will be engraved with the winning winery’s name and presented in March 2027 to the Best of Show winner.

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Turks Head Wines in Pennsylvania’s Chester County is redefining the traditional winery restaurant with the expansion of its wine-first dining experience.

The California winery with its West Chester tasting room, wine lounge, and private event spaces has started a full lunch and dinner service, transforming from a destination known for thoughtfully curated winery bites into a full-scale culinary experience where every dish is intentionally designed to complement the wines — not the other way around.

The new format was introduced the week of Aug. 3, according to media release.

Unlike traditional restaurants, where chefs create dishes before recommending wine pairings, Turks Head Wines has chosen to follow a wine-first dining philosophy. Founder and Level 3 Certified Sommelier Allison Owen first curates the wines she wants guests to experience before collaborating with newly appointed Executive Chef Dave McDonald to develop seasonal dishes that highlight the unique character of each varietal. Every menu item is accompanied by two recommended wine pairings, inviting guests to explore how different wines can completely transform the same dish.

“We’ve never wanted to be a restaurant that simply serves wine,” said Owen, the president of Turks Head Wines, which opened its initial retail space, The Bottle Shoppe, in October 2023. The full tasting room and wine lounge, at 120 N. Church St., officially opened later on Aug. 29, 2024. “Wine has always been the starting point. Most restaurants create a dish and then decide which wine pairs best with it. We reverse that process. We begin with the wine and build every plate around it. That’s what makes our wine-first dining experience so unique, and we’re excited to expand it into a complete lunch and dinner destination.”

The new seasonal menus, developed in collaboration with Consulting Chef Jason Cichonski of Ampere Hospitality Group, aim to showcase the winery’s wine-first philosophy through thoughtfully composed dishes designed to elevate Turks Head Wines’ award-winning California wines.

Standouts from the new dinner offerings include:

• Herb Brined Chicken Breast ($28 - white beans, fennel, salsa verde)

  • 2024 Sémillon, Sonoma Valley

  • 2023 BDX Blanc, Wildwood Vineyard, Sonoma Valley

• Confit Duck Leg ($36 - cherry gastrique, beets, black garlic, sunflower crunch)

  • 2022 BDX Reserve, McCoy Vineyard, Fountaingrove District

  • 2023 Merlot, Olson Vineyard, Sonoma Mountain

• Seared Scallop ($26 - watercress, chorizo vinaigrette)

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Suisun Valley

  • 2024 Melon, Alexander Valley

• Sweet Corn Agnolotti ($24 - brown butter, summer squash)

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Big Valley District

  • 2025 The Semi Q White Blend, Sonoma County

• Chilled Shrimp ($21 - cucumber, fennel, nectarine salsa)

  • 2024 Sauvignon Blanc, Ryan’s Vineyard, Napa Valley

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Exposition West, Sonoma Valley

• Heirloom Tomato Salad ($19 - whipped ricotta, almond chimichurri)

  • 2023 Barbera, Sonoma Mountain

  • 2025 Rosé, Sonoma County

Lunch highlights include:

• Porchetta Sandwich ($18 - broccoli rabe, salsa verde, served on ciabatta)

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Suisun Valley

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Exposition East, Sonoma Valley

• Chilled Shrimp Roll ($21 - lemon aioli, pickled fennel, shaved cucumber, served on buttered brioche)

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Suisun Valley

  • 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Exposition East, Sonoma Valley

• Prosciutto Focaccia ($19 - grilled nectarine, whipped ricotta, hot honey, arugula)

  • 2024 Sémillon, Sonoma Valley

  • 2025 Rosé, Sonoma County

Additional offerings include oysters, steak tartare au poivre, seasonal salads, artisan cheeses, and charcuterie.

“Every ingredient on the plate has a purpose,” McDonald said in the release. “We’re not trying to compete with the wine—we’re trying to elevate it. Whether it’s the sweetness of summer corn, the richness of duck, or the brightness of fresh herbs, every flavor is chosen to help tell the story of what’s in the glass.”

