Cellar Stories
Chrisa Giorgi's new wine documentary celebrates Virginia vineyards.
We’ve all heard about California wines, and many have heard of Oregon wines, but Virginia? Virginia wines have a bit of an identity crisis.
“I was in Minneapolis for a wine tasting,” recalls Luca Paschina, president and CEO of Barboursville Vineyards in Barboursville, Va.
“The wine bar had about 40 people and only two people had ever tasted Virginia wines before. Within a three-hour tasting, they had purchased 452 bottles of wine to be shipped to a distributor in Minneapolis. I think the main reason that still happens is simply because of ignorance outside of the Mid-Atlantic. It’s not a bad term, people just don’t know yet about Virginia wines.”
Paschina is one of several people featured in a new documentary, “We the Wine People” by Chrisa Giorgi. Paschina’s wine, the 2021 Octagon, a Bordeaux-style red blend, was recently given a perfect score in a blind test by Xavier Thuizat, Best Sommelier of France. But, even with praise-worthy wine, it was that ignorance about the state’s wines that led him to participate in the documentary.
“Virginia is a big state,” Giorgi says. “We had to cover all 10 geographic regions and, because I’m a wine nerd, I wanted to experience all the different climactic conditions. It’s so diverse, it’s incredible. From inception to delivery, the film took me about nine months, just like a baby.”
One of the lesser-known regions is south of Richmond, near the North Carolina border. That’s the location of Rosemont Vineyards, a family-run vineyard next to Lake Gaston. The vineyard grows Cabernet Franc — the top grape in the state — as well as some other reds and hybrids such as Chambourcin, that makes a bright fuschia, dry rosé.
“When Chrisa came and had this idea about wanting to do the documentary, well, we’re always looking for better ways to tell our story,” Rosemont’s Aubrey Rose says. “We don’t get the recognition that someone from the Charlottesville area gets. We thought it was really important to be able to tell the story that there are other people making wine in Virginia.”
For Giorgi, the documentary was about more than featuring lesser-known wine regions. A former journalist in her native Greece, she moved to Baltimore, Md. 12 years ago and fell in love with learning about wine. She realized that traditional wine education lacked a link to the importance of the environment and began making documentaries about the world of wine through her company, Wine Cellar Stories.
“My wine documentaries are always talking about agriculture, viticulture, and it is all dependent on weather and the climate,” Giorgi says. “Wine is a gateway to environmentalism. That’s what fuels this whole process.”
Giorgi says she was pleasantly surprised at the camaraderie of Virginia’s wine community.
“I was surprised by the depth of Virginia wine history — it goes back to the first settlers in the 1600s — but also how wine makers stay with one another and help one another,” says Giorgi. “In a spring frost they’ll be up at two or three in the morning with fires to warm the vines and they’ll be on the phone with one another, commiserating.”
One example of this community is Common Wealth Crush Co. in Waynesboro, co-founded by Ben Jordan and his brother, Tim, along with Patt Eagan and Lee Campbell. The company serves as a place where about a dozen producers and 20 to 25 growers can bring their grapes to crush and blend, and to learn. The brothers also have their own small vineyard in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley.
Jordan agrees with Giorgi about the importance of the environment to wine.
“There certainly is a climate threat,” he says. “The weather is getting more erratic, and all farmers face increased risk with that. It’s hard. When the weather changes so drastically year to year these days, there is more risk of crop losses.”
The challenges Virginia winemakers face — climate, remaining overlooked as a whole, even changing national trends in drinking — are compounded by the fact that just 20 years ago or so, Virginia wines were mediocre at best as growers experimented with the best grapes to grow here. For all of these reasons, the Virginia Wine Board, a state-funded group charged with education, research and marketing Virginia wines, agreed to fund the documentary.
“There’s the climate issue, because growing grapes in the Mid-Atlantic is always tricky with humidity, pests and normal plant diseases. And, on the consumer side, not only do people not know we have some really high-quality wines, but if their introduction to Virginia wines was 25 or 30 years ago, they might be pleasantly surprised now,” Megan Seibel, chair of the Virginia Wine Board, says.
Seibel and her husband have their own small vineyard, 15 Peaks, near Roanoke, where the limestone and shale in the soil yields Pinot Grigio and Viognier and other mineral-forward whites, as well as a few red varietals.
Giorgi echoes the idea that Virginia wines are underrated.
“California, Oregon, they take all the attention,” Giorgi says. “With Virginia, I felt inspired because I was getting invited to these wine dinners with blind tastings and the Virginia wines would be more impressive than their French or Italian counterparts. It tickled my curiosity.”
“We the Wine People” is being shown at Second Bottle Monday, Aug. 24. Although that event is sold out, Giorgi says she is working on setting up more viewings, and that the documentary will be distributed this fall through Apple TV and Amazon Prime.