Is it possible to make a world-class wine in Virginia? Rutger de Vink, of RdV Vineyards in Delaplane, says yes. Now he has to sell it.
Promised Land
RdV Vineyards’ 30,000 vines cover 16 acres in Fauquier County.
The winery at night.
Stairs in the silo lead down to the fermentation room.
Inside the fermentation room.
The vines at RdV Vineyards.
The vineyard’s 30,000 vines cover 16 acres in Fauquier County.
Gabriel Flores, Oscar Vargas, Ezequiel Cortez and Raul Herrera tending to the vines at RdV Vineyards.
Adding new fruiting varieties to a vine through grafting.
Grapes on the vine at RdV Vineyards.
De Vink in his Airstream on the vineyard.
RdV’s two blends, Lost Mountain and Rendezvous.
Vineyard Manager Gabriel Flores with de Vink.
Jim Law, de Vink and Luca Paschina share a bottle at Barboursville Vineyards.
A freshly poured glass of RdV Lost Mountain.
Enter RdV vineyards, in Delaplane, and you’ll travel a long gravel driveway, a barely marked turn off a narrow, winding side road. On this early June morning, it’s so quiet that all you can hear is the twitter of birds and, faintly drifting down from the hillside above where RdV’s permanent team of four vineyard workers is tending to the vines, a tinny chorus of norteño music from a pickup-truck radio. Low-hanging clouds threaten a rain that soon arrives, the latest dousing from a cool, wet summer, and the Blue Ridge foothills roll away, lush and green.
You are here to meet Rutger de Vink, about whom you know only this: Dutch family, international roots, former Marine officer, business-school graduate, refugee from the 9-to-5 grind with private resources backing a young vineyard that, in its first few vintages, has produced some extraordinarily good wines, wines that can hold their own, so you have read, in comparison to some of the best of Napa and Bordeaux.
The 43-year-old de Vink strides in to the vineyard’s cool, airy winery, sun-ruddied and disheveled, in heavy boots and grimy work shirt, his greeting friendly and unassuming. No lord of the manor, de Vink lives nominally in an Airstream on the property but, primarily, it becomes apparent, outdoors in the vineyard itself. He is followed closely by 32-year-old Josh Grainer, a Virginian from New Kent and RdV’s “technical director.” (You’d call him the winemaker, except, says Grainer, “We don’t use the term winemaker here—the wine will make itself. We just have to guide it.”)
Almost immediately they begin talking about the wine, the vines, the weather forecast, the work to be done. And it takes perhaps two minute of listening to realize that you are in the company of people for whom wine is a life-consuming passion, a lived-and-breathed raison d’être .… a devotion.
On RdV’s 16 planted acres are 30,000 vines, a mix of Bordeaux-style grapes, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. And every one of those 30,000 plants receives, says de Vink, its own individual care.
“We know the perfect profile of a plant—the way a perfect plant should look—and we try to replicate it for 30,000 plants,” he says. “The canopy has to be positioned to be a perfect solar panel to capture the sunlight.”
They speak of this process, this extraordinary care, not with weariness but with a reverence, and you sense in neither of them any gratitude for the respite of a rainy day. But, thwarted by the weather, they give themselves over instead to a wide-ranging, hours-long conversation in RdV’s private tasting salon, where their passion reveals itself through a steady procession of bottles—uncorked, breathed, swirled, sampled, discussed, analyzed.
“A great wine,” explains de Vink, swirling the glass in his hand—a compulsive habit, he admits—“has to speak of a place. It can’t be replicated anywhere else. This wine comes from this vineyard.
“And it has to deliver complexity in the glass, so that when you taste the wine, you taste many layers of nuances, and you have to go back to the glass, because the complexity keeps on growing.”
What, really, does any of that mean? This isn’t the language of the something-red-with-dinner drinkers, the cocktail-party Chardonnay consumers that most of us, the majority of the wine-drinking public, are. To understand the story a good wine tells requires years of educating a palate, of days just like this one, tasting and tasting and discussing and appraising and comparing and questioning. “It’s all very complicated to understand,” says de Vink, “until you put the wine in your mouth.”
