When Ben Jordan noticed the beginnings of a creative new wine culture in his home state of Virginia, he says he knew he wanted to be part of it. Now he’s among some of the early vanguards of winemakers in the southern state touting the power and promise of wines sourced from hybrid grapes.
The head winemaker and vineyard liaison for the Lightwell Survey label, Jordan recently spoke to me about his work, where it’s going, and what he thinks about the future of Virginia wines.
First, it’s really fun to talk to winemakers in the Shenandoah Valley because that’s actually where I got my start in journalism, at The News Virginian in Waynesboro, Va.
In Waynesboro? That’s crazy.
There was no wine scene there in 2009. What led to this scene manifesting there? Why Waynesboro?
For Common Wealth Crush, where Lightwell is made, it had to do with the location. We’re a multi-producer facility, so we’re centered between the central Virginia wine scene, where a lot of winemakers are, and the Shenandoah Valley which is increasingly an interesting place to plant vineyards. It looks like it’s kind of the future of vineyard planting in the state.
And the other part is that Waynesboro has some of the most affordable long term leases at old manufacturing sites. In Common Wealth’s case, we refurbished part of the Virginia Metalcrafter’s building that already had concrete floors and metal siding. It would have been much harder and more expensive to build a winery from scratch.
But you’re right, it’s not a place everyone thinks of when they think of wine. We know that.
You’ve spent time in California making wine, but you’re actually originally from the East Coast, right?
That’s right. I’m from a small Virginia community not far from here called Swoope.
What led you to wine?
It was a bit of a meander. When I graduated, I moved out to San Francisco. I was trying to be a playwright, so I ended up at grad school in Pittsburgh, where I worked at Whole Foods in the specialty section which was cheeses and coffee.
Then I moved to New York — because that’s what playwrights do. I started working for a Whole Foods wine store that was ultimately shut down because of restrictions on selling wine in grocery stores. But it was one of those seminal experiences. They brought in their most experienced buyers to open the store, and the goal was to make it an important wine program in the city. So my first job exposed me to many of the importers in New York and their wines. It was very inspirational, and I fell in love with wine.
And you stayed in New York?
I moved back to San Francisco, actually, and worked for an importer there. Then I went up to Sonoma County, where I learned the craft of winemaking, and then came back to Virginia in 2012. It’s still a young and emerging industry here, and I wanted to be part of developing it.
Tell me about Lightwell Survey. How did it start?
Well the first place I landed was Michael Shaps Wineworks. That’s where I first met Sebastian Zutant, who was based in DC and was looking for a rosé for his restaurant. So we started working on a wine together and realized we had similar tastes in producers and importers. And that’s when he pitched to me the idea of starting a small wine label. That launched in 2015, and it was right around the time I took a job with Early Mountain Vineyards. They were making more classical-style wines at the time, but still pushing the envelope with certain bottlings.
At the end of the day, it was a way to work in two different parts of the Virginia wine industry. Many times those two roles informed each other.
Do you consider yourself a natural winemaker?
We don’t use that term because of the way most grapes are being grown in Virginia, though it’s gotten better. There’s a younger generation of farmers coming up who care a lot about the way grapes are farmed, but there’s not that established organic viticulture community here in the same way it exists in parts of Europe and California.
You don’t operate any vineyards, correct? Where are you sourcing your grapes?
Lightwell Survey doesn’t own any vineyards. My brother and I have a small label called Midland. We’re growing all the grapes on a family farm in Fort Defiance, Va.
In terms of Lightwell Survey, though, we’re always looking for long-term relationships with growers who are willing to change and work with us. That’s been a little bit challenging recently because, up until last year, there has been a shortage of grapes. But now that demand has softened, there’s an opportunity to talk to growers to discuss what the industry might look like going forward — and how they can be part of it.
Generally, we’re working with about five different growers, and almost all in the Shenandoah Valley and one in Loudoun County. A lot of times they’re working small plots of vines, like five acres or less.
And what hybrids are you incorporating?
Chambourcin and vidal blanc are the bulk when you look at the percentages in the wines we make. But we have worked with noiret both at Lightwell Survey and at Midland. Also traminette. My brother, his name is Tim, he planted chambourcin, chardonel, and regent (the German PIWI), and he just had his first harvest. He actually made the regent for a project he has with his wife’s family called Star Party. He’s excited by the potential.
