Wait...Wine, from Maryland?

Serious wine lovers know the Burgundy, Bordeaux, Alsace, Chianti, ….the Old World European wine regions of the world. More serious wine lovers know the New World Australian, New Zealand, South American, and Northwest North American coast wines of Napa, Sonoma, Willamette Valley, and the like.

Courtesy of Wine Folly- https://winefolly.com/update/top-wine-regions-of-the-world/

But what about the East Coast? Virginia has been making some headway with a few huge leaders of the pack like Barboursville or King’s Family, but there’s still plenty of farm land to put under vine in both Virginia and Tobacco Coast’s home of Maryland.

To understand why the Chesapeake region is a future wine region, we first need to understand what goes into winemaking.... and more importantly, grape growing.

Great wine is made in the vineyard.

That’s a quote that perhaps you’ve heard of – and I, like many vineyard owners, have to agree. The concept is described similarly by the French word, terroir, which does not directly translate, but essentially encapsulates those environmental factors like climate, weather, soil, humidity, sunlight, etc. that have such a profound effect on grape growing. And in the mind of the French, terroir is the reason behind their beautiful wines.

Now, clearly the terroir in the Chesapeake is much different than Bordeaux.

But does that prohibit the area from making great wine?

Vitis vinifera, the wine grape species, just like every living organism strives to do two things: grow and reproduce. With vines, the growing side is how the vine builds the canopy, or leaves, and the reproduction aspect is producing the grape. Grapes for wine making are best when the vines suffer and focus their energy on that reproduction side. This is why it’s so important to prune, or cut back, the vine.

Pruning ensures that the vines are not growing too fast. This rapid growth of the canopy is called vigor. Having extremely nutrient rich soil, like the Chesapeake Bay means that vines here grow significant vigor, making it more labor intensive, but not impossible, to make great grapes for wine.

The terroir in France includes a lot of chalky, rocky soils proving to be advantageous for grape growing. And while it seems the Maryland and Virginia regions are too nutrient-rich to grow the same quality, this is where the Tobacco Coast comes in.

Here you can see how quickly our vines grow aka the vigor that exists in Maryland soil, meaning we have to prune back and monitor the vines a lot.

In this case, I’m not talking about our specific vineyard, but instead it’s namesake.

You see, many farms up and down the Chesapeake Bay were historically tobacco farms including our own. This is where the area got the Tobacco Coast name. Growing tobacco was a huge cash crop, but it is a very hard crop on the land --- meaning, growing tobacco on our farms and many of the farms around this region actually took a lot of the nutrients out of the soil, making it much more feasible to grow grapes.

So clearly, it’s not impossible. It will just take some time before we catch up to the generations of European families perfecting their wines...stay tuned, more to come!