By Grace Reynolds • Photos by Sarah Cramer Shields

On a journey spanning more than 25 years, Claude Thibaut has carried his sparkling-wine expertise from France to Virginia, with stops in Australia and California on the way. As a consultant, he has brought sparkling wine to a list of wineries that reads more like a who’s who of American wine, including Jordan (the bottle with the eye-catching “J” painted on it), Iron Horse, and Kendall-Jackson.

We’re lucky enough to now have him here in Afton, Virginia, where he leases space from Veritas Winery and has created his own label with an old friend.

(Photo © Sarah Cramer Shields)

From Champagne to Charlottesville

Thibaut-Janisson was born from a long friendship that began in a Grand Cru village in the Champagne region of France. Thibaut and his friend Manuel Janisson, both from champagne-producing families in the town, started in the family businesses at a young age. When Thibaut came to work in California in 1983, he had already spent a few years working in Australia, and Janisson was looking for some experience working in California. Thibaut arranged for Janisson to come work with him, and the two young men began talking of one day producing a sparkling wine together. About 25 years later, they agreed that Virginia could be the place to do it.

Thibaut came to Charlottesville with his wife in 2003 to consult at Kluge Estate Winery, and since then he has provided his services for numerous Virginia wineries, including Veritas. In 2005, after seeing the potential for Virginia sparkling wine, Thibaut and Janisson began their joint venture, and in 2007 they had the first release of their nonvintage blanc de chardonnay. Janisson continues his successful work in his family’s business (Janisson et Fils), and he provides consultation and financing for equipment and operations. Meanwhile, Thibaut controls the entire winemaking process.

Methode Thibaut

For his blanc de chardonnay, Thibaut sources all of the grapes, exclusively chardonnay, from the Monticello AVA (American Viticultural Area). Roughly half of these grapes come from a nearby vineyard, Ivy Creek Farm, which has some of the oldest chardonnay vines around—dating back to 1982. The fruit from these old vines adds to Thibaut’s success: The older the vine, the less fruit it produces, but in exchange, the quality is superior. Thibaut visits and chooses a harvest date for his fruit based on its sugar and acid levels. This is always early in the season, because chardonnay destined for sparkling wine must be picked when acidity is high. Chardonnay grapes grown in Virginia have a lower acidity to start with than their French cousins, so he picks all of his fruit within a week’s time in order to hit that prime acidity level.

He uses the “methode champenoise,” the traditional method of making champagne in which the wine goes through a secondary fermentation in the bottle and ages on the lees for about two years before being riddled, disgorged, and then finally readied for sale. In Champagne, there are a multitude of rigid rules to comply with in order to make wine that carries the name of the famous region. That is not the case here. “I know which steps of the method I have to respect,” Thibaut says. “I use the same method I would use in Champagne, but here the change is in the fruit. I want people, when they taste the sparkling wine, to be able to tell it has the same finesse [as one made in Champagne].”

One thousand cases were made of the first-released Thibaut-Janisson Blanc de Chardonnay Brut, and they made their way mostly to small retailers and restaurants. This was facilitated in part by Thibaut’s wife, Pamela Margaux, head of Margaux and Company—a wine importer and distributor carrying Thibaut-Janisson, Janisson et Fils, and other fine imported and domestic labels. The fine, crisp finesse of this wine is immediately evident. Whether it will stand the test of time, a trait that its Old World inspiration is renowned for, remains to be seen. “The quality of a French champagne is the aging potential. They can age for years and years,” says Thibaut. “The question mark here is, are the wines going to age?”

While American wine drinkers have grown in number and sophistication during Thibaut’s nearly three decades in the business here, the wine cultures of America and his native France are still worlds apart, and this is especially evident with sparkling wine. “Sparkling wine here—it’s not like France. Here they still think of drinking it as a celebration, or that men don’t look good drinking it, or that you can’t drink it by yourself,” remarks Thibaut. Part of this is due to the marketing of champagne, by the famed eponymous region itself, as a marker of luxury or prestige. Thibaut aims to work around this image. “When you tell people that you can do a lot of food pairings with sparkling wine,” Thibaut says, “well, then you have a lot of educating to do.”

Claude Thibaut (Photo © Sarah Cramer Shields)

Processes & Predictions

Thibaut works with many Virginia wineries in their sparkling-wine production, and operates his own disgorging line. The line helps automate the disgorgement process, a procedure unique to sparkling wine. After the wine has aged on the lees in the bottle for at least two years, the bottles are put into a gyropalette, a machine that automates the riddling process. Riddling—slowly turning the bottles to force the lees into the neck of the bottles—was traditionally and painstakingly done by hand. After about a week in the gyropalettes, the lees must be extracted (disgorged) from the bottles. This is done by quickly freezing the lees in the neck of the bottle, popping the cap off, extracting the lees, and refilling the bottle with a precisely mixed recipe of sugar, wine, and often “secret” ingredients (this stage is called dosage). The bottles are then corked and the familiar wire cage is put on to contain the bubbly.

