In late October, Virginia’s trees were many shades of red and orange, the skies were bright blue, and the political banners sprouting from lawns were all perfectly upright.
Inside the Boar’s Head Resort in Charlottesville, producers from an array of Virginia’s wineries and distilleries manned the stands, pouring their products for the 70 or so buyers who circulated the room.
Not just any buyers. Representatives of some of the world’s top wine companies.
It was Day One of the Vinexposium Explorer, an initiative by the company behind Wine Paris and the World Bulk Wine Exhibition, whose goal is to shine a spotlight on lesser-known wine regions and help them enter export markets.
A serious proposition
The Virginian government pulled out all the stops for the event, with top officials on hand to open proceedings. Joe Guthrie, Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services began with a rundown of Virginia’s food. “Virginia can raise almost anything and do it well,” he said. “Everything from seafood from the Chesapeake Bay through here in the Piedmont with our vineyards, orchards and other crops, through to the livestock industry in Virginia.”
Tourists, he said, can go to the Atlantic Ocean and swim with dolphins. “You may eat one of our eight oyster varieties. We have a 300 mile trail called the Crooked Road Music Trail where there's old time music—country music, bluegrass—and we are the home of Dave Matthews.”
And despite being a new-ish wine region, Virginia’s also a very old one, as Erin Scala, postcaster and owner of Market Street Wine explained.
The British established Jamestown and the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent English colony in the New World, in 1607. Twelve years later, the authorities decreed that every household needed to plant and maintain 10 vines of Vitis vinifera; these grapes became an important part of the food culture. Attempts to make wine were much less successful; in the late 18th century, even Thomas Jefferson had no luck when he tried to establish a vineyard. Instead, people turned their attention to indigenous grape vines.
“In the 1850s, there was a wine boom,” said Scala. Not only that, she explained, but these indigenous-grape wines were sold on the same shelves as European wines. “Virginia wines were being sold in big markets like New York City,” and even exported.
But then came Prohibition, and by 1960 there were only five wineries left. Things changed in the 1970s when Gabrielle Rausse began working as a winemaker at Barboursville Vineyards, owned by the Zonins, the Italian wine family.
“And in 1980 we had this amazing thing happen called the Virginia Farm Winery Act—it gives a tax credit to people who have land who plant grapevines,” Scala went on. “It encouraged a lot of people to invest in wineries. In the 80s, you see a lot of people with legacy farms transition to grapevines and then you also see new investment coming in from outside.”
And there are no appellation rules, so people can experiment and see whatever works. Today, the state boasts around 300 wineries.
The wines themselves
Nearly 20 wineries came along to pour their wines, and it’s clear that in the 12 years since Meininger’s visited Virginia, things have evolved. The whites have become crisp and attractive, with many elegant and highly aromatic Viognier and Petit Manseng on offer. There were also hybrids like Traminer and Chambourcin being used for elegant sparkling wines.
As for the reds, it was the soft styles of Cabernet Franc that caught the buyers’ interest.
One winery that didn’t was the Trump Winery. Although people tried the wines, they said it would be difficult to sell Trump-branded wines in other markets. The genial Michael Mentor, National Sales Manager, seemed sanguine about it. He said that sales were rising as the election neared, even though the winery is owned by Eric Trump, not Donald Trump.
According to Mentor, MAGA fans are insatiable when it comes to Trump-branded merchandise, whether it’s slippers from the hotel, key rings, or wine. “People grab it if they see the name,” he said, though he added that Trump supporters generally prefer the red wines to the sparkling.
In other words, Trump the teetotaller is bringing a whole new audience to wine. Mentor was expecting sales to keep rising in the event of a Trump election win.
Touring the state
The next day, the buyers clambered onto buses, to be driven back and forth across the state. This was no hardship, as the itinerary consisted of distilleries—Virago Spirits, Ironclad Distillery and Copper Fox Distillery—where the whisky pours were generous, the cocktails inventive, and the spittoons in short supply.
