Bordeaux’s Château Montrose has taken over Virginia’s RdV, in a major boost for the state’s wine industry.
Virginia wine country got a major validation on Monday as the group that owns Bordeaux’s Château Montrose purchased RdV Vineyards – the first purchase of a Virginia winery by a foreign wine company in nearly 50 years.
The winery will be renamed Lost Mountain, the original name for the property given to it by its first surveyor – President George Washington.
It’s a win for RdV founder Rutger deVink, who planned to celebrate in Oregon – where he is currently on vacation – on Tuesday night. It’s also a big win for the whole state. Prosecco producer Zonin founded Barboursville Vineyards in 1976 to make sparkling wine, but since then, Virginia has not been on the radar of the world’s big wine companies.
“I’ve been having a lot of excited texts this morning,” said George Hodson, president of the Virginia Wineries Association. “A lot of us have been eagerly waiting for an announcement like this. We can talk about the progress we’ve made and be excited about some of these laurels, but when the international wine community takes notice it’s a game changer. It’s one thing to say ‘They’re making good wine in Virginia.’ That just changed to, ‘We want to make good wine in Virginia.'”
RdV was one of the most ambitious wineries outside the US west coast from the very beginning. De Vink, a native of the Netherlands, joined the US Marine Corps while in college and saw action in Somalia. He was working in venture capital in Washington DC when he decided he wanted to build a world-class winery in nearby Virginia.
At the time, most of the Virginia wine scene consisted of wineries started up on land that the owners inherited, with little regard for terroir. De Vink did everything with deliberate intention and a Marine’s commitment to work. He interned at the best winery in Virginia, Linden Vineyards, which was arguably the only winery at the time that took site selection seriously. He also worked harvests at Ramey Wine Cellars in California and Cheval Blanc and Château Lagrange in Bordeaux.
De Vink searched for the right piece of land and found it in a 93-acre sheep farm that had been named Lost Mountain by Washington, though it really is more of a hill.
“Jancis [Robinson] keeps teasing us that it’s not a mountain,” de Vink told Wine-Searcher. “George Washington surveyed the land out there, and these hilltops kept disappearing from the drafts. He told the draftsman: ‘Where’s my lost mountain?'”
In 2006, De Vink planted four Bordeaux red grapes on 18 acres: half Cabernet Sauvignon along with Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. He said from the beginning that he wanted to make the first $100 Virginia wine, which garnered headlines at the time. Today, his main wine is $249 and most of its 1200 cases annually are allocated, though it can also be found in some top restaurants in DC and Manhattan. He also makes 1000 cases of a second wine, Rendezvous, that sells for $125.
In my humble opinion, red Bordeaux blends are the best wines Virginia makes, because unlike the West Coast, the state has serious vintage variation. The climate is unique and often challenging: it can be cool in spring and fall and rainy and humid in summer. The best way to adapt is by changing the percentage of grapes in the blend based on how well they ripen each year, and that is what RdV does.
In its best years, Virginia produces red Bordeaux blends that combine the fruit of the US West Coast with the structure and restraint of France.
“So often, people think of our wines as American, but that’s not our DNA. It’s not what we do,” Hodson told Wine-Searcher. “The company that bought [RdV] saw the value in French Bordeaux. We’ve never been Napa, we’ve never been California. This is a result of Virginia saying, this is what we’re actually good at.”
De Vink hired French consultants from the beginning, notably Eric Boissenot, who also consults for four of the five Bordeaux first-growths. De Vink takes his staff, including winemaker Joshua Grainer MW, on multiple learning and tasting trips per year to Bordeaux.
It was through Boissenot’s connections that the Bouygues family, which bought Montrose in 2006, became aware that de Vink was willing to sell.
“We hadn’t put it on the market, but I just talked to a couple friends and said we were thinking about it,” de Vink said. “[His wife] Jenny and I talked for the last couple years about how it would be nice to move to the mountains. I had done ski patrol at Vail the last couple years in the winter.”
Montrose CEO Pierre Graffeuille took the rumor seriously and came to Virginia to taste a vertical of RdV’s wines.
“It was a hard decision to sell, but the Bouygues focused on terroir,” de Vink said. “Most people in Virginia ask about the tasting room, and how many visitors you can have. None of that came into the conversation. We talked about climate change and how that might affect Virginia. We will still have plenty of water. They thought it was interesting to grow on granite. In France, Cabernet Sauvignon isn’t usually grown on granite. The key for me is that their main goal is to continue to improve and to maximize the potential of our site.”
Grainer, who has been there from the beginning, will stay on as winemaker and run the estate with Graffeuille. Charlotte Bouygues, whose mother Melissa was born in Baton Rouge, LA, will oversee the business end from France. The Bouygues family offered de Vink a chance to stay as long as he likes, but he said he thinks he’ll be moving to the mountains – a different mountain – after this year’s harvest.
“The Bouygues family coming here, this will now validate Virginia and validate what we do,” de Vink said.
He also said that the exploration of Virginia’s terroir is just beginning.
“We do not have a monopoly on great areas in Virginia,” de Vink said. “I think there are far more great sites. There are some very interesting areas in the Shenandoah Valley, on limestone soils. But to date, most Virginia wineries are established because of the tasting rooms. If you look at Oregon, when the Drouhin family opened in Oregon, that really kicked it off, but they didn’t open it for the tasting room.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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