Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

Apples had once grown there by the bushel, but by the time John Higgs had settled back onto the family farm in Barren Ridge, it had been overgrown for years. Not that it mattered to Higgs one bit that he had several years of work out ahead of him to turn the old apple orchard into a vineyard.

“Being from a fruit-growing family, apples and grapes are not that dissimilar. You do the same things. It was in my blood,” said Higgs, who moved his wife, Shelby, to the family farm just a short crow’s flight from the world-famous Andre Viette Nursery to make a go at the wine business.

And by all accounts, the effort is paying off. Last month, Higgs’ Barren Ridge Vineyards won a gold medal at the Virginia State Fair Wine Competition for its 2007 Viognier. Not bad for a startup in an industry in Virginia dominated by winemakers who date back to the days of the Old Dominion’s first famous vintner, a fellow by the name of Jefferson.

“The Valley really hasn’t established itself as a wine region yet, but I think we will,” Higgs told me after a tour of his vineyard, which has six acres with grapes on the vine already and another four acres that are slated for growing beginning next year.

“We have a better climate. I’m at 1,400 feet. That’s at least 500 feet higher than on the other side of the mountain. It tends to make for cooler days, cooler nights. It tends to make the grapes better. We have good limestone and shale soils. To me, we should be able to produce world-class wines,” Higgs said.

“Hey, it’s either that those 72 on the other side of the mountain are idiots, or that they have something figured out, and there’s no sense for the mountains to serve as a barrier,” Higgs said.

Just up the road a piece from Barren Ridge in the heart of Augusta County is another up-and-comer in the nascent Shenandoah Valley wine industry, Cross Keys Vineyards in Rockingham County. Like Barren Ridge, the vineyard at Cross Keys opened to the public in the spring, though Cross Keys Vineyards has a little bit of history on its sister vineyards in Augusta County. Owners Bob and Nikoo Bakhtiar planted the first grape vines at Cross Keys in 2002 and marked their first local harvest in 2005. Cross Keys produced its inaugural homegrown wine in 2006 and now has 25 acres under vine, with plans to grow to 40 acres in the next couple of years.

“Slow and steady,” said vineyards manager Mark Parsons of the growth plans at Cross Keys, which produced 1,500 cases of wine last year and is on track to produce 3,700 cases this year.

The focus at this point in the development of the business is on “selling experience,” Parsons told me on a recent visit to Cross Keys Vineyards. “When people come in for a tasting, I want them to learn about the culture. I want them to learn how we do what we do. I want them to be able to experience everything there is to our wines.”

The wine experience is a key driver to the $300 million-a-year wine industry in Virginia. Believe it or not, Virginia was named last year as one of the top five new wine travel destinations in the world by Travel and Leisure magazine, joining Italy, Spain, Chile and New Zealand. Which you have to consider impressive when you think about how the entire industry was comprised of a handful of vineyards and all of six wineries as recently as 30 years ago.

The growth in Virginia is more impressive when you factor in that the wine business isn’t exactly among the easier businesses to get into. It can cost as much as $17,000 an acre to establish a vineyard, according to Tony Wolf, the state viticulturist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who approach me have an interest in wine, and the interest in grape-growing, I would say, is a natural horticultural extension of the interest in wine,” Wolf said. Most who express an interest in getting in the business, like Higgs, own property that they think might be suitable for the development of a vineyard, Wolf said. Not everybody starts out wanting to own a winery, “though it’s probably something that’s in the back of the mind of most people who take the first step with the vineyard,” Wolf said. “And once they start exploring the numbers, the costs and the returns, most people realize that for a small vineyard, one can make more money selling wine than you can ever make selling grapes, just due to the value-added nature of wine,” Wolf said.

Wolf tells those who approach him about starting a vineyard that they need to look at having at least 10 acres in production to count on being able to turn a consistent profit. And he also counsels patience - because the wine business is not something that one is going to be able to see immediate profit from.

“A lot of people get into it for the romance of it. We got into because my wife was a teacher, and I was in the Navy, had been in it 27 years, and we spent a lot of time apart. We got into it because we liked drinking wine, and we wanted to do something where we’d end up spending a lot of time together as opposed to apart,” said Rock Stephens, an Eastern Shore vineyard owner who is the president of the Virginia Vineyards Association.

“We got exactly what we wanted. We spent a lot of time looking at the monetary aspect of it and how much time it would take to make money, we never realized it would take three times the amount of time that we thought it would,” Stephens said.

Higgs, whose Valley winery produced 1,000 cases of wine last fall, and now has an award to tell the world about to boot, is already seeing something of a return on his investment, though he’s careful not to want to rush things for the sake of short-term gain that could put the long-term viability of the operation at question.

“I don’t want to get much bigger than maybe 5,000 cases a year. You can sacrifice quality for quantity, and I don’t want us to do that,” Higgs said.

It’s quality that will draw wine fans to our new Valley vineyards, after all.

“I think our wines, and I know I’m prejudiced, now, but our wines are superior to a lot of the warm-weather wines that tend to be overalcoholic and oversweet and just not as interesting. I think we’re making some good wines in the Valley, and some interesting wines,” Higgs said.

“I’m a wine snob, so I’m hard to please. But our wines here are good. And I think people will agree,” Parsons said.

Filed under: 1-July 2008 Issue