Virginia Uncorked: Scott Elliff

I want to start our conversation talking about the award season. It seems like DuCard had a really great time with your 2023 vintage in particular. How was the award season for you guys? How are you feeling about that vintage?

Scott Elliff: Delighted! We knew 2023 was a great vintage. We knew it from the day we harvested the grapes. It's probably the best vintage ever. I go back to the 2010 and a little bit before that was the other really great vintage for Virginia, so we're not surprised it was a great vintage.

Having three gold medals from Virginia is great, but we also have three gold medals from [the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition] for whites from that vintage too, so we're, we're holding on to six there. I think we have two pending from the previous year and a couple of recognitions from VinePair. We're not Michael Phelps, but we're doing okay!

That's fantastic! I noticed that of your wines, you also crafted a Triskele which only comes out in your best vintages, right? It really is a testament to the year?

Yeah, we've made that I think six times in 16 years. [Julien Durantie, DuCard’s head winemaker] and I look at each other as the harvest is proceeding or after the grapes are in, and code word we kind of say, “Is this a Triskele year or not?”

Was there anything about this particular award season that was new in your wine program that you were really pleased that the world that the the wine world was receiving with open arms?

No, but you're glad when you feel like wines that are really good are recognized. Competitions are a little bit of a crapshoot, you know? One low score can knock you out or one high score can vault you up. I think you drop the low score on average, so you don't have the sort of “Russian judge problem.” But still, they're tasting a lot of wine, so there's a potential for palate fatigue even though [Frank Morgan, the director of judging the Virginia Governor’s Cup Wine Competition] does a nice job of trying to keep it running smoothly.

And in the case of California, it just tickles me that they got to be thinking out in California, you know, with a little bit of angst or cognitive dissonance or something, and thinking, “Virginia?! Who are these guys getting these gold medals?!”

I want to pivot and ask about the recent regional frost that happened on April 21. How is the winery faring since that event?

Well, we're still figuring out what our loss is, but it was substantial. What you heard originally from people was 50% to 90%. We're certainly in that range. I know individual vineyards and individual blocks that were not affected at all for various reasons. Ours was variable too, but most ours got hit pretty much across the board. There are people that clearly are at 100% loss, so that's really rough for them.

I saw on some of the online forums that there was some chatter that people trying to band together and support the wine community and help the vineyards that are hardest hit. How is the community coming together from your point of view? What is being done in the background between winemakers?

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure what they can do except if they've got wine in the tank to sell to each other. We have an open market all the time for bulk wine and grapes. If somebody's got extra grapes when they get a little bit before harvest, they'll announce that, but I don't think there's going to be much grape sales this year.

And also maybe most people are going to be saying, “We need to hoard what we have because we don't have supply coming in the next year.” A lot of it depends on how much inventory you have and whether your sales tend to be going up or declining.

It's very nice for everybody to rally around the industry and for consumers to do that. Buying extra wine always makes us happy, but I'm not sure there's a lot of sort of collaboration per se that could be done among all of us that have gotten hit. We're all kind of in the same boat.

So there's no word that the state's Department of Agriculture or anything is going to be trying to stimulate the wine industry? I saw that there was a survey that was out trying to get a true sense of the damage.

The purpose for that is twofold. One is to have a waiver to allow farm wineries to bring in more fruit from other states, which I'm sure that waiver will be granted. We don’t plan to bring in wine from outside Virginia. We're very passionate about Virginia and being estate grown and local and authentic and everything. But, you know, that's a reality. There's a fair amount of fruit that comes in already from California. It's kind of a dirty little secret.

But the other reason is that maybe the legislature will cough up some money to help people through financially. There's not much that they can do on a collective basis to make more fruit or more wine exist out of the blue.

One thing that makes DuCard stand out is your sustainable environmental practices. How did your green practices square up with the regional frost and tackling this whole situation?

I don't think it either contributed or hurt. I mean, it's just a different dimension. It just has to do with how much I suppose you care about the environment and how much you're willing to act in it and invest on it. Most green initiatives in the winery and tasting room are more expensive. It's more expensive to be green than it is to be traditional.

I mean compostable cups cost more than cheap plastic cups, but we do it anyway because we think it's the right thing to do. So being green doesn't necessarily help you with your crop yield or whatever. It's just a different dimension.

You mentioned that there's a considerable amount of grapes from California — that it’s sort of the dirty little secret for the region. I know you've written extensively about this, writing in 2017 about how you wanted the industry to tighten up what qualifies as wine from Virginia. Now that it's many years later, how has that played out in your mind with keeping wine that's authentically Virginian?

Yeah, it has, and it wasn't just me. Our industry got together and worked with the legislature, and in fact, tightened the rules. That was in about 2022 or 2023. They tightened up the definition of what a farm winery is and that you have to grow grapes and you have to make wine. That was a broad industry consensus.

Obviously there are some people that you know wouldn't want to go along with it, but they didn't speak up too much because the direction of it was pretty clear. People had used very narrow readings of the regulations and everything to kind of take advantage of it in a way that we thought was detrimental to this state industry.

Changes were made, and it's pretty unusual that an industry goes to its legislature and says, “We'd like more regulation on us. We like the regulation to be tighter.” But that's what we did and that was passed without any big complaint about it.

As of this past week, there was news that Veritas Vineyards had agreed to sell to a local business group. And, of course, Barboursville Vineyards was sold as well. How are you interpreting these big wineries for the Virginia wine scene being sold and changing ownership? Is it a is it a confirmation of just how special the region is? Or is it something else?

