For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke to the passionate and dedicated winemaker Maya Hood White of Early Mountain Vineyards in Virginia. Maya has been at Early Mountain for over ten years, working both in the vineyard as vineyard manager and in the cellar as winemaker. At Early Mountain, she has cultivated a wealth of knowledge around sustainable vineyard practices in a tricky region, focusing on the connection between variety and site selection that creates expressive and terroir driven wines.
In this issue, we take a look at Quaker Run Vineyard and get technical with vineyard practices, biologics and sprays, lees aging, and ambient fermentations. We also touch on the Virginia winemaking cultural landscape and how the region has changed over time. I’m so excited to have Maya on The Fizz, whose expertise and love for her work jumps off the page.
Margot: You were born in California, so I imagine wine was a part of your life growing up?
Maya: My family wasn't in the industry at all, but it was always around in Santa Barbara. My folks would go to tasting rooms and I'd tag along as a kid. It wasn't anything crazy special, but I remember always being interested in learning about it.
Margot: Did you have that bug growing up, being interested in wine? You went the engineering/math route. What happened there?
Maya: I come from a family of engineering and wine was always a curiosity, but I think I let inertia take over when I was in school. I actually love math. Way back when polymer chemistry was big, I had the realization that the world does not need more plastics. You start separating it out—that's a cool thing to learn about, but do I want to do that? I did work in a corporate environment in a cubicle in a field that I wouldn't say I loved. I was like, I don't know if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I was pretty early in my twenties at that point and I had lost a family member that I was really close to. That catalyzed for me that I didn’t want to keep doing this work. I didn’t want to keep not enjoying my days.
I’d always enjoyed wine, I'd loved learning about wine, who makes wine. Even as you're figuring out a career path, nobody tells you that wine could be a career. Oftentimes in the United States, we're so disconnected from where our food and consumables come from. That's just nothing that ever occurred to me.
I started out working a vintage to see if I liked it. I knew it wasn't going to be sitting around drinking wine all day. And I did, it was interesting and very physical, but very engaging in so many different ways. It’s the interdisciplinary qualities of the field that kept me really interested. I said okay where do you go from here? I figured I probably want to go to school for this. The more I learn, the more I realize that I need this sort of background.
I got my Master’s at U.C. Davis. I was taking prerequisites for microbiology, which arguably is very needed for that program. I was still working harvests, still working in a winery learning how to do the lab work in a winery setting and taking prerequisites for grad school.
Margot: What brought you out to Virginia from there?
Maya: My family had been out here in Virginia, and another relative had a health obstacle. I wanted to come home. I knew I really liked East Coast viticulture and wine making, so it would be a good fit. I often joke that I found Early Mountain in a roundabout way, but even before that I worked for Kristy Harmon and managed to finish my thesis during harvest. She was very supportive of that—I would never recommend doing that. Harvest is not conducive to writing anything, but she always made a point to make sure I had the time. Then I wound up at Early Mountain and I've been here ever since.
Margot: Amazing. I want to go back to your U.C. Davis days. The more people I talk to about going into winemaking, they end up in two camps. There's the go to school camp, it's important, and then there's the just intern and work with a winemaker camp. What did you take from your experience?
Maya: I’ll say totally upfront. I don't think you need a degree to make wine. Most people, a lot of people don't have it. I don't even think U.C. Davis teaches you how to make wine. They teach you problem solving, so when you encounter certain issues again and again, you can figure out what to do. Many people can figure that out on their own without going to school for it. For me it was important because I came from a totally different background, again, having never taken a microbiology class—like I could not focus a microscope. I use a microscope to look at our native fermentations today—it’s important to know how to use it! I think I fall weirdly between the two camps, and I think it depends on where you are.
Even in Virginia there's not really this sort of educational infrastructure for teaching or viticulture terminology as there is on the West Coast. So I think if you were to stay on the West Coast, these sorts of degrees and these sorts of institutions are more common, so it seems less like of an anomaly not to have a viticulture degree here.
