2020 Silver Lining ~ It still looks to be good year for wine
“Wine is a living thing. It is made, not only of grapes and yeasts, but of skill and patience. When drinking it remember that to the making of that wine has gone, not only the labor and care of years, but the experience of centuries.”
It is hard to imagine that we will be capable of separating reflections of Virginia’s 2020 wine vintage from the diverse, disruptive, and frightening global events of the year. While COVID has not and will not change the way we grow or make wine, it has changed nearly everything else about the wine business, in a way that might not last forever, but will surely echo into the coming years. What will this year’s wines remind us of?
There have been some silver linings in a year which has included so much sickness and uncertainty. We’ve seen a heightened mindfulness of the value and benefits of small business, local employers, and the cyclical nature of local industry. The call to arms surrounding small restaurants during the early days of the COVID shutdown was a great beacon of hope, as was the increase in CSAs and purchases from small farms, the reevaluation of regional food supply, and the explosion of the new “curbside pickup” from businesses that nobody would argue are essential to survival, but that most people would argue are businesses we desire to be surrounded by, and that enrich our community.
It may be naïve to believe that this perspective will outlast the virus itself, but I am hopeful that the disruption to the economy will remind us of the truly profound benefits to keeping money circulating locally, the impact that a dollar spent on a business that employs the community, that pays taxes in the community, and that improves the community can have. The wallet has always been a powerful way of voting.
Loudoun County is a beautiful place. In a fertile valley surrounded by rocky, well-drained ranges, it is a place that has a lot to offer from an agricultural standpoint. I am fortunate to work in an industry that is in many ways the very epitome of community. The very idea of wine, for most people, is communal – enjoying a bottle together over meals, sharing in a discussion, relaxing with a friend; down, in fact, to the very vessel itself: a single bottle from which many people drink.
When my wife and I first opened our tasting room in Loudoun County, the power of the community was palpable. It was bigger and more touching and more important to my life than I would have ever guessed. We viewed our industry, suddenly, as not just the winemakers and vineyard workers, but the brewers, vegetable farmers, distillers, cheesemakers, chefs, waitstaff, hosts and hostesses, Bed & Breakfast owners, caterers, and on and on. Our industry is everybody working to keep Loudoun County expressive of itself, an interesting place to live and visit, and a region using its resources in a way that is unique and good.
With the shutdown of early 2020, our community became a true force. Guests, customers, friends, neighbors—our entire mailing list reached out with support simply because they did not want us to be gone. They—and I—wanted businesses to exist that make their community rich and interesting and unique.
We are now, as I write this, picking the last grapes from the 2020 vintage. This vintage has, for Walsh Family Wine, been a great success—we enjoyed a relatively dry spring and summer, and, ignoring a frustrating week or two in August, a dry picking schedule, which is something we aren’t always fortunate to have in Virginia. For us, that equates to wines which are more expressive, more dense, and in general of a higher quality than when we struggle to ripen under wet conditions. These types of growing seasons are a blessing, and they give us something that, in a small way, expresses this place.
I am often asked what my favorite part of growing wine is. I have had many answers over the years, but this year, my favorite part is time. Growing wine connects you to time in two very distinct ways. First, there is the immediate: the daily, hourly, weekly, both through the close connection to the subtleties of weather and also the tasks themselves. Pruning a vineyard requires working on a new vine every five minutes, over and over and over again, for months. Shoot thinning is the same. Hedging the same. Each task is similar in that it requires a marathoner’s patience. Meanwhile, similar to the marathoner, you become intimate with the weather, sunrise and sunset, shifts in wind, each new blossom.
Then, there is an annual viewpoint of time. Each year is a single block. For a winemaker, a vintage is an agglomeration of all those circadian moments, bundled into a phrase like “2020” and expressed as a bottle of wine. That wine reflects a lot of things: the weather, the site, the grape, some new winemaking techniques, perhaps, and the blend put together by the team. And, for the rest of any winemaker’s life, that is how the year will be remembered. In that bottle, reflecting those things.
We are just beginning to press new red wines from the 2020 vintage. They will now go into barrel where they will mature and develop. In this COVID year, this year that has given us so much to remember in a negative way and not want to look back on, there are two pieces of time that I hope we hold on to with reverence. First, let us remember the community, the understanding and cooperation of our community and neighbors. And second, the wines. Let’s enjoy them for years to come.
“At Walsh Family Wine we produce vineyard-specific wines from our vineyard sites in Loudoun County, “ says Nate Walsh. “We believe strongly that the aspect of wine growing most worth pursuing is the sense of place. As such, our vineyards are managed and our wine is made with methods that we believe best showcase the strengths and idiosyncrasies of our vineyards. This is an endeavor that we believe will keep us busy for a lifetime. We farm 50 acres of wine grapes on five distinct sites, all in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The featured wine at Walsh Family Wine this winter is their 2019 Dutchman’s Creek Cabernet Franc, a bold, full-bodied red blend from Dutchman’s Creek Vineyard in Lovettsville, VA. For more information, or to plan a visit, please visit www.walshfamilywine.com.
Nate Walsh is a career winegrower. Starting as a cellar rat at Horton Vineyards in Central, Virginia, he went on to work in vineyards and wineries in the Willamette Valley and Central Otago before spending seven years as the winemaker and vineyard manager for Sunset Hills Vineyard in Purcellville, Virginia, during a time of large expansion. It was during this time that he began searching for a site from which he knew one could create truly premium Virginia wine.