Thibaut gets to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes action in the Virginia wine business, and he’s positively excited about it. “It reminds me of Sonoma County in 1980—it was all farms then. Everybody said, ‘There’s no way Sonoma County can compete with Napa.’ I can see that same kind of evolution happening here.” He also sees more and more people asking for local wines, and notes that this is important in pushing Virginia wine to the forefront. “There is a demand from the consumer that can kind of force the sommelier to bring in more.”

Plans are in place for another product, “Virginia Fizz,” perhaps in spring. This sparkling wine will have more modern packaging than the blanc de chardonnay, which has a very elegant bottle and a more classy, traditional label, and it will be marketed toward a younger, urban crowd, with a more fruity character and a little less time on the lees. Thibaut is working on this project with some D.C. mixologists to develop the perfect sparkling wine to be used as a base for cocktails. Between the two wines, he hopes to be producing 2,000 cases in three years and then go up to 4,000 to 5,000 cases in five years or so.

With sparkling wine, Thibaut has a niche that allows him to focus in on what he does and likes best. He notes that other wineries with a wide variety of grapes and wines “are still researching and experimenting. I don’t really experiment because I know what I already do best.”

Grace Reynolds is a Piedmont, Virginia, native who has worked in the U.S. and international wine business for over a decade. She’s a firm believer that sparkling wine is an acceptable and often preferable complement to any meal.

Virginian Bordeaux: Boxwood seeks to marry its distinctive Virginian terroir with Bordeaux’s traditional approach.

Situated in the midst of picturesque Loudoun County estates, Middleburg’s Boxwood Winery is both right at home and far from the ordinary. The winery is the realization of a dream for owners Rita and John Kent Cooke, the former Washington Redskins owner and president, who bought the estate in 2001. The Cookes commissioned renowned architect Hugh Jacobsen to design a winery with modern, clean lines, but one that agrees with its surroundings.

The result is a four-part complex that is stunning in its simplicity on the outside while filled with high-quality, high-tech streamlined inner workings. Boxwood is dedicated to making wines in the Bordeaux tradition, and as such the hillsides around the winery are densely dotted with vines of Bordeaux varietals, all certified by the French government.

Seamless and Serious

Rachel Martin, daughter of the owners, studied winemaking and sensory evaluation in California and Bordeaux. She now manages and oversees the operations at the winery. To her, “It’s all about omplexity and quality.”

Painstaking work goes into achieving the complexity for which Martin and her team, which includes consulting winemaker Stephane Derenoncourt—one of Bordeaux’s greats—strive. One hundred percent of the grapes used in their wines are estate-grown, all of the harvesting is done by hand, and the primary sorting is done in the vineyard, meaning that
only clean, ripe fruit is brought to the winery for further sorting before processing.

Inside the winery, one encounters a remarkable harmony of architectural form and function that encapsulates the entire winemaking process, from start to finish—something not at all common in Virginia wineries. Each of the four buildings is dedicated to one step in the winemaking process: After being destemmed on the press pad, the whole, uncrushed grapes are brought into the chai, where they are transferred into custommade stainless steel tanks whose temperature can be monitored and adjusted by computer, on site or remotely. The sort of wholeberry fermentation the grapes go through in the tank is done with nuanced flavor in mind. The fruit is harvested based on its ripeness and maturity, says Martin. “When berries are not crushed, wine ferments little by little and adds to the complexity.”

Before its 21-day stint in the vats, 25 to 30 percent of the juice for the estate’s two red wines is bled away from the tank. “We’re reducing the ratio of juice to skins in order to extract more flavor,” Martin explains. Next, “punch-downs, pumpovers, and delestage”—techniques rare in Virginia wine that are used to gently extract juice from the berries—are performed, and the juice is then transferred to an adjoining building for the next stage.

Stainless steel pipes run between all of the buildings, and the wine is transferred from one to the next through these pipes, cutting down on the use of hoses and adding to a more sanitary and controlled environment. After leaving the vats, the wine is pumped through the pipes into barrels in a circular underground cellar, an architectural jewel in itself. Here it ages, separated by varietal, for 12 months. The French oak barrels used are acquired from three very select cooperages.

Vine to Bottle

Inside the winery, one encounters a remarkable harmony of architectural form and function that encapsulates the entire winemaking process, from start to finish.