With the addition of lunch and dinner service, Turks Head Wines continues to blur the line between winery, restaurant, and wine education, offering a uniquely immersive experience. Additional beverage selections include an array of beers from local breweries such as Levante Brewing, and Turks Head’s take on classic cocktails (Vodka Martini, Negroni, Old Fashioned, Spicy Margarita, and beyond) — as well as non-alcoholic options, including zero-proof wine and beer.

The expanded culinary program marks the next evolution for Turks Head Wines, which has grown into a destination where guests can enjoy curated tastings of their award winning California wines, educational wine classes, seasonal pairing dinners, weekly live music, community events, private celebrations, and private CRU Club membership experiences — all centered around making wine more approachable, engaging, and memorable.

Turks Head Wines sources, produces, and bottles handcrafted Bordeaux-style wines in the heart of Napa, California. The winery’s catalogue of offerings utilize grapes grown in a variety of American Viticultural Areas (AVA) and vineyards, each with their own distinct flavor profiles. Here’s a link to the page on the Turks Head website that features its wines.

The winery’s name and logo pay homage to The Turks Head Tavern, which played a vital role in the early history of West Chester. Locals would refer to where they lived as “near the Turks Head” and the town affectionately took on the same name. Though the original tavern is gone, the winery continues to honor its legacy through the Turks Head Wines brand.

It’s open 4 to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 4 to 10 p.m. Fridays, noon to 10 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 7 p.m. Sundays.

Turks Head Wines are available for purchase at the Bottle Shoppe, located

For more information about private events, tastings, and wine club memberships, fill out the contact form at www.turksheadwines.com.

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Loew Vineyards was one of the wineries feted last month by the Maryland Wineries Association (MWA) and the state’s Department of Agriculture for its important contribution to the diversified and growing industry that exists today.

It was one of six that were recognized — an idea other states would be wise to copy — over an eight-day period by MWA Executive Director Janna Howley, Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Kevin Atticks, and by other political and industry leaders and colleagues.

Here’s coverage from the first one, on July 21, at Basignani Winery.

Dave McIntyre, of the WineLine Substack, provided an excellent summary of all six recognition stops in this story.

As McIntyre noted, Loew Vineyards possesses Maryland wine’s most compelling story, thanks to the family history and to the immersion of Rachel Lipman, who returned in 2018 to help her grandparents, Lois and Bill, manage the business and has made a series of improvements to the venue and the wines while carrying on the tradition of the mead production, which dates back multiple generations.

The Loews purchased a 37-acre parcel in Frederick County in March 1982, planted vines, and by 1986 were selling their first bottles of wine. For multiple decades they have continued to carry forward a family vocation that began in the mid-1800s, in Bursztyn, Poland, when Meilech Löw began making mead and his sons became involved in wine distribution and marketing.

Bill died in 2022, with Rachel then taking over the primary operations and leadership alongside her grandmother at the winery at 14001 Liberty Road, Mt. Airy, located amid a cluster of producers (Black Ankle, Serpent Ridge and Elk Run, the latter recognized on July 22). Loew Vineyards is open noon to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Sundays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.

They began this year by hiring Christian Orr as tasting room manager, Lipman noted in a January 2026 blog post on the website, “allowing us to increase our production bandwidth, focus on new projects, and run our tasting room much more successfully.”

She added in that same post that among her plans for the year were:

• releasing their first kosher mead under the Star-K certification before Passover.

• working on ways to increase traffic to the tasting room

• looking at “elevating our outdoor seating and continuing our efforts to ensure we have new tasting space(s) for customers over the next couple of years.”

• bringing in more private events

A late addition to the list was the mid-July reception, an MWA initiative to recognize the hard work the pioneer families “have undertaken to support everyone who has come after them, and to also say thank you for being the industry leaders to so many wineries.”