Chambourcin, in particular, is pretty interesting for Virginia because there is a lot already planted. It’s not the end-all-be-all for resistance, but still much better when compared to vinifera.
At Common Wealth Crush we made a 2022 wine with chardonel that turned out well, and I think that grape will become more important in the state.
I just had a bottle of your 2021 “Strange Collapse” rosé. It’s got a whole medley of hybrids in it, and was quite good.
Thank you! Yeah it’s got vidal blanc, petit manseng, chambourcin, noiret, and traminette.
What got you into hybrids in the first place?
As I was leaving California I went to this thing at UC Davis called RAVE, and I heard this grape breeder, Andy Walker, speak. He was talking about some of his varieties that were nearing commercial release. The idea of new resistant varieties bred for the challenges of a place was not something I understood having worked solely with vinifera in both sales and in Sonoma County wineries. But I’d just accepted the job in Virginia, and I knew downy mildew was a big issue. So that’s what sparked my interest, and it was the first thing I started talking to people about when I got to Virginia.
When I started in Virginia, I didn’t understand the hybrids we were making. I didn’t give them credit — and my European and California wines bias made me judge the wines they made, though it became immediately clear they were easier to grow.
I was sceptical of chambourcin at first, but I think that was because we were trying to make it taste like Bordeaux, which was silly in retrospect, and also because we were adding sulfur dioxide to it, and it has a problem with sulfur and fermentation. But through my experience with the Young Wine program at Early Mountain Vineyards, I came to love it. And it’s relatively easy to grow in Virginia.
It sounds like you really had to wrestle with hybrids, at least mentally, at the start.
I definitely had a journey. In the end, I was intrigued and inspired by the conversations that were happening in Vermont and the northeast, like at La Garagista and some of the other producers. They made growing and working with hybrids sound like the logical thing to do, and they really pioneered this sense that you could sell the wine and not portray them as lesser or anything other than a grape that makes wine. They sort of changed that whole conversation.
Between that and the original ideas from the RAVE talk, a group of us started discussing the importance of a breeding program in Virginia.
And you did just that.
Yeah. This group of us did. We had been discussing it for a while, and we had talked to Virginia Tech and members of the industry, but we hadn’t found a path to making it happen. As a Covid-19 era distraction, I decided to write a small grant proposal for a disease resistance breeding program in Virginia. There’s a tax on wine sold in the state, and the government puts some of that money back into the industry, including into research. So I sent in a proposal to the Virginia Wine Board, which awards the grants, and they basically said, ‘That’s interesting, but you need more support to pull something like this off.’
They suggested we work with the Winemakers Research Exchange, which was focused on improving the quality of Virginia wine. Since they had the infrastructure, they became a potential partner, and they agreed to apply for the grant if we figured out how to make the program work. Emily Hodson, the winemaker at Veritas Winery, a founder of the WRE, and a member of the original breeding group, agreed to help work on the proposal. Her connections ultimately led us to conversations with a USDA plant scientist who was working on the VitisGen project. We had an informational meeting with him, and he happened to know this post-doc who was really interested in grape breeding. He was like, ‘I’ve got the guy for you if you want to start a breeding program.’ And there are a lot more details, but that collaboration was what made the Wine Board feel like it was a project that merited funding.
When you think about the future of winemaking in Virginia, what do you envision?
I can imagine a future where we can leave this idea of vinifera superiority behind. I don’t find it really sustainable in the long term here. In twenty years, I don’t want to be farming it. I want to be farming plants that are happy to grow in our conditions. It is an important species to the industry now — and we can’t pull it all out at once — but I would love to see the industry move forward.
It seems like a basic rule of agriculture should be to work with what grows well?
Have you run into any challenging opinions from folks in the industry who are ardent about sticking with traditional European varieties?
Yeah, there are still those ideas, because the modern industry was built on these grapes. Some people continue to hold the Eurocentric opinion that the only good wine can come from vinifera, because that’s what has dominated wine culture for so long. But conversations are starting to change.
I think a lot about how wine is talked about by folks who are part of ABV Ferments. Flavor is a construct. And our preferences and expectations around how wine (and food) tastes have so much to do with a person’s exposures and upbringing. We should be open to different flavors, especially if they come from fruit that grows well, and it’s going to make our engagement with wine more interesting. More and more, folks in this industry, they’re tired of it being so hard out in the vineyards. With vinifera, if you miss one spray or fall behind on canopy management during the growing season you can find yourself with a bad downy mildew problem.
