The Fizz #13: Lisa Hinton, winemaker at Maryland's Old Westminster Winery, is not afraid of experimentation
We spoke about the Maryland wine scene, Lisa's passion for experimentation in the vineyard and winery, making their own foeders, and their bright future at Burnt Hill.
For the Fizz #13, I had the joy of speaking to Lisa Hinton, winemaker at Old Westminster winery in Westminster, Maryland, just west of Baltimore. Lisa has been making wine with her siblings on the farm that she grew up on, for ten years. She is rooted in local pride, and consistently creates incredibly varied and exciting wines. Lisa works with over a dozen grape varieties every year, and is often switching things up with different grapes, fermentation and aging vessels, and wine styles—making everything from bold Tempranillo to pét-nat sparkling Chardonnay to canned wine to delightfully sweet vin doux naturel.
In our conversation, we spoke about the Maryland wine scene, Lisa’s entrance into the wine industry with her siblings, and her passion for experimentation. We also touched on new projects, such as her brand new vineyard, Burnt Hill, in Clarksburg, Maryland. I’m always super excited to open one of Lisa’s wines, and I can’t wait to find out what’s coming down the line for this exciting winemaker.
Margot: Can you tell me about your wine background? How did you get into wine?
Lisa: Old Westminster winery is in Maryland, which is not a super well known region for making wine. In 2009, my parents wanted to sell the family farm that I was raised on—they were just coming out of a recession and they were thinking about moving back to where they were originally from. My brother and sister and I were in college and we decided this is something we wanted to preserve. We had a heart for agriculture and for creating a product we could share with our community. Old Westminster was born more out of practicality than out of passion, which I think is unique to this industry. Following that was the passion—we quickly fell in love with the wine industry.
After about two years of research, we planted our home vineyard here in Westminster, which is about 7 acres of vines. We put up a production facility the same year—my dad built that, he’s a contractor by trade. I’m sitting right now in the house I grew up in on the family farm. Part of our model is to create wines that are grown in our home vineyard, but also from other vineyards throughout the state. Our first couple of years—our vineyards took three years to come on—we were sourcing fruit from other growers. From there, it just has grown and been this incredible experience. We’ve gotten bring a lot of people in, and our community has grown, it’s been really fun.
M: When it was time for your family to think about selling, how did you get from farming to wine? How did you decide to start a winery?
L: We just started doing all sorts of research into different types of agricultural products. We were in college, and were really interested in farming something that was value added. We don’t have that much land—twenty acres won’t really give you viable crops. We were hoping to create something our friends and family could get behind and a product we could build a community around. It was quickly narrowed down, and then after talking to a lot of people in the Maryland wine industry, which is booming right now by the way, they really inspired us. We were really driven to get into this business.
M: Do you feel that your chemistry background has helped you in your winemaker role?
L: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting because being a chemist by education, when you’re in college, they’re not training you to go into wine. It’s very much pharmaceutical or med-school oriented. There isn’t much overlap between a chemistry education and wine. When I was a senior, though, I did my senior capstone project on wine, and I interned for a local winery. I started connecting those dots then. Since then, I’ve gone back and done talks at the school about being creative with what your degree is. It’s helpful in the fact that I can understand some of the deeper things that are happening throughout our fermentations, but as far as the practicality of it, it’s been much more learned in the winery than taught in the classroom.
M: In the United States, as opposed to places like France and Italy, winemakers generally move away from their home states, to places like Oregon, California, and Washington. You have a somewhat unique experience of making wine where you’re from. What’s inspiring to you about Maryland wine history?
L: Wine here definitely isn’t new. [An aside: The first commercial winery in Maryland, Boordy Vineyards, opened in 1945. Indigenous people in North America were making wine before colonists ever came to the area, but documented winemaking has been found in Maryland since the mid 1600s. Folks were growing hybrid grapes like Catawba and Alexander in the late 1700s. Check out a Maryland wine history timeline here, and read the Fizz interview with Pascaline Lepeltier, where we talk in depth about hybrid grapes here.] Maryland production was really small and traditionally a lot of sweeter wines were made.
France has a well documented rich wine history that goes back over two thousand years. When we first started out, we thought, well we don’t really know what we’re doing here. What we were most drawn to was the fact that there is a whole story to still be written here. This is just the very beginning. It’s an industry burgeoning with opportunity. The really attractive part of this industry is that you get to be a part of writing that story. There are a ton of people who inspire us—Virginia, which is right next door, there’s very rich wine country there too. It’s been really cool to meet people from around here and to hear their journeys.