Here’s a link to the coverage the winery posted on its Facebook page.

Asked about those early days, Lois sent back this answer to the Wine Classroom in an email:

“My husband, William, was the driving force behind the vineyard and winery. Prior to the Holocaust, his family had had several prominent meaderies (honey wineries) in Austria and Poland. While Bill worked in the States as an electrical engineer, he also made wine for our family and friends. As we planned for retirement, we bought the 37-acre parcel of land in Frederick County and planted our first grape vines in 1982. The intention was to sell grapes to nearby wineries. While agriculture presents many challenges, the next steps brought us into another dimension. When we decided to become a winery, the paperwork saga began — federal, state, county and even local voting district requirements. Some of the antiquated forms and laws had not been updated since Prohibition was lifted. (One example: Customers were not allowed to sit at tables to sample wines because this infringed on the rights of restaurants.) We soon found that the best solution was to band together with other wineries to work with our government officials. We also found support from the Department of Agriculture and the University of Maryland. Over time, Maryland wineries have gained recognition for the high quality of their products and for their contribution to the tourism industry. We have increased from an undaunted group of eight pioneers to more than 75 wineries at this time.”

Lipman, who has been handling the winemaking and vineyard over the past several years in addition to having a big hand in managing the business, is also one of the wine community’s most consistent bloggers. So often, there are blog tabs on a winery website where nothing has been written in months, or years. At Loew, there already are eight posts on the site from 2026, all conveying Lipman’s positive outlook and personality while giving customers plenty of information on the goings-on there.

You can find the blog at this link.

The July post segues well into my question to her about the challenges she sees on the horizon, in that she formally introduced Sam Alder, her boyfriend, who joined Loew Vineyards this year to work with her to manage both the winery and business operations. He earned his Master's degree in Oenology and Viticulture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, worked at wineries throughout Israel, and most recently made wine in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the post.

“My grandmother, my family, and I are incredibly grateful to have Sam as part of our team,” she wrote in the blog post. “As we look toward the future of Loew Vineyards, having a trusted partner to help steward the winery means more than I can express. In many ways, it reminds me of how my grandparents built this winery together—each bringing different strengths while working toward the same goal. Just like my grandparents had each other, I have Sam.”

And with that, someone else to handle the challenges that await.

Asked about those, she responded this way in an email: “The industry has changed a LOT over the past 20 years. It seems to be changing at an even quicker rate since COVID. Our business has often pivoted over the past 10 years to adapt to the market changes. We’ve outgrown many aspects of the business since my grandparents first started the winery in 1982. Some changes have been difficult, whereas others have been easy. I think one of our biggest, and ongoing, challenges is marketing. We make fantastic wines and honey wines, but getting people to learn about us remains one of the toughest challenges. We have goals to renovate and update our tasting room experience for customers, but these updates require time, which is also a challenge. At least it’s certain that we will continue and keep moving forward with all of our new projects and endeavors as a winery.”

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Generally, coverage of the winemakers summits involves sending a question or two to the participants, and wrapping their responses into a story.

Last year, the questions were 1) What makes East Coast winemakers optimistic? and 2) What do those in the wine industry see as future challenges? The 2024 question was similar, asking a response on what has East Coast wineries optimistic and concerned about the future. Just fyi, the links are to stories all behind paywalls.

This year, the question sent to a mix of the participants and guests focused more on their takeaways from the event, held Tuesday at Black Ankle Vineyards.

Twelve wineries from seven states participated in the open tasting that ran close to six hours, with another two dozen guests from the wine community tasting the wines and, in some cases, offering their comments or asking questions.

Those in the room on Tuesday offered these thoughts in the first 24 hours after they left Mt. Airy, Maryland, and headed home.

