Over a Barrel: Loudoun County Winemakers Make the Most of a Challenging Year
/COVID slowed, but didn’t stop VA wine country
By Matt Yan and Susan Able | Photography by Jennifer Chase | From the Edible DC Summer 2020 Issue
In Virginia, winemaking has a 400-year history, harkening back to colonial times. In this century, Virginia wine has earned its place on the map, producing award-winning wines and building a strong local following.
The nearly 50 wineries that make up the Loudoun Wineries Association (LWA), within easy driving distance of DC, have faced much more than unpredictable weather in this time of COVID-19 shutdowns and quarantines. Yet the limits, they say, have inspired them to find new ways to connect with their customers and with each other. We talked to several winemakers and vintners to find out what summer looks like in the local vineyards.
For Cori Phillips, LWA board vice-chair and owner of The Wine Reserve at Waterford, the pandemic demanded a new business outlook and the flexibility to be creative with ways to keep their customers and guests engaged, even if they couldn’t visit.
“COVID-19 allowed us to take a step back and think of new ways to connect with our customers and guests.”
The team at Stone Tower enjoying some down time with their wine.
“COVID-19 allowed us to take a step back and think of new ways to connect with our customers and guests,” says Phillips. Her goal became to keep guests close to the winery during the shutdowns and she decided to involve their customers as partners in supporting the winery and its workers.
Phillips and her team developed what they called “Wineade” Stands, a riff on a lemonade stand. The Wineade Stands—where people had the opportunity to buy staff shout-outs at $5 increments—offered a way to connect the staff and the customers while providing a way to ensure staff were still paid.
While they have since been allowed to slowly reopen, The Wine Reserve at Waterford continues to ensure that social distancing is maintained with customers seated outdoors and spread out around their 20-acre property.
The LWA’s main goal is to promote the Loudon County wine community with events such as the Loudoun Wine Awards. With the continued rise of COVID-19, an added focus of the LWA is communication, so members can receive information about matters like reopening as well as shared guidance and ideas from other members.
According to Phillips, the association assisted its members with information concerning PPP loans and local grants like the Tourism and Hospitality Relief Fund, which was put together by the Visit Loudoun Foundation.
“The big focus for us is really fostering our community and giving a space for [our members] to connect with one another,” says Phillips. “If we can get through this, we are going to be stronger on the other side.”
As of June 12, Loudoun County had entered Phase Two of reopening, and though some restrictions had been lifted, wineries in Loudoun County still continued to take precautions.
At Stone Tower Winery in Leesburg, Lacey Huber and her family had invested years and resources to developing their own foothold on Virginia winemaking, and they—like so many other wineries in the LWA—were forced to pivot.
The Hubers started Stone Tower Winery with a twofold mission: to create a world-class wine directly from their property in Leesburg and to connect people with the land, enhancing the community they serve.
“We have connected with our fellow wineries in a bigger way than ever. It’s been an incredible sense of community––we’re all in this together.”
According to Huber, maintaining the sense of community that Stone Tower had already created was most important. For the past two-and-a-half months, they have offered virtual tasting flights every Sunday on Facebook Live with four wines in a flight, all focused on a specific theme, such as a flight of VA rosé wines an all-estate flight.
“It’s really cool to interact with folks virtually––it’s my favorite part of the week,” says Huber, who is vice president of Stone Tower Winery. “We can have that sense of community in this virtual space and re-create what we are able to do here at the winery.”
The pandemic has prompted Stone Tower to connect with other Virginia wineries, creating a sense of camaraderie in the county’s wine industry.
“We have connected with our fellow wineries in a bigger way than ever. It’s been an incredible sense of community––we’re all in this together,” Huber says. “All of the problems and challenges we’ve had, they’re not unique.”
Aimee Henkle, who co-owns The Vineyards & Winery at Lost Creek with her husband, is chair of the LWA board. According to Henkle, the LWA’s work focuses on three areas: promotion of Loudoun County wineries and the area, educational efforts to ensure that the best vineyard practices are implemented and a celebration of the Loudoun wineries community.
Within the Loudoun community, Henkle says, each winery offers a distinctive hospitality experience.
“Our vineyards have this expanse of experiences, whether it’s for a family, for date nights, for foodies or dog lovers––we’ve got that all here,” she says. “You have Stone Tower Winery that [looks like] something right out of Napa or Sonoma, then you have Zephaniah Farm Vineyard, a quaint, old farmhouse winery that’s been in the family for the last five generations.”
Despite the diverse nature of the vineyards and their hospitality offerings, all share what Phillips and Henkle describe as a common pursuit to make great wine.
“We’re seeing a lot of great Cabernet Francs, Petit Mansengs and Vidal Blancs. 868 Winery’s Vidal Blanc even won the Governor’s Cup this year,” Phillips says. “It’s just incredible because we definitely have strengths, but there’s also a lot of room for creativity.”
Jeremy Zimmerman, sommelier and director of hospitality at Stone Tower.
Wineries like Stone Tower experiment by using French grape varietals, selecting clones to best match their site. Through their careful work, the team ultimately creates a wine with lots of restraint and elegance, reminiscent of the best wines of France but still characteristically Virginian.
Despite the challenges brought upon by COVID-19, people like Huber and Jeremy Zimmerman, director of hospitality at Stone Tower and a certified sommelier, still believe that the best is yet to come.
“The Hubers have been blessed with a beautiful property that is really well suited for quality wine production,” he says. “Their primary focus was not to find the most beautiful land and put a winery there––once they realized the land’s potential to make high quality wine, that was the goal.”
Like the other wineries in the LWA, Stone Tower’s mission echoes the sentiments of Phillips and Henkle: to make world-class Virginia wine, and as the county reopens it seems that industry is still on the rise.
“We’ve had some really fascinating people from the wine world come here,” she says. “VA wine country feels like Napa back in the ’70s, you really have this sense of wine industry that’s on the edge of greatness, and this setback won’t stop us.”
For more information about visiting vineyards in Loudoun County, VA, go to visitloudoun.org and for more information on the Loudoun Wineries Association, loudounwine.org
