Fauquier Times | April 19, 2024
Fauquier County winemaker Jim Law showed the way to fine wine over 40 years ago
By Mark Gerchick, Contributing Writer
Jim Law stands with the vines he planted and has tended for 40 years at Linden Vineyards near Markham. | Mark Gerchick/Fauquier Times
When Jim Law planted his first grapevines on a rocky abandoned apple orchard at Fauquier County’s western edge four decades ago, there were fewer than a dozen wineries in all of Virginia.
Today, his celebrated Linden Vineyards near Markham is one of nearly two dozen in Fauquier County alone — out of some 300 wineries statewide.
With more than a quarter of Virginia’s 4,000-plus wine-bearing acres, Fauquier and Loudoun counties together center an industry whose direct economic impact approached $3 billion in 2022, according to a wine industry report.
A surge of regional “winery tourism” underlies much of that explosive growth, but so, too, does the burgeoning reputation of Virginia wine — thanks to the work of industry pioneers like Law.
The market attests to their success. Numerous Fauquier County-made wines retail near $50 a bottle— and a few fetch close to $100.
Linden’s own signature Hardscrabble Chardonnay and Cabernet blends grace top restaurant lists and high-end shops throughout the Washington region.
But that success hasn’t come easy.
“Everyone told me I was crazy then to pay more than a thousand dollars an acre,” Law, now 68, said about the reaction when he bought his 76-acre site four decades ago.
By and large, Virginia wine at the time was barely “serviceable,” in industry jargon. Wannabe winemakers used “the old bucket and funnel method,” Law said, often choosing their vineyard sites at random, or because of their proximity to well-traveled highways.
That’s all changed over the last 10 to 15 years. Winemakers have become more proficient, better appreciating“the importance of site and soil to the quality of wine,” said Law.
They also learned to adapt toVirginia’s unique climate challenges — the same that stymied Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to grow European-style grapes at Monticello 200 years ago.
Throughout, Law has been both mentor and measuring rod for the evolving industry, though he laughs off his informal title of“ godfather” of Virginia wine. He’s taught viniculture at area colleges and authors a regular newsletter. His “Hardscrabble Journal” is a must-read for fellow vintners and wine aficionados, expounding on everything from grapevine pruning techniques to climate change to bottling methods to natural philosophy.
He also makes time to advise and work with both aspiring and established area “winegrowers,” a term he prefers to “winemakers.”
Among his former Linden apprentices who now are local wine luminaries are Rutger de Vink of RdV Vineyards and Jeff White ofGlen Manor Vineyards, as well as Dominick Fioresi of Crimson Lane Winery, which recently opened nearby.
At heart, though, Law thinks of himself mainly as a farmer.
Taking a break from working his hilly vineyard, where he spends most of his time, to meet a visitor in the library of his comfortably unpretentious chalet-style tasting venue, he said farming was his purpose.
“My goal was to make a living farming,” he said. “That’s really my greatest achievement.”
Law learned the wine trade from the bottom up, working winery jobs from “cellar rat,” washing barrels, to field work to blending wine after he returned from a stint teaching farming techniques in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Besides making fine wine, though, Law hopes establishments like his will help interested customers “reconnect” to the natural world, engaging with environmental issues like climate change.
Farming grapes in Virginia has never been easy. Early Jamestown settlers were subject to the first agricultural law, “Acte 12,” that required each male colonist to plant 20 imported European grapevines. When that failed, they turned to tobacco farming.
“Here it’s all about the weather — humidity, rain and heat,” Law said.
Winemaking, as Law sees it, is a specialized kind of farming, an “agricultural art” aimed at capturing in the product what the French call the “terroir” — all the environmental factors, from climate and microclimate to elevation and soil, that combine to form a wine’s character.
It means selecting and adapting grape varieties that can thrive on Fauquier’s elevated ridges and“understanding the personality of the (growing) site,” he said.
It means deciding when to pick, what to blend and how long to age before bottling, and it requires discipline, experience and intuition.
Law tries to keep it simple, though, avoiding undue “intervention” in the grape-to-wine process, such as adding substances like Tartaric acid or sugar.
Like other small-scale farming, wine growing takes long hours— especially during active vine growth from May to July and during the September to October harvest, or “crush.”
It also requires tenacity and experimentation, working methodically with new grape varieties, said Law. While Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay together make up a quarter of Virginia wines, newer popular varieties include Petit Verdot, first planted in the early 1990s, and Petit Manseng, which grows well in humid climates.
A traditionalist vintner, Law has reluctantly made his peace with the fast-growing “wine tourism” side of the industry, where the tasting “experience” in a beautiful rural setting can take precedence over the quality or sophistication of the wine served.
Most Virginia wineries fit that bill, Law said. While he draws the line at hosting large group outings and limousine wine tours, Linden now offers by-reservation wine-tastings for a fee.Even so, “farmers are not hospitality experts,” he said, on the way out to check his vines.
After 40 years, Law is optimistic about the future ofVirginia wine, but patient.Vineyards take years to bear usable fruit; new wines take a decade of experimentation to perfect, and weather is always unpredictable.
And the relatively small scale of Virginia vineyards — Linden’s 4,000-case annual production pales in comparison to the 10 million cases produced by the largest individual California vintners — makes Virginia wine harder to find, relatively expensive and less likely to attract the attention of national wine media.
Still, he said, the Washington, D.C., region is “a wonderful market” for fine wine, full of “educated world travelers who appreciate it.” Then he said, philosophically, “They didn’t take California wines seriously either until the mid-'70s.”
Linden Vineyards / Learn More / News About Linden | Fauquier Times | April 19, 2024