Julia Alvarez-Perez, winemaker and co-owner, Usonia Wine, Ovid, NY: It's not often I get to taste so many East Coast wines, so it really was a treat. It's obviously a challenging time to grow grapes — or anything for that matter — anywhere, but one of my takeaways is the strength of the community that already exists amongst local wineries, and the potential for more collaboration amongst east coast wineries. It seems we're all dealing with similar challenges — humidity, rain, unpredictable weather patterns, spotted lanternflies, and a challenging market — but I always feel better about the future of our industry when I meet up with other growers and winemakers. So thank you for putting this together! I also enjoyed hearing about people's experience with Albariño [despite the losses during the frost.] It's a variety that I'm curious about for the Finger Lakes. I think the ability to try out new varieties, be they vinifera or hybrids, is really one of the most exciting parts about growing grapes on the East Coast. We have a lot of freedom [within the constraints of our growing climate and finances] to try out what grows best and what can make the most distinctive wines. This is what gets my husband and I the most excited about the future of East Coast wine. There are no rules, and we are actively writing the next chapter. There's not many places that get to say that!

Zach Waltz, director of operations, Waltz Vineyards Estate Winery, Manheim, PA: A couple things stuck with me. First, harvest timing. Hearing how different winemakers approach picking earlier versus later for the same variety, and how much that decision shifts depending on stylistic goals, was a good reminder of how nuanced that call really is. That’s the kind of judgment you either learn through years of experience or from someone who can pass down that knowledge.

Second, and maybe more than anything, the openness. People are genuinely candid about their decisions in the vineyard and the cellar, including the ones that didn’t work out. That kind of shared, lived experience is more valuable than anything in a book or a journal article. The mid-Atlantic doesn’t have centuries of winemaking history to draw on, so learning directly from each other is how we close that gap. I’ve been coming to these summits for close to a decade now, and the jump in overall wine quality over that stretch is obvious. It’s a genuinely encouraging trend, and it reinforces that the mid-Atlantic is a serious quality winemaking region, one that keeps getting better.

Matt Meineke, founder and winemaker of M Cellars, Geneva, Ohio: Good morning and thanks a lot for having us along! We had a great time. It’s a region I’m not sure I would have found or explored without it. Looks like a lot to see and do considering the Civil War sites, Baltimore, D.C., and other wineries to check out. Frederick was really neat little town as well.

The meeting is definitely top of mind and still is. The perspective of other winemakers is interesting. We try to take a pretty gentle approach to what we do and hearing from others that do the opposite and tasting their wines was really cool, and I really liked some of the wines that were made in the opposite style in the winery. The vineyard layout and topography in the region was ambitious being on the steep hills. Again really enjoying the region’s wines from that terroir. I think it’s probably a bit warmer than us, as the success from Petit Verdot was well stated amongt the group. My biggest takeaway was there is really some great wines being made in the eastern U.S., and people need to know about it.

Melissa Aellen, of Linganore Winecellars, Mt. Airy, MD, and Simple Theory Wine Co., Frederick, MD, a former participant who was a pourer this year: In the 2026 mid-Atlantic winemaker’s summit, there was significantly more talk of processing — and the intriguing diversity therein. From gentle scooping of must over fermenting reds for soft extraction to grinding the skins to bits therefore intensifying tannins and mouthfeel, wines of all styles showed the high caliber of East Coast wines. The idea of more relaxed processing was a reoccurring theme, and it showed through in the wine. Less manipulation and more vineyard forward practices in the cellar allowed the terroir and regional variation to shine, especially while trying many Cabernet Francs in a row. As our climate continues to shift into a warmer environment, these winemakers have adapted quickly to the changes allowing the fruit to show through instead of heavy-handed winemaking styles. I left thinking about how doing less (with the right fruit) might, in fact, just do more for the wine.

John Cifelli, general manager, Unionville Vineyards, Ringoes, NJ: It was a terrific gathering with broad regional coverage of wineries, many of which traveled great distance. Having the chance to interface and present in front of peers and a wide cast of wine media was a valuable opportunity. Understanding the challenges and successes of peers across the mid-Atlantic and northeast in an intimate, conversational setting is very helpful in advancing the mission of fine winemaking on the East Coast and beyond.