I think in the case of [Veritas], the founders are about 80 years old or so. And of their kids, George is the president and Emily is the winemaker still. I think it's fabulous that the Hudson seniors could sell it out and monetize. They've only been doing this for 30 or 40 years, you know? So it's just generational, and that's fine.

I think Barboursville is probably a little bit of a special case. I think it's driven by the whatever Zonin family issues they're having over there — legal issues or something. And Lucas is still in place.

I think you can’t read too much into that. They're just two large transactions that happened about the same time, but for different reasons.

But there's a broader issue separate from that though, and that a lot of the early wineries are still around and people aren't getting any younger. So I do think there's going to be more generational turnover for certainly, but that's not a bad thing or a good thing particularly.

And what about you, Scott? 

Well, I’m not getting any younger either – young at heart still I hope. My winery would never be a candidate for an investment group or a hedge fund or whatever – too small, too personal if that’s the right word. It’s sort of a Cheers Bar and an end of the road escape, so it’s more a matter of finding someone who could take it over seamlessly and keep the vibe going.  Which ultimately would be good for everyone, whenever.

How do you feel like there is a younger generation of winemakers that are stepping up and taking the baton? The winner of this year's Governor's Cup, Corry Craighill, started her own label. It seems like there are some younger winemakers waiting in the wings and try some new stuff.

Yeah, don’t confuse owners versus the winemakers. The winemakers have always been fairly young and vibrant here, and lots of new talent is coming in and coming up the ranks and everything. It's the owners! It's the guys who founded the winery, and who are maybe involved with wine making, but aren't the day to day winemakers now. They're getting old, and that's, that's what's triggering sales.

What's really generating excitement with you right now and amongst your peers?

Well, I think it's a lot of things, but one of them is seeing Virginia getting some traction on the national stage. We do some head-to-head against California and against Europe, and we hold our own pretty well with our top wines. And to have national publications talk about Virginia, I think all of that is really fulfilling because it’s been a long time coming.

We're several generations in and you kind of have to thank the pioneers who are long gone and long out of business. They started to prove that you could do it and have a chance to be successful with it, so I think that's really fulfilling. It also brings more traffic in the tasting room, which is pretty important.

But also seeing some of these new varieties come in and be successful. Sometimes it's a little bit of a new bright, shiny object thing, but Albariño, for example. We planted some, but there are people that have planted it a few years earlier than us and it's working out very nicely. And so that's great!

Twenty-five years ago when I planted, nobody knew what Albariño was. I certainly didn't, and so it's kind of fun to see us reach out and have success with some other varietals. It just adds to the overall excitement.

From an environmental standpoint, with climate change and the forces that come with that, are more varietals that have become amenable to the Virginia's climate? Is Albariño a good example of that?

Well, I think so. We chose [Albariño] in part because it comes from a little county in Portugal that's known for hot and humid summers. That's pretty much the Piedmont here, so we thought it would be good from that standpoint.

But a lot of people are looking at hybrids. I don't know how close you are to this, but Bordeaux has always been just the five noble grapes, right? They have now authorized new varieties to be planted in their tightly regulated society there in a recognition of climate change. They've been studying them for a decade, and now they say, “Okay.”

But it’s kind of funny to be talking about climate change right after we have a massive freeze, right?

Hearing you talk about the freeze and climate change makes me think about another recent phenomenon, lantern flies. How are you preparing for them? Their prevalence coincides with a really key part of the growing season.

Well, either A: We're all going to die, or B: We will get through it somehow or another. There have been generations of invasive insects before, and we've dealt with them.

There are a couple [of other invasive species] that they were going to “kill us all” and didn't end up amounting to much five years later. Nature adapts.

But hope isn’t a strategy here. We're working hard to keep them at bay. But nature adjusts. There are going to be some insects that learn to eat them and like them as a delicacy.

That was true of stink bugs. Five or 10 years ago, nobody knew what they were. The insects didn't know what they were. The birds didn't know what they were, but the point is that birds are eating them now, or something's eating them now, because they're not nearly as prevalent as they were five years ago. I don't think it's going to kill us! (laughs)

We only have a few minutes left, Scott, so I want to ask a few “softer questions.” The first of which is, if you were to go to a winery that wasn't your own, where would you go?

Oh, gosh, we try to go to a lot of them! It's not like the restaurant where you're just going to go to your one or two favorites.

It's hard for all of us to get out anywhere, but I'd like to try some of the new ones that I haven't heard of and there are also some that are sort of contemporaries of ours that have always been high quality that I go to.

It's not so much the individual names as it is philosophy of trying some of the new guys and also continuing to stay in touch with your peers and colleagues.

I’m not really big on saying, “These are the three that I like to go to.” Let individual consumers do that.

And I think the kind of coverage that you’re planning on providing will be great for that purpose – currently the big publications all seem to list the same ten wineries, who are already the best known. Where’s the journalistic value in that, right?

There are a lot of great places that are tucked away, that don’t get or can’t afford big time publicity – sure, DuCard but not just us who is flying under the radar.

This is a complete hypothetical, but if could grow any grape varietal in Virginia, what would it be? Is there ever a varietal that you dream growing if the conditions were right?

Oh, everybody wants to grow Cabernet Sauvignon if they can. Almost all of us have tried, and almost all of us have taken it out.

We're not going to compete with California. It’s the “granddaddy,” but it's super late ripening, and we run out of summertime before we can get it ripe.

An under-ripe Cabernet Sauvignon doesn't do anybody any favorites, especially since California does it so well.

I think if you go around almost every winery that's been around 10 years or longer, they'll show you a spot on their property where they tried to grow Cabernet Sauvignon heroically, and ended up giving up on it.

We’re delighted to have what we have. Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and other varietals have worked very well for us!