M: What’s the culture of Maryland winemaking today? What’s the vibe out there?
L: The vibe is all over the place! [laughs] You’re not going to come to Maryland and experience the same thing at different wineries. Every place has their own personality, and that’s really fun. Within thirty minutes of us, there are maybe four or five other wineries you can get to, and all of them are so different. There’s this really exciting energy when you go to wineries here, because people are really starting to get behind what we’re doing. The Maryland wine industry in general, I mean.
M: In my interview with Lee Campbell, who works with Early Mountain Vineyards in Virginia, she was telling me there’s a real feeling of experimentation there right now. Y’all make a ton of different wines—the Piquette, the Albariño, the Riesling. How do you decide what you’re going to make?
L: [laughs] Yes, we do make a lot of different wines! I have friends making wine in France, and what’s fun about making wine in the US is that there are much looser rules around what we can do. When my friends come here, they’re always like “wow, you grow Albariño and Cabernet Franc? What?!” It’s a lot of experimentation here, and it’s really fun. On our home site, we have 6 different varieties and we also have another farm in Clarksburg, which is closer to D.C., and there we have one huge block of over 100 experimental varieties, and then we have some bigger plantings of Gamay—which is the first commercially grown Gamay in Maryland—some Pinot Noir, which is really hard to grow here, but the site is just incredible and I think it’ll do really well here.
We only grow 50% of our volume here on our home farm, so the other 50% is from growers throughout the state. A lot of times it’s more about what they are growing, what the condition of the fruit is, what is doing well. One thing we push a lot for are hybrids—the hybrids are just incredible. There’s a lot of draw to growing them, and to making wine with them. Honestly, I would rarely turn down something new to work with unless it’s in bad condition. I’d love to experiment as much as possible because that’s the fun of where we are and what we get to do. I’ve been making wine for ten years now—I got into the industry when I was 21 years old. That’s not that long! The more opportunity I have to work with a variety of grapes, I’m always up for it.
M: How do you choose the growers that you work with?
L: Some of it has been trial and error, for sure. We’ve made friends with a lot of them through Maryland Grape Growers Association and Maryland Wineries Association. There’s a whole web of people you get to meet, and a lot of it is building those relationships and starting small with them. A lot of the growers are incredible—they’re super careful and they really care for their vineyards. It’s finding like-minded people who believe it’s a journey to making wine, and not trying to force a vineyard to do what you want. We want to work with fruit that you equally care about as much as they do.
M: Can you talk about what the terroir looks like in your home vineyard?
L: We are on what is called “Ridge Road”. We’re in a unique climate because we’re actually between the Appalachian Trail and the Atlantic Ocean, so we fall into a unique ecosystem. Our home vineyard sits a little under a thousand feet above sea level—it’s high enough that we get really great wind. Sun and wind are nature’s antibiotics. Here we are channery loam over greenstone schist bedrock. If we could do it all over again, you wouldn’t hand pick this site to start on. We hand picked our new vineyard site in Clarksburg which we searched for years for a site like that. Articles have been written about that site—geologists have been talking about how unique those soils are.
Starting on our home vineyard, though, we’ve experienced a lot of success with some of the varieties, and with others, we’ve ripped them up. Merlot, for example, which is not a super cold-hardy grape, didn’t do well on our home vineyard. We’ve since re-planted it with Albariño, which is amazing here and makes really crisp delicious white wines. We have some Chardonel here, an incredible hybrid. It’s been a lot of trial and error, and a lot of learning. When we went looking for our site in Clarksburg, we knew it was going to be something special.
M: In Clarksburg, you’ve already planted vines there?
L: Yes, we acquired the farm in 2016. We farm that site biodynamically. For a little over a year, we prepped soils with cover crops and radishes. Then in spring of 2018, we planted a little under thirty thousand vines. We’ll be getting a small amount of fruit from that site this harvest for the first time ever. We also have harvested some trees there and getting some foeders made out of them. [Foeders are huge, usually oak, casks that are used to age, or sometimes ferment, wine. Their size means they give off less oak flavor to the wine.] Wines that are going to come out of there are really designed to show one specific farm. We also farm bees, mushrooms, and pigs there. It’s just an amazing place.