Molly Kelly, enology extension educator, Penn State University, and recent winner of the Wine Grape Productivity Award from the Atlantic Seaboard Wine Association (AWSA )and the Distinguished Service Award from the American Society for Enology & Viticulture (ASEV): The information shared among winemakers and attendees was so valuable. The winemakers weren’t guarding techniques or holding back details rather, they explained exactly how each wine was made, including any lessons learned. This speaks to the camaraderie that this event encourages. As a result, everyone’s wine gets better. It was encouraging to see young [and older] winemakers excited about making wine using various techniques (sometimes experimental) from not-so-familiar East Coast varieties (Marsanne, Roussanne, Saperavi, Tempranillo and Vermentino).

If this was a glimpse of where winemaking and wines are heading, what did it show?

I was encouraged to see the enthusiasm that these winemakers have for improving wine quality across the board, despite the low/no alcohol trend. I see the industry attracting younger winemakers as they see the potential to make great wines on the East Coast, being led by veteran winemaker wisdom. This will keep us moving long into the future. I think that we are in good hands!

Stephanie Pence, co-owner and winemaker/vineyard manager, Brix & Columns Vineyards, McGaheysville, VA: I realize I was probably one of the newest winemakers there, so I have a lot to learn. The session was very informative for me and I learned much from the event.

Some of my top takeaways are:

• I thought it was interesting how one of the wineries (Black Ankle) focuses predominantly on mouthfeel. That is part of what goes into my wine making decision, fruit characteristics is my top, so it was interesting to gain another perspective. Also how intentional they are in finding new barrels that added mouthfeel but not wood. I often think of this with neutral barrels.

• The discussion about earlier harvest and the use of “verde” (green or unripe) wine to add acid instead of citric addition. I would like to explore this more.

• Also, the discussion of sweetening with wine where the fermentation was intentionally stopped early to preserve the residual sugar for additional sweetening of other wines. We have done this with a Petit Manseng that we were not able to get all the way dry and added that to our off-dry SKUs. The addition was intentional, but the intent was to go all the way dry. Maybe there is some thought to keeping a sweeter version on hand to add sugar when needed.

I have been very active in our state vineyard and winery associates but have not ventured out much beyond our borders. It was great to be with other East Coast winemakers and taste their products, learn about their practices and the similarities we all face. The wines were delicious.

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Bringing the 10th winemakers summit to Black Ankle Vineyards on Tuesday made sense for several reasons.

For all of the consternation over the sobering trends surrounding wine, and frankly all alcohol, Black Ankle serves as a reminder that there’s still an audience willing to invest their time and money at one of the country’s top wineries (see any number of the Daily Meal’s “101 Best Wineries in America” lists that ran from 2011 to 2017). The venue and the quality of the wines make it a “must visit” destination, and owners Sarah O’Herron and Ed Boyce plan to expand the experience when they open Live Edge Vineyards, about 20 miles to the southwest of Black Ankle, next summer.

Two, it’s a Maryland winery, and it was the Maryland Wineries Association (MWA) that stepped forward a handful of years ago to lend its support to what’s pretty much been an annual event, minus the COVID years, securing grants to fund the lunches and morning coffee and provide pourers for the 40 to 50 people who attend. Trying to get my home state of Pa. to do the same, to this point, has been close to impossible.

Three, Boyce was one of the participants in the first one, in April of 2017 at Waltz Vineyards Estate Winery in Lancaster County, so it was appropriate to welcome back he and several others – Carl Helrich from Cadenza and Zach Waltz, both from Pennsylvania, winemaker Austin Sterling and GM John Cifelli from Unionville Vineyards in New Jersey, and Phineas Deford from Boordy Vineyards in Maryland, who helped pour after his winery hosted summits eight and nine.