Derenoncourt, acclaimed winemaker and consultant to toprated wineries in Bordeaux and beyond, determines the final blends for Boxwood’s wines, Boxwood and Topiary. Both of these wines are reds of traditional Bordeaux styles: Boxwood is in a left-bank style, made up of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. Topiary, a softer wine more reminiscent of Bordeaux’s right bank, comprises Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Malbec. The winery also produces a limited edition Rosé, made of entirely Cabernet Franc with 24 hours of contact with the skins. The winery is designed to produce a maximum of 5,000 cases a year of all wines.

Another element of the winemaking process at Boxwood that sets it apart from the herd is the on-site bottling facility that occupies one of the four buildings in the complex. It is rare for a winery to have the capacity to take the grapes through the entire process from the vine to the bottle, but at Boxwood, stainless steel pipes again take the wine from the barrels back to the tanks for blending and then on to the bottling stage. Two months later, the bottles are released.

Martin, who is dedicated to the Bordeaux tradition and passionately devoted to promoting Virginia wine on an international level, feels Boxwood’s wine is “a terroir-driven wine unique to Virginia, and I think it can go up against any highquality wine in the U.S.” Each year, she attends—usually as the only representative of a U.S. winery—the Bordeaux En Primeur tastings, a sort-of futures tasting for Bordeaux’s latest vintage.

“The world now knows about Virginia wine,” she says, “and it’s been very well-received.” Boxwood’s three wines can be tasted at one of the winery’s satellite tasting rooms, in Middleburg, Reston Town Center, and soon in Chevy Chase, all overseen by Sean Martin, son of the owners. The winery itself is closed to the public but is available for tours by appointment.

A New AVA

Another facet of Martin’s dedication to the product of her native Virginia is her two-year travail to put together a petition, submitted a year ago to the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), to establish Middleburg, Virginia, as an American Viticultural Area (AVA). If approved, this AVA will straddle Fauquier and Loudoun counties and is based on a composition of soil and geology that is unique within these tight boundaries.

The outcome is an issue of quality: “It helps the [Virginia] wine industry be viewed as a real wine region,” Martin emphasizes. “It increases our reputation and our credibility.” In order to use the AVA designation on a label, a winery must use a very high percentage of grapes grown within its respective AVA in the final product, and it must adhere to other strict guidelines of quality laid out by the TTB. The review of the application is a two-year process, and so, after years of collecting data, consulting with soil and geology experts, and formulating her argument, Martin says that the petition was “well-received” by the TTB, but she must now wait patiently for the results.

The award-winning architecture and sophisticated methods used at Boxwood may belie the grassroots approach taken by Martin and her very dedicated family to promoting Virginia wine. “We want Virginia wine to be on the international playing field,” she enthuses, but notes, “You’ve got to start at home. You have to increase your quality for your local consumer.”

Grace Reynolds is a native Virginian who has spent nearly two decades in the food and wine industry, both locally and internationally. She also teaches English at several Virginia universities.

Boxwood Winery
Tours by appointment only.
State Highway 626 at Burrland Rd., Middleburg
(540) 687-8778
contact@boxwoodwinery.com
www.boxwoodwinery.com

The Tasting Room
Middleburg
16 Washington St.
(540) 687-8080
Thurs.–Sun., 1 p.m.–7 p.m.
Reston
1816 Library Street
(703) 435-3553
Daily, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

Winemaker Kirsty Harmon marches to the beat of her own drummer and makes fresh, young win Blenheim Vineyards.

Nearly landlocked by the massive Kluge Estate Winery, Blenheim Vineyards sits unassumingly 20 minutes south of Charlottesville. A small winery with a full-time staff of only four, Blenheim is owned by musician Dave Matthews and run in large part by members of his family. Although Blenheim has been in operation for nearly 10 years, it was only in February of this year that the tasting room was opened to the public. Despite Blenheim’s being dwarfed by the neighboring 2,000-acre estate and its near lack of signage, weekends bring a steady stream of visitors, and they’re not just hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous owner. Word has spread that there are good things happening at this little winery.

There & Back Again

One of those good things is Kirsty Harmon, Blenheim’s new winemaker, whose path in winemaking led her around the world but finally brought her back to Charlottesville, armed with knowledge and motivation. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Harmon “fell into winemaking” when she worked with Virginia wine icon Gabriele Rausse at the Kluge estate. Of her mentor’s influence on her, Harmon says, “He kind of takes over and you get caught up in his love and passion for wine and for life. It’s hard not to get caught up in it.”

Getting caught up in Virginia winemaking led Harmon to the winemaking program at the University of California at Davis, where her studies helped to build a solid foundation under the field experience she had already gained through working with Rausse. After working in Burgundy for several months and in New Zealand as a harvest intern, she returned to Charlottesville with all of this diverse experience to try her hand as winemaker herself. One of only a handful of female winemakers in Virginia, Harmon started at Blenheim in 2008. Rausse’s son, Tim, now serves as Blenheim’s assistant winemaker.