The story of RdV has been chronicled (“Rock Star,” “Gutsy Gambit,” “Virginia’s Rogue Winemaker”) across multiple publications in the scant two-and-a-half years since the winery’s first vintage was released: former Marine officer, making a success of himself in the boom-boom world of telecom venture capital, wearied of suits and ties and soulless suburbia and living for the weekend. He longed to be outdoors. He longed for work that, like the Marines, wasn’t a job, but a way of life. Drinking Champagne at a New Year’s Eve party, he had an epiphany—“I’ve got to change my life.”
Intrigued by the wine business, he read a lot of books on the subject, called up a Virginia-based expert viticulturist, Lucie Morton, and asked, “Hey, can you make a world-class wine in Virginia?”
Because de Vink likes a challenge, and he doesn’t do things by half measures, he would set himself the ambition of making not just a good wine, not a great Virginia wine, but a world-class wine; a wine that could be, as they say in the business “in the game,” that could earn its place at the table with the best of Bordeaux and Napa.
But Morton’s answer to his question was this: Before you go into the business, you must understand wine. And she sent him to Jim Law. Who sent him away, and sent him away, until finally de Vink managed to beg himself an apprenticeship at Law’s Linden Vineyards in Fauquier County, where Law promptly set the former-Marine and M.B.A. to doing grunt work—cutting the tops off the shoots to control the vigor of the plant.
And de Vink loved it.
During his time at Linden, de Vink joined Law and a group of winemakers on a trip to France, and at Cheval Blanc, where the wine demands more than $1,000 per bottle, he met the vineyard’s consultant, Kees van Leeuwen, and a fast friendship was born. If a great wine is made not by the winemaker but by the land, then what de Vink learned from van Leeuwen is that the best land for wine should be lousy for growing much else. Put simply, the fundamental starting point of making wine is that if you stress a vine by restricting its water, it will focus its energies on the biological imperative to reproduce; it will pour its soul into its fruit, its seed, the grape. To grow a great wine then, particularly in lush, verdant Virginia, you would begin with low-water-holding capacity soil and a steep hillside, where the rain just runs away.
You would begin with land like de Vink eventually found in Delaplane after years of searching, not just in Virginia but also in Sonoma, and Central California, and the Sierra Nevadas: pretty much nothing but a pile of rocks, 18 inches of stony topsoil sitting on a solid wall of granite, where the former owner’s Angus cattle had roamed and the county soil map indicated “not suitable for agriculture.”
With private backing, including from family, he set out to see if he could answer the question he’d posed to Morton. In 2004, he cleared the land. He consulted with experts to lay out the vineyard, to understand its soil composition and microclimates, to prepare its trellising. He planted his grapes. He tended his vines. He waited.
In the fall of 2008, he brought in his first harvest. In November came the first opportunity to taste the wine. De Vink’s technical consultant, Jean-Philippe Roby—a French viticulturist to whom Cheval Blanc’s van Leeuwen had referred de Vink—offered to deliver a sample of that wine into the hands of a fellow Frenchman named Eric Boissenot: one of the most important figures in French wine-making, a quiet unassuming “consultant winemaker” in Bordeaux who supervises the “assemblage,” or blending, that creates some of that region’s most famed wines. (An expertly orchestrated assemblage of a vineyard’s different grape varieties produces a wine of the greatest depth and complexity.)
“C’est un vin du terroir,” came the email from Boissenot. “I do your blend.”
Terroir. A French word with no exact English translation, it carries, in the world of wine, an almost mystically nuanced complexity of meaning. It is terroir that creates a great wine, and, in turn, a great wine expresses its terroir—that sense of place, as de Vink describes it, of that very particular land and the soil in which the grapes grew, but also of the sun and the rain and the microclimate and the infinite variations of a particular growing season. When you taste a wine that fully expresses its terroir, it should say all these things.