M: Wow, that sounds magical. One thing I really admire about your work is that you’re incredibly ready to start something new. You had a solera project you worked on, for example, a cider that you did. How do you decide what to experiment with in terms of winemaking?
L: We taste a lot of cool wines that inspire us, but we also make wine that we enjoy. We have a really unique set up in that it’s just the three of us. We don’t have to answer to anyone. When one of us comes up with an idea, and all three of us get behind it, it happens. We don’t have to run it down a chain of people and get them on board, or bring it to a board of directors and convince them it’ll sell. We’re flexible and are ready to make it happen. We have an incredible team around us—our assistant winemaker, she farms apples on her home vineyard close to us, and we did a collab called “Take Me Home”, which is a wine/cider hybrid. She farmed the apples and made the cider here at our facility, and I made the wine. Our team is amazing and they encourage and help us bring those visions to life.
M: That’s such a joy!
L: It is! It’s super fun.
M: You make a line of canned wines that I absolutely love. How did you start with that idea? I feel like y’all were almost on the forefront on bringing these new canned wines into the market in a fun and accessible way.
L: I’d say that was one of our scarier projects that we’ve come out with. It was something that was born out of living here in Maryland. In Maryland, you have access to the beach, to hiking in the mountains, to these amazing endless outdoor activities. You can’t take glass, though. A lot of the wines we enjoy aren’t that accessible—you can’t take them with you. It was a lifestyle product for us. I wanted to take a wine that is thoughtfully made with me outdoors. I knew the pushback was going to come, though. That was a scary project, just because not everybody is super comfortable with canned wine, but I think that doing orange wine in a can—why would you limit it and make it unaccessible? It’s fun!
M: What has the response been like from your community around the canned wines?
L: It’s been overwhelming in a positive way. We have grown the volume to as much as we can from the amount of product we make here, and it has been overwhelming acceptance and support.
M: That’s great to hear. What’s on your radar now—working on anything new that you’re excited about?
L: So many things! I’m most excited about making my first vintage from Burnt Hill, which is the vineyard in Clarksburg. We’re going to take fruit from it for the first time, and the wines that are going to come out of it are going to be really special, and I’m beyond excited to make wines from there. We have some concrete eggs I’ve never worked with before. There’s some fun new stuff we’ll be bringing out this harvest. The foeders, I’m so excited about.
M: Those foeders are really exciting! When people think about oak in wine, we usually think about French oak. Why’d you decide to make foeders out of these trees?
L: We collectively view aging and oak use kind of like a spice cabinet—it’s never meant to be the focal point. It’s only supposed to create some dimension and diversity around your wines. The foeders will have less oak influence, but the wine will still get to interact with oxygen and change and develop. It’s another way to be creative and work with some other materials.
We use Foeder Crafters, who I believe are based in Michigan. The trees that we used were actually ash trees, and they were destroyed by a boar that has taken over a lot of the indigenous varieties that are found here in Maryland. It was naturally already being killed, so in order to upcycle those trees instead of just getting rid of them, we decided to harvest them. We put them on an 18 wheeler, hauled them out to Michigan, where they were dried for the past year and a half. They’re just now being crafted into foeders, so we’ll have them for this coming harvest.
M: That’s amazing, and it’ll be such a celebration to have them back! I can’t wait to try those wines.
L: The focal point of a lot of conversations I’ve been having lately, is that there’s been this rally around creating a community of diverse wine drinkers and makers. The tagline for Maryland is “America in the miniature”, which I think is really cool. Creating wines from here has just brought this community around supporting Maryland wine. Both Erin and I being females in this industry—we’ve gotten more support than ever before, and it’s been such an amazing opportunity. Thanks for being a champion of the Maryland and the U.S. wine scene.
M: Thank you for making great wine, and thanks for your time. I hope we can meet in person soon—I have to make it down to the winery!
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Non-profit pairing: Lisa supports The Boys and Girls Club of Westminster, “which is a program designed to help teens in our community succeed by providing them with care and life skills”. Donate to this important organization here.
You can support Lisa Hinton and Old Westminster winery by buying their wines! You can sign up for their newsletter here, and for their wine club here. Their tasting room is open—I highly recommend safely checking out their beautiful space. Follow Old Westminster on Instagram here. You can also learn more about Burnt Hill vineyard from their videos on YouTube.
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