True Heritage is bringing Virginia’s wine to a national stage—without a tasting room.
Winemaker Emily Pelton checks her grapes.
Photography by Tyler Darden
When you picture a Virginia winery, you probably imagine rolling hills of grapes surrounding an attractive, welcoming tasting room packed with bottles—maybe with a food truck out front and a picnic area or large event space nearby.
George Hodson and Emily Pelton aren’t making that kind of winery.
George Hodson and Emily Pelton in the barrel room.
Instead, the siblings are taking Virginia wine out of the tasting room and into the grocery store with the launch of True Heritage, a wine brand that aims to make wine from Virginia more available and affordable to a wider wine-buying audience.
Hodson and Pelton are experienced in the traditional ways of Virginia wine. Their family owns Veritas Vineyards and Winery, where Hodson is the CEO and Pelton is the winemaker, and the pair launched Flying Fox Vineyard with their family just last year. But they’ve come to realize that the very attributes that make a winery like Veritas so beguiling to visitors—the attentive staff, beautiful tasting room, and portfolio of wines that includes everything from sparkling to dessert varieties—also limit opportunities for the business. Doing everything not only requires huge overhead, but means there isn’t room to do a lot of anything—they can’t produce enough of any variety to sell it in the quantities required by grocery stores, which is where many wine drinkers do their weekly grocery and wine shopping. It keeps Virginia wine in the “special experience” category, instead of something consumers can toss in their cart and pop open to pair with leftovers.
So, in a big change from the way wine is usually sold and marketed in Virginia, True Heritage doesn’t have a tasting room. Instead, the wines are available online, in grocery and larger wine retail stores, and in select restaurants. “This is what we saw as the next step for us and for Virginia,” says Pelton. “To grow production that could move more into the marketplace and out of the tasting room model, so that we have both layers.” True Heritage aims to be that delicious but affordable bottle you buy at Wegman’s, even if you’ve never set foot in a Virginia winery.
Fruit fermenting prior to pressing.
Harvest interns emptying a tank.
Filling barrels.
Further, Hodson and Pelton are limiting the offerings from True Heritage. While Veritas produces a wide range of wines, “True Heritage is just going to have a little bit more of a pinpoint focus,” says Pelton. True Heritage’s first release includes just four wines: a chardonnay, a viognier, a petit verdot, and a petit verdot reserve. The idea is to focus on the varieties that best represent the Keswick area, which is part of the historic Monticello American Viticultural Area (grape-growing region).
Bottled petit verdot, chardonnay, and viognier.
To that end, rather than sourcing grapes from a single vineyard, True Heritage is using fruit grown on a couple of historic farm estates in the Keswick area. Currently the pair is working with Ben Coolyn and Castalia farms, and they have partnerships with other nearby estates in the works. Labels on the 2017 chardonnay, viognier, and petit verdot bear Castalia’s name, but as the region’s reputation grows, the farm-specific labeling may fade. And, because the Monticello AVA, established in 1984, encompasses a variety of microclimates, Hodson would love to see it divided to create a focused wine region in the Keswick area, drawing more attention to the regional name.
Similarly, Hodson is encouraging local producers to agree on a style and blend of grapes to create a signature local white blend for the area. Virginia wines have been circling around this idea of signature grapes and styles for awhile, but still don’t have the uniformity of style you see in places like France and Spain. For example, petit manseng, a grape native to southwest France, has found success in Virginia’s humid climate and is growing in popularity here (a petit manseng from Horton Vineyards won the 2019 Governor’s Cup). However, winemakers make it in a variety of styles, from bone dry to noticeably sweet, and there aren’t yet consistent labeling conventions to let consumers know what they’re getting.
Both the focus on region-specific labeling and the desire to create consistent regional styles are moves toward the place-specific wine styles that have made the wine regions of Europe famous and trusted by consumers. What makes you grab a bottle off the shelf isn’t the grape or the winery, it’s the familiar regional designation, like Côtes-du-Rhone or Bourgogne. This flips the way most American wine consumers think about wine, and it’s a shift Hodson and Pelton hope to encourage with True Heritage. Instead of buying chardonnay, for example, they hope you’ll look for a Keswick white.
Pelton in the lab.
This also allows Hodson and Pelton to place their wines in a larger regional context, as part of Southern food culture, not just Virginia wine. “We want you to be able to go to the store and get a Virginia wine and have it with your fried chicken or whatever local dish that you and your family have grown up with,” says Pelton. It’s important to her to not only put Virginia wines on the map, but to relate them to other agricultural products and dishes from the South. “I really want Virginia wine to be relevant,” she says.
In this context, then, it makes sense that Pelton’s winemaking technique is fairly hands off. “I have really straightforward winemaking techniques,” she says. “I’m doing my best to show off what I already have, not an idea of what I think it should be. … I really want to show off how the fruit expresses itself here in Virginia.”
Grapes ready for harvest.
Pelton uses less oak than some of her contemporaries and often has her grapes picked earlier, putting her firmly in the Old World camp—someone who takes inspiration from the traditional grape-growing countries of Europe. She enjoys classic white wine styles like Chablis, which shows in the refreshing True Heritage viognier; it has the grape’s signature aromas and flavors of orange blossoms and ripe, juicy peaches. The True Heritage petit verdot tastes of ripe blackberries and plums, and would be right at home with the label’s suggested food pairing of slow-grilled barbecue ribs. The refreshing chardonnay has a barely there hint of oak and a crisp, mouthwatering finish.
So True Heritage may not have a tasting room, but by focusing on wines that exemplify a region’s flavor and retailing them where people regularly shop, Hodson and Pelton aim to have something much bigger: a place in America’s national wine conversation.
Look for True Heritage wines at stores like Total Wine and Wegmans throughout the southeastern United States, or online at TrueHeritage.com.
This article originally appeared in our Drink 2019 issue.