But I think there is starting to be a change in mindset, even with some of the people who’ve been here longer. Maybe not everyone, but people are more open to wines tasting different.
A little about your winemaking: Do you de-stem?
I think it depends on the wine we’re making. We’ve made wine with 100% whole cluster and we have destemmed. With the whites, if we’re pressing, it’s generally whole cluster pressing. But it really depends. That’s the thing with Lightwell Survey: the wines are always evolving and changing, and we’re always questioning what works and what doesn’t. They are all co-ferments, though, and a big part of that is maybe that we haven’t found grapes that are consistently ripening in a balanced way in Virginia.
Do you ever co-ferment with anything other than grapes?
Yes, but only on small levels with apples and pears fermented with grapes.
And for malolactic fermentation, are you adding any sulfites to slow it down? If so, why is it important?
I think in the minimalist, natural wine-adjacent space where we are, if we’re looking to limit filtration and the use of SO2 we need to let the wine go through malo. For reds that’s normal. For whites, especially in a warmer climate like Virginia, sulfites can be used to block malo to preserve the malic acid in the wine for its freshness. We use petit manseng and hybrids to maintain freshness, because they have plenty of acid even after malo.
You were recently at ABV Vol. 4 in Oakland. What were some of your parting thoughts?
Every one of the ABVs has been inspirational for me — from a social and wine perspective, so I’m excited to see this movement go forward. There’s so much being expressed that’s going to be beneficial to this industry.
Also, it’s not only that the event is refreshing and exciting, but it’s also thoughtfully radical. In any endeavor, we can get stuck in these assumptions about the way things are or should be. And that gets compounded with wine, in particular, because the industry is so backwards-looking and steeped in nostalgia about the way it used to be. Since culture is always changing and progressing, that classical stance can really get in the way of thoughtfully moving into the future, especially in this time of seeing just how much needs to be fixed, and how the status quo makes no sense. ABV Ferments actively challenges status quo and clearly says those sorts of things, and it offers a place for people to say them and hear them.
What can we expect next from Lightwell Survey?
When I think about some of the wines we’ve made, we’ve made different iterations of them year after year. They continue to evolve. Take “Hintermen,” as an example. It’s our conversation with petit manseng that’s changing over time.
I mentioned earlier about the softening of the demand on grapes. We see a cool opportunity to work with vineyards we’ve not been able to work with before.
Are there any European PIWI wine producers, or US-based hybrid producers you really dig?
So with the European stuff, we have almost no access down here in Virginia. I’ve gotten to taste a few, but I don’t think I’m well-tasted enough to answer that. In terms of domestic wines, there are more and more exciting domestic hybrid producers on the east coast, in the middle of the country and even the west coast! Taking a look at any of the ABV lineups and there is a list of exciting producers to seek out. As an example Shitty Wine Memes wrote about a number of producers they tasted with this list which includes NOK Vino, dear native grapes, Mural City Cellars, Camuna Cellars, Spinning Wheel Wines, Lilith, RAS, Plēb, and Kalchē Wine Co. I’m always excited to follow what Kathline Chery is doing. Also Wild Arc, Iapetus, and American Wine Project. And The Two Eighty Project and North American Press are out in California.
I’m realizing now that this is tough question to answer, because the hybrid world has a lot of inspirational people, who do a variety of things, and I know I’m leaving folks out.
Here in Virginia, you’ve got Quartzwood in Loudoun County, Star Party, Early Mountain’s young wines, Artemisia Farm, who you’ve interviewed, and I’m sure I’m missing others. There are some cider makers like Patois and Troddenvale who are doing neat things where they are using hybrids in their work.
What are you interested in learning more about in this space?
For me, the more I can taste and hear about the European PIWIs and how they’re performing — that’s all very interesting to me, especially for winemakers in similar climates. It’s interesting because these people in Europe are walking away from a long cultural history, and it’s a decision that’s rooted in logic. It’s a compelling thing to watch happen. Sort of like small producers walking away from the name grape varieties in California. It’s an uphill battle of convincing your colleagues this is the way to go.
I want to add, too, that I think the emergence of natural wines helped hybrids here in the US and that probably helped European producers open their minds as well.
Natural wines made it okay to make a light wine, okay to make an orange wine. It’s okay now to make things that don’t come from famous places. That’s where I think the Vermont work was very important. They said, ‘Here’s a way we can do this.’ And they did it.