That Boissenot had bestowed the distinction of “terroir” upon the first vintage of a new Virginia winery was extraordinary; that he had offered to supervise RdV’s blends was rather like Francis Ford Coppola reading your first script and signing on as director. Even de Vink was taken aback. Boissenot says, “When I tasted the vintage of 2008, I told myself that there was something interesting here, and I did not hesitate.” The well-known British wine critic Jancis Robinson called RdV “Virginia’s new star” and wrote of de Vink in The Financial Times, “I sincerely believe his considerable efforts stand a good chance of putting the state on the world wine map.” The then-winemaker at California’s famed Screaming Eagle Winery & Vineyards advised RdV to set the price at more than $100 dollars a bottle. These were people who owed de Vink no favors. “They wouldn’t stake their reputations on our wines if they didn’t believe they were good,” he says.
Vindicated for his faith in terroir and passionate attention to detail, RdV was in the game.
And then, with the work of years come to its first and rewarding fruition, de Vink was brought up hard by the cold realities of the marketplace. “The world,” he discovered, “has plenty of wine at the high end. It doesn’t need any more.” And it didn’t need, therefore, to sit up and take notice of a newcomer wine, however good, from a state without a solidly established international reputation for exceptional wines. While his 2008 and 2009 vintages sold out (a combined 1,500 cases), with a strong showing from regional customers in particular, de Vink wants to see his wine championed by a San Francisco sommelier, by a New York restaurateur, by a discerning collector who will offer it to friends saying, “Look at what I’ve discovered.” And that’s proving a tougher sell from the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
“I never focused at all on wine marketing,” admits de Vink. “My focus,” he says, in something of an understatement, “was to make a great wine. And I thought by having a non-biased group of people taste it and recognize its quality, we thought it would be automatically accepted in the industry. We didn’t realize how it wasn’t going to be that way. We weren’t anticipating,” says this M.B.A., “that we would have to go out and sell our wine.” It wasn’t until 2011, three years after RdV’s first harvest, that de Vink finally added a marketing specialist to his staff.
Should he have been less surprised? Although it is producing ever better wines in general and some very good wines in particular, Virginia is still a long way from being a byword in the industry for vins du terroir; Molly Choi, executive vice president at Cape Classics, a wine importer in Manhattan, diplomatically speaks of the state as an “up-and-coming” region that “may not yet have gotten that national acceptance.”
De Vink, with the wisdom now won of some painful experience, puts it more candidly. “In Virginia, you’ll hear, ‘Oh yeah, Virginia wines are great, we are up-and-coming,’ but we are drinking our own Kool-Aid. You go out in the real world and you hear ‘Not bad, for a Virginia wine,’ or even, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Virginia made wine.’”
Even de Vink, confident as he was in his wines, tacitly acknowledged that obstacle when he first released them. He initially priced his two wines, Lost Mountain (“dense black fruit notes and subtle oak”) and Rendezvous (“finishes with an energized backbone that sings of minerality”) at $88 and $55.
The business of wine, as business, is not for the faint of heart nor the shallow of pocketbook. The startup cost for a fully operational winery, is something upwards of $50,000 per acre just for the land and the vines, then add staff, and the equipment and facilities to ferment, age, and bottle the wine. Not to mention the three-year wait before you can harvest your first grape, and the vagaries—particularly in Virginia—of weather and threats of disease and pests. And then there’s selling your wine, a process so mired in a nearly Kafka-esque tangle of regulations, with every state setting its own laws and licensing requirements, that it’s no wonder that, of the more than 200 wineries in Virginia, nearly all are happy to succeed on a mix of wine tourism—hosting weddings and bluegrass weekends—and selling their wine directly to purchasers.
De Vink understands that to start from scratch today, to build a world-class vineyard from the ground up, demands a relentless, uncompromising passion, patience and persistence that few can muster and almost nobody can afford.
