Loving Cup - The Only Organic Winery in Virginia
Organic viticulture east of the Rockies is impossible. Just ask any conventional winegrower. Yet there's at least one winery proving this axiom to be false, and by doing so they're building the future of American wine.
Photo/Copyright/Jack Looney
Karl Hambsch is the mind behind Loving Cup Vineyard & Winery, established on his family's farm in central Virginia. His is the only certified organic winery in Virginia, and he may be the vanguard of answering the biggest questions facing the wine industry as it moves into the second quarter of the 21st century, and beyond.
Hambsch studied history, not science, and stumbled into wine growing by happy accident while experimenting with making wine from various kinds of fruit. A historical perspective may be necessary, though, to understand the significance of what he has begun with Loving Cup.
The wine making traditions of Europe date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. The grapes used at first were local. We can guess that what began as a series of happy accidents that led to better wine resulted in a process of hybridizing and breeding and selecting the best growing, best tasting grapes for a particular area and climate.
Over hundreds of years of trial and error, particular grapes made in particular styles, became the clear "winners" in the winemaking race for that place. Given the ancient techniques and tools humanity had at its disposal for winemaking during these centuries, we can assume the winning grapes were the ones that made wine growing and making easiest - the winners were the grapevines best adapted to the pests, rainfall, and temperature of that place, and the ones most resistant to the native molds and viruses.
The problems began when, after thousands of years of human-encouraged adaptation, those vines were transplanted to a place and climate utterly different from their home, with pests and viruses and fungi to which they had never had a chance to adapt.
This is why, when Karl Hambsch began to consider the idea of making grape wine in Virginia in the 21st century, he was shown a long list of chemical sprays that he would need to make it possible. Making wine from European grapes on the East Coast of the U.S. would be folly without these conventional substances, he was told.
He couldn't accept this answer.
Photo/Copyright/Andrew Shurtleff
This was his family farm. He felt a sense of stewardship both to it and to the surrounding environment. He also knew that he would be the person spraying the vines, and his family and their pets would be playing in and around them.
His discovery of organic viticulture began with the question, "How do we grow grapes for ourselves without covering ourselves in poison?"
To find the answer, Hambsch turned to the vines themselves. If European vines - Cabernet, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and the like - were ill adapted to Virginia, why grow them? Why not grow the vines best suited to his terrior?
Variety selection became the key to making organic viticulture possible in Virginia. Since organic viticulture eliminates the synthetic chemicals used to kill the fungi and pests that are rampant in the hot, humid summers of the East Coast, the goal was to find grape varieties that had their own natural resistance.
Since 2007, Hambsch has tested 30 varieties of grapes in the Loving Cup vineyards. He uses four main selection criteria to determine varieties that could be successful - disease resistance, cluster architecture, lack of phytotoxicity to copper or sulfur (the main tools in the organic toolbox), and wine style & flavor.
Most of the varieties failed in one way or another - often by succumbing to disease pressure - and entire sections of the vineyard were pulled and replanted, again and again. From the 30 trial varieties, three have emerged as winners so far: Cayuga White, Corot Noir, and Marquette.
Having a few "winners" doesn't mean that the vines take care of themselves at Loving Cup. Organic viticulture requires more hands on labor anywhere, but especially on the East Coast.
The work of trying out new varieties is significant. Entire blocks of the vineyard are regularly pulled and replanted. Then the canopy must be managed meticulously. Leaf pulling, trimming, and positioning must be done by hand and continuously throughout the growing season. Sanitation of the vineyard is a third job that never ends. Any traces of disease or fungal growth must be removed from the vineyard with extreme prejudice. This could be as simple as plucking a leaf, or as extensive and heart-breaking as cutting off an entire section of a vine in worst case conditions.
Though Hambsch lists these three labor practices as the keys to success in organic viticulture, there is a fourth that became apparent to me while talking with him: a humble and positive attitude.
"You have to expose yourself to things you don't understand so that you can change and grow," Hambsch explains.
It's this kind of attitude that enables Loving Cup to weather vintages like 2018, when over 100 inches of rain fell during the growing season. "The good thing about that year was that it showed us that most of our trial varieties didn't work, and we pulled them."
Even with the Herculean amount of effort that Hambsch and his family put into the care of the Loving Cup vineyards to enable the success of the vines, he acknowledges the vineyard site may play a significant role in making what they do possible. "We could just be lucky," he says, noting that his family farm happens to be situated in a valley that funnels the wind through the Loving Cup vineyards, causing a natural blow-dryer effect that could reduce disease pressure.
We can imagine that this kind of luck, over thousands of years, is exactly what created the great wine cultures of Europe. A certain south-east facing slope, or gravelly river bank, or windy corridor was discovered to be the ideal setting to allow a specific variety of grape to thrive. We, in the U.S.A. and elsewhere in the New World, are just at the beginning of that process - a process that requires the kind of commitment and bravery that people like Karl Hambsch embody.
While Hambsch is proving that there is a way to practice organic viticulture on the East Coast, he's also showing that, in fact, organic viticulture is the only sustainable way to build the future of the American wine culture.
A truly sustainable wine culture, that reflects a real, native sense of growing from a specific place, cannot be built by importing grapes from another continent and then poisoning the earth so that they don't have to compete with new, foreign pests and diseases. It must be built organically, in every sense of that word, through trial and error, with many native and experimental hybrid grape varieties that are allowed and encouraged to compete and thrive by their own internal mechanisms for adaptation and resistance. Over time, clear winners will emerge for a particular region, and a wine style will emerge to reflect the particular growing conditions that favor those winners.
The fact that most people, even wine drinkers, have never heard of Cayuga White, Corot Noir, and Marquette, shines a light on the issues facing anyone wanting to embrace organic viticulture commercially on the East Coast. But it also illuminates all that is wrong with the way the New World wine industry has begun, and what must be done to correct it.
Though these less popular grapes make tasty wines already, I have no doubt that they will likely be the great-grandparents of the specific varieties that eventually become the winners for central Virginia. Some cross-bred genetic offspring of Corot Noir will become the North Garden, VA equivalent to Pinot Noir in Burgundy. If we begin to embrace the organic approach to viticulture, it's only a matter of time.
Time is an important factor in winemaking at Loving Cup as well. That is, the enormous investment of time required to grow organic grapes in Virginia must be respected in the winery. "A growing season is five months long," Hambsch says, "and you can screw it up in one hour in the cellar." Because of this, he describes his winemaking style as "conservative" with a primum non nocere goal to protect all the work that preceded the harvest.
Despite all of the obvious challenges to organic viticulture on the East Coast, the one that seems to trouble Hambsch the most is more subtle. How do we talk about the importance of what we're doing without alienating our colleagues and friends in the wine industry who continue to grow grapes conventionally?
Touting organic values inevitably holds up a mirror to the vast majority of winegrowers who continue to use things like glyphosate and imidacloprid in millions of pounds per year amounts. The effects of these, and many other, "conventional" chemicals are insidious, systemic, long-lasting, and far reaching. The environment's health will continue to degrade with the use of these chemicals. We can focus on the positives of organic viticulture as much as possible, but at some point there will need to be a debate, a confrontation, even an intervention, and possibly an agricultural revolution.
Perhaps it has already started, with a winery like Loving Cup proving that the stated conventional wisdom is false. Organic viticulture east of the Rockies is NOT impossible. It's delicious.