There's such a diverse group of people that are interested in winemaking here. Especially nowadays, with this younger generation, I always wonder—how did you get here? And you don't expect, oh, I went to school for it, or my family did this. We don't have that on the East Coast. I think that's so special. It's a positive thing in some ways, but you've also wound up with programs like the Winemakers Research Exchange that started in Virginia because there's not the institutional infrastructure and education possibilities and private equity and winemakers. Overall, everyone wants to learn because we are in this dynamic field and we're growing and changing seasonally.
In Virginia, I wouldn't say you need a degree. In California, it's just more common than I think people expect. But I knew that was the right path for me.
Virginia's still unique in that way because we don't have as many jobs, there's not as many larger production facilities. So if someone's dedicating the time and the financial resources to go to graduate school, there have to be the jobs there to sustain that sort of program in the state. I don't know if we're there yet, but conversely, I think there's still a really great group of people that are supplementing the information and the research that you would get in those sorts of programs in a more grassroots way, if that makes sense.
Margot: It does. Do you think that the community in Virginia is growing, like you're saying, we're not there yet and the jobs aren't there yet. Do you see that moving up or expanding?
Maya: I do. I think as we have more people investing in vineyards and looking to do large projects—well, I don't want to say large, but I think Virginia is so special and unique because it was built from the ground up. People said hey, I've heard grapes may do well here I have this family land. I'm going to plant a small vineyard. This industry was really built on the backs of those people and we've learned so much. But now it's taking the next step. We can't just plant anywhere and whatever we want.
Do not plant the wrong variety in the wrong site. You're going to have to try way too hard to farm it. That is not cool, that is not okay. But similarly, people go, here's the kind of wine I might want to make. I'm pursuing the site to do that. There's a lot more of these very intentional projects coming up and it's something that we've talked a lot about as a community.
We all take interns during harvest, but sometimes we have a hard time finding interns, but then doubly, if there are not always full-time opportunities in the state, how are you drawing people in if they're not able to stay? I do see that changing and there's a lot more of a dynamic movement. Even since coming back to Virginia, I've seen people that I've worked with where we'd love to keep you. We already have our full-time crew, but I'm able to connect them with other people. I have a great person you should talk to them about the work.
Margot: You spoke about matching variety to site. How you do that matching—do you have the information that you need to make the right choices, or are you still experimenting to find that perfect match?
Maya: We have a lot of information. I think there are still varieties that people are exploring. Obviously there's a lot more Petit Manseng that we have invested pretty heavily in. I joke that it’s the only thing I want to grow at this particular site. I'm surprised sometimes at the diversity and varieties at some sites, like chances are where you're putting Chenin Blanc is not where Cabernet Sauvignon is going to thrive. That still happens, but I understand too, and sometimes it feels maybe a little too judgmental to say that because how else are we going to learn?
There is information out there. I have dense, heavy soils that are relatively low lying with very little relative elevation. That's probably not your Cabernet Sauvignon. But there are still people who say well but that's my favorite variety. That's what I want to plant. There's still that kind of obstacle. Maybe that's just a maturity issue in the region, but that's where I think newer generation of winemakers and winegrowers are coming in and being like what are we doing?
Virginia was so excited about Viognier for a while. Full disclosure, we don’t participate in Viognier [laughs]. It’s such an annoying and quirky vine where every few years it has primary bud abortion and just, oh, look, no fruit. That does not seem like a sustainable approach to growing, aside from how people are choosing to farm it. I think people are learning and growing—people haven't always been digging soil pits, for example. Even the way people have amended soils in the past, rather than just putting some dolomitic or lime down. There are sites you still find that have been amended with potassium. So that's what you avoid. Even just the idea of let's soil sample and see what's there, which I think is a very normal approach for great growing doesn't always exist in an industry that doesn't have easy access to that educational and institutional support.
