Wine

Virginia Wine and the Quality Revolution

- Brian Yost

The cover of the 1996 third edition of Oz Clarke’s The Essential Wine Book contains a photograph of Clarke surrounded by cases of French wine. Based on the cover image, it is little wonder that 115 of the 320 pages were dedicated to France. This “indispensable guide to the wines of the world” allocated 16 pages to California and just two covered the entire East Coast. Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia were lumped together in a single summarizing paragraph.

The year Clarke’s third edition was published was the same year I arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day after the moving truck was unloaded, I visited Oakencroft Vineyard and Winery a few miles west of the city. I remember my first taste of Virginia wine quite vividly. The wines were palatable, but the reds lacked complexity and the whites were a bit too acidic. Despite this less-than-auspicious first tasting, I continued to explore Virginia wineries.

I returned periodically to Oakencroft. My final visit was in 2008 shortly before owner Felicia Rogan shuttered her doors after 25 years of wine production. Things had changed during those intervening years. Oakencroft wines, along with those of many other Virginia wineries, had been transformed for the better. In the following years the same quality revolution spread up and down the East Coast from New England to Georgia and inland to the Midwest. What facilitated this turn of events, this sudden raising of the quality bar?