Camila Carrillo has nurtured solera-method wines for six years at La Montañuela, filling vessels halfway to encourage flor yeast and oxidation, and topping older vintages with newer ones, as is common in Jerez. Yet Carrillo is not in Spain, and the grapes she uses aren’t Spanish. They’re Frontenac Gris and La Crescent, American hybrids bred to withstand cold because Carrillo makes wine in Vermont.
Winemaking is booming on the East Coast, as a new generation brings energy, innovation, and environmentalism. For decades, many Atlantic wineries focused on semi-sweet wines and conventionally farmed high-status vinifera ill suited to the terroir. But times have changed.
Unencumbered by the traditions of Europe and the West Coast, these newcomers are exploring what works here: native grapes, hybrids bred for the cold and humidity, apples and other fruits for co-fermentations, alternative vinifera. Increasingly, distributors, buyers, and consumers are welcoming their wines. It’s an American wine revolution. Here’s where it’s happening.
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New England’s New Scene
“Vermont is selling wines all over the country, we get good press, and other regions are looking to us,” says Ethan Joseph, who makes wine at Shelburne Vineyard, which was one of the state’s first producers when planted in 1998. Today, Vermont has 28 producers. Much of its growth is due to Deirdre Heekin, whose La Garagista burst onto the natural wine scene in 2010.
“She was the first to sell out of state,” says Carrillo, who works at La Garagista. “She’s had so much attention, and that helped me meet people,” including José Pastor, who distributes La Montañuela.
Heekin drew aspirants who are helping build the scene. “Everyone’s making it up as they go,” says Justine Belle Lambright, the director of external business for Vermont’s five-year-old Kalchē Wine Cooperative, whose wines are distributed by Jahdé Marley through her By the Hand portfolio under Zev Rovine Selections. Necessity is the mother of Vermonters’ invention. When frost and floods decimated her 2023 crop, Kalchē’s director of production Kathline Chery sourced 10 tons of Virginia-grown Vidal Blanc. The resulting skin-contact sparkling wine was the winery’s biggest production to date.
La Garagista employees have spread to neighboring states. In 2022, Nicholas Kimberly launched NOK Vino “to put New Hampshire on the map for natural wine.” One of two producers farming regeneratively out of 30 in the state, he makes 650 cases of wines like a wild-fermented Sabrevois-St. Croix blend. He’s planning to grow to 1,200 cases, a viable goal for sales, as Marley just picked him up for distribution.
In Maine, Bluet and RAS Wines eschew grapes for a fruit that grows better there: wild blueberries. “It feels like the early days of the Willamette Valley when a handful of people were figuring things out,” says Joe Appel, the sales director and winemaker at RAS, whose dry, sparkling wines are featured on menus at wine bars like Manhattan’s Terroir.
The Tri-State Area Expands Beyond New York
The Finger Lakes and Long Island make New York the third-largest winegrowing state. Now, sleepier regions are waking up. In 2019, the Hudson River Region AVA had 35 wineries. Today, there are 59. “We’ve come a long way in a short time,” says Wild Arc Farm winemaker Todd Cavallo, who is distributed by Jenny & Francois. In 2018, he revived an old-style pomace wine called piquette, causing a sensation. “Now even older wineries are doing native ferments, lower intervention, and low-sulfur wines.”
Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest grape grower, boasts 376 wineries, including, recently, in Philadelphia. “We have so much community support, we went from 800 cases to 3,000 on neighborhood sales alone,” says Nicholas Ducos of Mural City Cellars, which launched in 2021. Zweigelt pét-nat, skin-contact Pinot Gris grown in the suburbs—“Because we’re in a beer town, everybody expects something new all the time. We’ve never made the same wine twice.”
There’s a similar energy to the Berkeley scene of which Eli Silins is an alumnus. He made wine around the corner from Donkey & Goat, “until we couldn’t afford to live in California anymore.” Now, Silins farms grapes like the native cultivar Niagara on a South Jersey vineyard for his kosher-certified Camuna Cellars wines. “I’m still in disbelief that anybody cares about wine made in Philly from these grapes. But there’s a newer generation coming in and pushing that,” says Silins, who is distributed by Marley and Roni Ginach of California’s Roni Selects.