Also pouring were Janna Howley, of Cultivate + Craft and the executive director of the MWA, and Melissa Aellen, the president of the MWA who is connected to Linganore Winecellars and Simple Theory Wines.

More than 40 people attended, including 12 winemakers from seven states — Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — along with a couple of dozen others connected to the wine industry, from organization leaders to those involved with enology and viticulture to writers and bloggers.

Here’s the list of participants, all of whom were invited because of the excellent work they are doing with their wines:

MARYLAND

Sarah O’Herron/Ed Boyce, Black Ankle Vineyards, Mt. Airy, host

Mark Giganti, 61 Vineyard, Damascus

Dave Collins, BIG Cork Vineyards, Rohrersville

NEW JERSEY

Austin Sterling, Unionville Vineyards, Ringoes

PENNSYLVANIA

Carl Helrich, Cadenza Vineyards, Brogue

Zach Waltz, Waltz Vineyards Estate Winery, Manheim

NORTH CAROLINA

Elizabeth Higley, Windsor Run Cellars, Hamptonville

OHIO

Matt Meineke, M Cellars, Geneva

VIRGINIA

AJ Greeley, Hark Vineyards, Earlysville

Stephanie Pence, Brix & Columns Vineyards, McGaheysville

Corry Craighill, Septenary Winery (Greenwood) and Valley Road Vineyards (Afton)

NEW YORK

Julia Alvarez-Perez, Usonia Wine, Ovid

Dr. Joe Fiola, of Maryland Extension and a solid winemaker in his own right, was the emcee for the almost six-hour-long program.

The original idea was to put representatives from 12 Eastern wineries into the same room in an open-tasting format that would help lift the profile of the wineries and winemakers on this coast, thanks to the writers who attended. It was also designed to give them a chance to taste each other’s wines in a relaxed setting, talk about their winemaking styles and the work that was done in the vineyard and cellar to produce them, show off the diversity of the coast’s grapes and wines, and give others in the industry a chance to sample them.

It has grown from the original meeting of about 20 in Waltz’s barrel room to nearly 50 people, all associated in some way with the wine industry.

The lineup

Morning

Waltz: Kissel Valley Blanc de Noir

M Cellars: Brut Rose- Texsom International Judges Selection, Ohio Wine Competition Gold

Usonia Wine: Soon Different 2025, a blend of 50% Regent, 30% Aravelle, 20% Aromella

Windsor Run: 2025 Seyval Blanc

Hark: 2024 Roussanne

Unionville: 2024 Marsanne/Roussanne

Valley Road: 2024 Albariño

61 Vineyard: 2024 Albarino

Brix & Columns: 2024 Viognier

Big Cork: 2025 Vermentino

Black Ankle: 2025 LEV Reserve Chardonnay

Waltz: 2023 Old Line Chardonnay (Judgment of Davis finalist)

Afternoon

M Cellars: Saperavi Reserve

Cadenza: 2023 Cadenza Vineyards Forza (Petit Verdot 47%, Merlot 27%, Cab Franc 13%, Cab Sauv 13%)

Windsor Run: Cellar Select Series Red blend (2024 Tannat 50%, 2024 Petit Verdot 25%, 2023 Cab Sauvignon 25%) from Shadow Springs Vineyard

61 Vineyard: 2024 Rolling Ridge Red Blend (50% Cabernet Franc, 30% Merlot, 20% Petit Verdot)

Brix & Columns: 2024 Cabernet Franc

Hark: 2023 Cabernet Franc

Usonia: 2024 New Suns Red, Cabernet Franc

Valley Road: 2023 Cabernet Franc

Unionville: 2024 Silver Lining Cab Franc

Big Cork: 2024 Tempranillo

Black Ankle: 2023 LEV Canopy (Cab Sauvignon-based Bordeaux blend)

Cadenza: 2023 Cadenza Vineyards Cadenza (Cab Sauv 46%, Cab Franc 24%, Merlot 20%, Petit Verdot 10%)

Having last attended the first one, Helrich was asked what’s changed since then.