On another afternoon, around another table, at another vineyard—Virginia’s long-established Barboursville—the wine flows again as de Vink joins in conversation with two of that small fraternity, winemakers he considers his closest mentors and colleagues: Jim Law, under whom he apprenticed, and Barboursville’s Italian-born Luca Paschina. Both have critically acclaimed wines of their own—in particular Barboursville’s Octagon and Law’s Hardscrabble—and de Vink credits the two with generously sharing years of hard-won knowledge and experience that he has been able to build upon in his own vineyard. “It’s thanks to these two guys I’m here,” says de Vink. “They’re the pioneers in Virginia who made it possible for people like myself to come into the industry.”
Barboursville is by far the largest of the three vineyards, owned by a successful Italian winemaking family of many generations’ standing that for more than 20 years has entrusted Paschina, a third-generation winemaker, with the work of developing Barboursville’s wine and building its reputation. Law has patiently nurtured his Linden over 30 years, acre by acre, harvest by harvest.
The moment de Vink, Law and Paschina greet each other, it’s obvious that they are cut of the same cloth. The wine talk tumbles forth, taking in a dizzying array of topics, from Paschina’s bottle-supplier to the (still rainy) weather to the seductive call of the vineyard in any season.
“You get out there, and you are looking at a vine,” Law, 58, muses, “and the next thing you know, two hours have passed.”
“One thing just leads to another,” de Vink agrees.
As the corks are pulled, Paschina produces plates of freshly made gnocchi, spinach and cucumbers harvested from his garden and venison he hunted and prepared himself. “This is the meaning of life,” says de Vink. “To drink wine and take time and sit around a table. You give the bottle the time it deserves. You respect the wine.”
Alas, that’s not how everyone drinks wine. And it’s not always, the three recognize, how their customers drink it either, a fact which almost visibly pains them to note. Art demands an audience, but an artist yearns for the audience the art deserves. These three want you not simply to drink good wine, but to experience it: to be in the moment with the language of the land.
And so, with frequent digressions on the subject of the wine (“it’s still fairly plummy in the back”), the food (“I soak the cucumbers in rice wine and rice vinegar and some lemon juice”) and viticulture (“wine is about soil”), they consider the challenges of making a Virginia wine that the world—and most particularly those fellow disciples of the vine, the sommeliers, the winemakers, the discerning connoisseurs—will take notice of.
“It is great how we can sell wine here in Virginia, but at the end of the day, we have an ambitious goal to be a great American wine,” says de Vink. “And in order to do that you can’t sell your wine just in Virginia.”
“It is important to me to be in a few good places,” agrees Paschina, who was recently profiled in The New York Times for his efforts to bring wider recognition to Barboursville and to Virginia’s terroir.
But to accomplish that, admits de Vink, “I spend an inordinate amount of time going places, schlepping my wine, saying, ‘Try this.’” He eschews wine competitions but enthusiastically promotes “brown bag” or blind tastings of his wines in matchups with top Bordeaux and California vintages. RdV has begun opening its doors to its patrons, what the winery is calling its “ambassadors,” hosting small, private tastings and carefully planned events.
De Vink would rather, he admits, be by himself, in his vineyard, his home. “I’m not Mr. Social,” he says. “But there is so much wine in the world today that you have to build relationships.”
“It is a tremendous amount of work,” demurs Law, “and that is why I shy away from it.” With the satisfaction of knowing he can sell out his annual production within the borders of Virginia, Law chooses the pleasure of staying at home among his vines over the promise of earning his wines a broader audience.
“But my thing is,” says de Vink, “I want to be in Jean-Georges. I want the top sommeliers to be like, ‘I have these great wines from California, but I have this East Coast wine, too; try this, this is RdV.’ And I have a better chance if I bring your wine and …. ”
“You are not alone,” nods Paschina, completing the thought.
Says de Vink, “When people drink a $100 bottle of wine, it is for a celebration, for a special event, and Virginia doesn’t connote that today. But if we keep at it, hopefully we will get to that point where I give you a bottle of RdV, and you say ‘OK, this is special, thank you.’”
It’s not, he says, about trying to prove that RdV’s wines are better than those other, more established wines of Napa and Bordeaux “The idea,” he says, “is that we are in the game.” RdVVineyards.com
This article originally appeared in our October 2013 issue.