New Wine, New Look

Blenheim Vineyards 31 Blenheim Farm, Charlottesville (434) 293-5366 info@blenheimvineyards.com www.blenheimvineyards.com Open Wednesday through Sunday, as well as Monday federal holidays 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

The first vintage of Harmon’s wines was released in April, and the new wines come with a brand new look. The labels of the new wines are brightly colored, a departure from the fairly traditional labels of previous vintages. A Pythagoras tree, based on a geometric design known as a fractal, adorns each label, and the bottles sport screw caps instead of corks. The decision to go with screw caps comes in part from Harmon’s experience in New Zealand’s wine industry, where nearly all wines are bottled this way. “When wines are closed with screw caps, there is no chance of having a corked bottle, and the quality is more consistent from one bottle to the next,” says Harmon of this decision. “Our wines are fresh and young and are meant to be enjoyed young.”

In order to keep that freshness in their white wines, the crew at Blenheim pulls the oaked portion of the Chardonnay and Viognier out of the barrels after about six months and then blends it with the portion in stainless steel tanks. This way, there’s only that hint of oak in the wine, and the fresh, young flavors shine through.

Message in a Bottle

The just-released 2008 Viognier offers a fresh, dry take on a varietal that is increasing in popularity with Virginia wineries. Harmon realizes this may disappoint some who are looking for a less-dry Viognier but explains that “there’s a huge range of Viognier styles in Virginia. There’s something for everyone.

This [style] is ours.” Grapes from two other Virginia growers are used for the Viognier—the first crop from Blenheim’s own Viognier vines will be pressed this year. The 2008 Chardonnay is equally refreshing, a blend of Blenheim’s own Chardonnay grapes and Chardonnay from two other Piedmont vineyards. About 35 percent of it spent some time in barrels, and none of it went through malolactic fermentation, leaving it tasting crisp, clean, and ready to drink—without the rich, buttery taste typical of many California Chardonnays that have gone through this process.

Perhaps more appealing to those who are new to wine, or to those who aren’t sure what they’re looking for in a wine, is Blenheim’s 2008 Rosé. Made from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes grown at Piggott Vineyards, this is a wonderfully fruity, robust take on rosé, and it hovers nicely in the gap between dry and not. Describing the pressing process, Harmon says, “The only skin contact [the wine had with the skins of the grapes after harvest] is the time it took to get from Lynchburg to here. It was all pressed immediately.”

A Natural Setting

Although being open to the public is a new thing at Blenheim, the first vines have been there since 1999; a second planting was done in 2006. The winery and tasting room—designed by Dave Matthews and craftsman William Johnson to have minimal environmental impact—was finished in 2000. The building, built using reclaimed wood, takes full advantage of the sunlight with its large south-facing windows, which make electric lighting unnecessary during the day. Blenheim uses passive solar heating in the tasting room, and the winery underneath, which can be seen from above through glass-paneled floors, stays cool naturally because it is built into the side of a hill.

Several members of the Matthews family are involved in the day-to-day operations at Blenheim: Peter Matthews, brother to the owner, is the grower and vineyard manager, and Peter’s wife, Kathleen Glenn-Matthews, is the general manager. Jane Matthews, Dave’s sister, says, “You’ll even find my mother in the vineyard—along with her five dogs. Everybody does everything. It’s a group effort.”

Educating, Not Entertaining

The staff at Blenheim feels strongly that part of their job is to educate people about wine and that to do so they must make themselves and their wine accessible. The new wines will retail for under $25—many for less than $20. Nora White, the tasting-room coordinator, says she sees a young crowd coming in, one that wants to learn about wine. The atmosphere, White describes, is such that people will see Blenheim’s “wine is not pretentious, and it’s tasty to boot.” She gets comments regularly from visitors who leave with a new sense of understanding about Virginia wine, thanks to the staff’s friendly and welcoming approach.

Harmon is not content with relying on the vineyard’s affiliation with its world-famous owner to sell its wine. Instead, she is determined to build a reputation for crafting pleasing but unaffected, affordable wines that express the terroir of the Piedmont. And so far, everything about the winery’s focused, understated approach seems to guarantee that she will succeed.

Grace Reynolds is a Piedmont native who has been involved in the Virginia food and wine industry for two decades. She also teaches English at several local universities and community colleges.

Blenheim Vineyards
31 Blenheim Farm, Charlottesville
(434) 293-5366
info@blenheimvineyards.com
www.blenheimvineyards.com
Open Wednesday through Sunday, as well as Monday federal holidays 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.