“The first one, if I remember, had a lot of well-known producers producing wines at a high level,” he said in an email. “Today, this event showed a wider range of producers, a lot of whom were totally unfamiliar to me and yet were producing wines at surprising levels of quality. The saying, ‘a rising tide raises all ships,’ seems to obviously apply to what's going on. Twenty years ago, there were only a handful of wineries pushing the envelope on quality, and now it seems that good wines can be found where you least expect it and much more consistently across the board.”

More on this tomorrow.

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Things, for the most part, have settled back into a routine at the Wine School of Philadelphia following a winter and spring that brought significant coverage to a lawsuit from the city’s other prominent wine educator.

Registration has begun for its upcoming courses, including the Accelerated Sommelier Course (summer) that begins on Aug. 17 (followed by an instructor certification the week after), with Its core sommelier course (fall semester) set to take place on Sundays in October and November, plus tasting classes that dot the schedule into the new year. The Wine School of Philadelphia, an independent wine education institution founded by Keith Wallace in 2001, is located at 109 S. 22nd St.

It has been back to business since May 26, when a federal judge denied an emergency legal effort to force the Wine School of Philadelphia to stop using the name “Philly Wine School,” a name the court found has been publicly associated with the school since at least 2005. Judge Joshua D. Wolson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued the 36-page ruling, denying a motion for preliminary injunction filed by PhillyWine LLC, a local provider of Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) courses.

Following the ruling, Wallace wrote a statement in his newsletter, saying he felt “vindicated” by the ruling, adding that “the court has now rejected the attempt to stop us from using a name by which students, media, and the public have known us for many years.”

While the dispute festered for years and then gained momentum (and eventually public scrutiny) for around 18 months, Wallace told the Wine Classroom in a late June interview that he was “blindsided” by the lawsuit, “because I actively worked to make sure it didn’t happen.

“Look, It’s been clear for over a decade, and actually their own lawsuit actually acknowledged that several of them have been actively working to discredit my school for at least a decade, that’s directly from their own filings. So we never just badmouthed them. We always kept our distance. … We’ve been both been around for 20 years. It takes a little bit of work not to get angry with somebody who’s actively trying to screw with you, but, but I’ve run a business for a long time, and the rule of thumb is, you don’t want to sue anybody, because you‘re never going to resolve anything. Ever.

“Especially, you know, we’re not talking about multimillion dollar companies here We’re talking about two companies that maybe on a good year might pull in a half a million dollars, at most.”

Both businesses have been around for several decades, with Neal Ewing’s Wine Services becoming a WSET-approved program provider in 1999 and the Wine School of Philadelphia opening two years later. At some point, friction developed between the two schools, but they continued to co-exist without any legal entanglements for several decades. Both have seen graduates go on to become sommeliers, winemakers, and industry leaders, including in the regional wine industry.

In 2022, Ewing retired, and Noelle Allen and Dr. Matt Kirkland took over the business associated with Ewing’s WSET program. Allen is a former Wine School of Philadelphia student and event planner.

Wallace runs the Wine School of Philadelphia with his wife, Alana Zerbe.

Their dispute on the Wine School’s use of Philly Wine School spilled into the courtroom and the media in December 2025. Per a Philadelphia Inquirer story, Wallace obtained a trademark for the name “Philly Wine School,” which court records show he used to help suspend PhillyWine’s Instagram account while attempting to take down its website. PhillyWine countered with its lawsuit in February 2026, alleging Wallace and Zerbe “made it their mission to destroy” PhillyWine “by attempting to erase its existence” from the internet.

The lawsuit contended that the fight over the “Philly Wine School” name had severely crimped its ability to communicate with students, with Kirkland noting that the attendance and enrollment at PhillyWine — which has found a permanent home at Rittenhouse Square’s Fitler Club — has been below average since December, the Inquirer reported.