Late in the afternoon, the tour stopped at Colonial Williamsburg, a recreation of the colonial capital established in 1699; it features olde timey shops, carriage rides and costumed staff. And it’s emblematic of something that’s both a strength and a weakness of Virginia’s wineries—tourism.
In 2023, more than 43.6m tourists spent at least one night in the state, spending $33.3bn between them. Many of those tourists drop in at the wineries on their way through, which means those lucky wineries near tourist destinations can expect to sell plenty of wine. Virginian wines are always destined to be expensive, because the state is humid, making it a challenge to grow grapes. But because so many wineries find it relatively easy to sell to the tourist market, many wines are expensive by international standards—making the wines uncompetitive for the export market.
This is where the Explorer comes in
Of course, when you can sell all your wines at the cellar door, or to local restaurants, there’s no need to export. But establishing a footprint overseas confers recognition and prestige, including in the home market, hence the interest in the Explorer.
Rodolphe Lameyse, CEO of Vinexposium, says that about 30 to 40 Virginian wineries and distilleries participated. But while the goal is to get them into export markets, only “five were ready to go to the next chapter. They’re realising they have paperwork to do. It’s a real business and I need somebody to take care of exports.”
The first edition of the Vinexposium Explorer was in Austria in 2017, though Lameyse says he wasn’t there at the time.
“I think the idea was that Austria was lacking awareness on the world wine market, and they wanted to find a way to get Austrian wine on the world map,” he says. “And [Vinexposium] had this idea to create an event where they invited 100 buyers.”
Lameyse says it was a success, with the “financial and sales results above expectations”. Sonoma followed in 2018, and then Beaujolais in 2019. The post-pandemic Explorer kicked off with Quebec in 2023, and the event will probably head to South America for 2025.
He says that although it’s one of his favourite events, it’s complex to put together, because it requires a high budget and effort. “But the satisfaction from the buyers and the region are super, super high and everybody’s always happy with the end result.”
Stage One of the negotiation process with any given region is to understand what they want. “Sometimes they have unrealistic expectations,” says Lameyse. For example, many think it will be easy to enter China.
Next, Vinexposium searches its database for matching buyers, and asks them if they’re interested. While the database holds the names of about 3,000 buyers, Lameyse says they put a lot of thought into who might be the best fit. Even so, finding around 70 buyers who are all available at the same time isn’t easy. Yet Virginia certainly held an appeal, as the buyers on the tour were an impressive group, representing prestige outfits from southeast Asia to the UK and beyond. Altogether, 20 countries were present.
The goal isn’t just to bring lots of buyers, but also to educate the region itself about what it takes to navigate international markets.
“In Quebec for instance, some of the spirits were already ready to export with the right pricing. But they realised that the bottling should be different and the labelling should be different,” says Lameyse.
What the buyers thought
On the third and final night, the buyers were treated to dinner at Barboursville Winery, which is really where the modern Virginian wine industry began.
It was also where the buyers reflected on what they’d experienced. Carl Robinson, the CEO of Jeroboam in Japan, said he thinks the wine industry has a good future. “Some wineries are at an international level, some not, but they’ll get there.”
At present, he says the pricing is wrong for international markets, but that might not matter in the future if the wines can become more terroir-oriented, “when it becomes less about price”.
Juan Luis Gonzalez, Managing Partner of Cinq Wines in Guatemala, said he was generally impressed with the wines, particularly the whites and the Cabernet Franc.
“I think there’s an opportunity, but maybe the cost of producing a wine in this region is much higher than in California, where they have different manpower,” he said. “I think they have an opportunity if they focus on second brands or something different from what they sell here.”
Not every winery was open to the idea of second labels, though “some took it as an opportunity and were very grateful for the feedback, which is good,” he said. “I think they have a future if they take that perspective and strategy.”
Gonzalez also said how taken he was by the sheer beauty of Virginia. “I would say to everybody to come to Virginia, because you’ll enjoy it. And they have great spirits as well.”
And anybody who goes should consider booking their trip during autumn, because the landscape is spectacular. And it's the perfect weather for whisky.
Photos: Todd Wright/Vinexposium
Felicity Carter attended as a guest of Vinexposium.