In New Jersey, where the number of wineries increased nearly 200 percent between 2000 and 2017, Beneduce Vineyards’ Mike Beneduce founded The Winemakers’ Co-op to pool resources toward improving quality. “I didn’t feel the average New Jersey wine was worth writing home about,” he says. “We need to concentrate on expressing our own terroir.” To support the $5-billion industry, the Garden State Wine Growers Association has been inviting press to the state to taste Traminette and Albariño from the maritime Outer Coastal Plains AVA, and Chambourcin and Blaüfrankisch from the shale-heavy North Jersey hills.
The South Explores Alternative Grapes
The number of Virginia producers has grown 600 percent in the past two decades, to 276 in total. More outside investment has also come to the state, such as the recent purchase of RdV Vineyards by Bordeaux producer Château Montrose. But more notable has been the cultural change. “When I was working retail in 2017, the Virginia wine scene was different. Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay—it was difficult to put those on the shelf next to their international counterparts. People went for Sancerre over Charlottesville Sauvignon Blanc because it was cheaper and familiar,” says Erin Dudley, the wine director for the Washington, D.C.-area’s Neighborhood Restaurant Group.
Today, producers like the brothers Tim and Ben Jordan are focused not on mimicking French wines, but on low-intervention varieties that express the state’s terroirs. “It shouldn’t be hard to grow grapes. That’s dumb. We should find grapes that grow well here and make wines that taste good,” says Ben Jordan, whose projects are Midland Wines with his brother and Lightwell Survey, distributed by Marley and Ginach. Midland’s crab apple-grape co-ferment; Lightwell Survey’s red-and-white co-ferment of Petit Manseng, Riesling, and four hybrids; a blend of Cabernet Franc and the Georgian grape Saperavi grown in the Shenandoah Valley, vinified at Tim Jordan’s Star Party Winery—“The East Coast excitement around alternative grapes has made it easier to sell wine.”
Now the brothers are working on Virginia’s future. Ben Jordan is collaborating with the USDA on the development of hybrid grapes adapted to the Mid-Atlantic, and the brothers have partnered with sommelier Lee Campbell and financier Patt Eagan on the small-producer incubator Common Wealth Crush, whose wines Marley represents.
In North Carolina, where classic vinifera styles dominate, “people are doing 15 to 20 conventional fungicide sprays and still losing fruit to rot,” says Chris Denesha, the winemaker at Asheville’s Plēb Urban Winery. “If you can’t grow organic, I don’t think we should be growing it.” Instead, making wines like a barrel-rested blend of biodynamic Vidal Blanc, Seyval Blanc, and Traminette, he’s earned national attention and distribution through Marley and Ginach.
Selling the East Coast
When she launched Roni Selects in 2017, Ginach recalls that “people in California were like, ‘Wine from Virginia? What are you talking about?’” That has changed. “It’s a new generation of buyers. Few were classically trained. Questions around typicity aren’t as relevant.”
The East Coast isn’t edging California off the shelf. With few subsidies and little infrastructure for East Coast winemaking, high production costs can make pricing prohibitive. In response, says Marley, “I make it clear to producers that it’s a partnership. Controlling your own market is the only way to overcome the pricing.” Appel drives wines to New York himself; Kimberly travels to the city to pour in shops.
With such can-do, success is possible. “Producers are ready, the industry is interested, and quality is improving exponentially,” says Marley. “Now it’s time to get consumers hyped.”
Festivals like Marley’s Anything But Vinifera build interest. On premises, “the tasting menu is an opportunity to put these wines in front of people,” says sommelier Jirka Jireh, who poured them at Manhattan’s Beut. “I sell it as a whimsical pairing where you try things you haven’t before. That gets them excited. Everything is a conversation piece, the wines are quality, and everybody’s happy.”
Dispatch
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Betsy Andrews is an award-winning journalist and poet. Her latest book is Crowded. Her writing can be found at betsyandrews.contently.com.