“I think there needs to be clarity in naming and clarity for students so they sign up for the classes they think they’re signing up for,” Kirkland said in February. He offered the Inquirer no comment on the ruling.

In addition to courses it lists on its fall schedule at the Fitler Club, PhillyWine holds a number of online classes and several in-person and hybrid classes, including at Drexel, Northampton Community College and Delaware County Community College.

The Wine School of Philadelphia uses one full-timer (Zerbe, the director of wine education) and two part-timers instructors for its variety of classes, which includes online and in person sommelier courses.

Wallace said the school canceled one semester of its academic programs for sommeliers, partly to shield students from the controversy but also due to the fallout from the lawsuit itself. After The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the lawsuit, enrollment for the following semester was about 50% below the school’s typical level, he said.

While a couple of students left the program because of the lawsuit, Wallace said that overall the support they’ve gotten has been “fantastic.”

What’s next is anyone’s guess. A recent summation on the National Wine School website said that the “case may continue,” adding that the “ruling is an important public development in the case.”

Meanwhile, Wallace called it “huge win” and said during the June interview that the ruling is “basically saying that nothing of their case likely will succeed in a trial. So they got knocked completely down. But now they just appealed it.

“They’re going to keep going,” he added. “It may be another two or three years of court, despite the [ruling] that they have no case.”

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Six Eighty Cellars in the Fingers Lakes is getting a new winemaker.

Phil Plummer is wrapping up his tenure at Montezuma Winery & Hidden Marsh Distillery in Seneca Lake, New York, and will start his new job down the road at Six Eighty on Wednesday, Aug 5.

He’ll replace Ian Barry, who has been doing winemaking double duty at Six Eighty Cellars and Barry Family Cellars.

Six Eighty Cellars is owned by Melissa and David Pittard and was founded in 2020 and opened its tasting room three years later.

As for Plummer, he has been making wine in New York’s Finger Lakes region for over a decade, spending most of those years at Montezuma Winery, where he has served as head winemaker/director of winemaking since 2013. Michael Reidy is listed on the website as the head winemaker and Jeff Harvey as the winemaker.

He said he was “chomping at the bit” to get going.

“As for why I’m heading there, it’s pretty simple: this is my dream job. As I’ve developed as a winemaker, I’ve learned that my favorite things to make are the unconventional, small-lot wines that are totally unlike anything I’ve ever had before,” he said in an email. “This is an opportunity to focus on those sorts of wines and dive into details that I don’t always have time to explore while managing everything going on here at Montezuma.”

Montezuma Winery posted a goodbye to Plummer on its website earlier Saturday, noting the 16 years he’s worked there and his growth as a winemaker that has left “a mark on not just our story but also the Finger Lakes wine industry. Recently known for his wines that color a little outside of the lines such as our Montezuma Voleur series or Idol Ridge Local Culture series, Phil also created a portfolio of award-winning wines along with the ones you know and love. To say he's capable of producing a range of wines is an understatement.”

Barry told winecharacters.com that he was beginning to feel burnt out in 2020 after 23 years in the industry. It was a call from David Pittard around then that eventually led to Barry joining the team and remaining in the business.

“It’s all estate,” he told the Wine Classroom of the grapes that Six Eighty Cellars sources. “We have a vineyard here with some of the conventional grape varieties that you’ll find in the Finger Lakes … Riesling and Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc, but we also have Gruner Veltliner here, we have a pretty young planting of Gamay Noir, we have a really nice planting of Chenin Blanc that’s kind of coming into its own now, so Six Eighty we kind of view as almost like an incubator, like a place to experiment with different varieties, different techniques. Definitely leans more toward the minimal intervention end of things, although we kind of do what we need to do to make good wine in a given year, but we do try to use as few interventions as possible.”

Six Eighty Cellars, at 3050 Swick Road in Ovid, New York, opens daily at 11 a.m.

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