The hill I will die on is the right variety for the right site. Sometimes you don't hit it right. We have a mountainside site Quaker Run, it's about 10 miles as a crow flies, takes a half hour to get to from the winery. I had inherited it when I came on full time. I decided to come back, Vineyard Manager was part of my title at that point, and there had been vines that were ordered previously that I inherited and put in the ground, and some of it was Cabernet, some Malbec, and this is the site where all of our extractive reds are.
I was like, huh, interesting. The logic was that from all of our sites, if it's going to do well, it's going to do well here. And surprisingly, or not surprisingly, it didn't do well. So I appreciate that we've had the support to be like, great, get rid of it. Replant with something that does do well. The first year I had worked with Tannat, I was dcared because of everything I heard. People were very dramatic about it. They're like, it's not cold hardy. It can dry on the vine. I hilled Tannat up for so long, I thought the cold's gonna get it. It has not got it, but it's the right site. We have great air flow, it's not sitting in a swale. It's just planting techniques that are, I would say normal, but just applied in a slightly less traditional area.
Margot: Did you choose to bring in Tannat? Why bring in a new variety? Why this variety?
Maya: To be honest, before I got here, a small bit of plant material was ordered and that's what I was working with. So I was like I'm not excited about this. It was a very tiny amount, under a half acre in one block. Then we had a little bit more that we put in another block and slowly I was like, once you get over the learning curve of it—it always looks nutritionally deficient in a way. If you look at it from far away right after it breaks bud, it's so cute. It has the fuzziest little grow tips. It almost looks like it has a little cotton ball on the top. It has a really annoying squirrely young vine character, but it has high potential alcohol and high sugar to begin with, and high acid.
Once you get over the, oh, this is different to work with, it winds up in this really cool place and over time I wanted more of it to the point where we put more in, in subsequent years. It took us a few years to get there. We did a small planting in 2020. We'd only really started working with picking those grapes to begin with in ‘17. We started ordering more material in ‘18, ‘19, went in ‘20, and we've actually put in the more, in 2021 and 2022. Even as of last year, we went ahead and removed a large chunk of this old vineyard, some of which did have some virus, and we were expanding as well. Then even some of these younger plantings that had got hit with cold in 2020 and we were struggling to establish them, I was like, this is the time to do it.
That site had been planted, the main part in about 1999, 2000. East/west plantings, wide rows, old school Virginia planting. When we planted, we did close spacing, more north/south seven foot rows, meter spacing. And I was like, we need to reorient this vineyard so we can pull out that large east/west portion.
Margot: Are there grapes that you're looking at into the future where you're like, oh, I can't wait to experiment with this or that, or, I think this is gonna really work here?
Maya: Tannat is one of those because we just had so little, and Petit Manseng. There's always been varieties that surprised me, though. Like Sauvignon Blanc. I am a perpetual cynic. I'm like that's not gonna work. I'll try it, but that's not gonna work. Like it's a tiny little grenade of a cluster. I was so wrong. I was humbled by it. It has such interesting characteristics that even Japanese beetles won't touch it. You can just let it be. Birds love it, so we put birding up. I was so stunned by that. We put in a little bit more so we're trying to try things in a reasonable way.
Quaker Run has such limited space, we will be at about 23 and a half acres planted out. That's essentially the size of that site. It abuts Shenandoah National Forest, there are beautiful trees around it, but we're not looking to take out a bunch of trees and expand it further. Tannat is such a special and important variety for us. It's not the primary variety, but it's getting to be close. It's an interesting way to work with that site.
Petit Manseng is one that I fought even years ago, fought really hard to plant more of. We've had a small parcel at Early Mountain since I got here, it's about two acres. I was able to expand that by another two acres. There was some Cabernet Sauvignon that we had been planted in probably the very early stages of this vineyard that we were able to pull out. I joke that it was our hydroponic Cabernet Souvignon. It was in the highest water capacity part of the vineyard. The funny part is it almost looked healthy because it was drowning so much. We pulled it out, put in some drainage too. We've been doing this consistently and the largest blocks were removed last year that will be replanted with Petit Manseng.
There's something that breaks my heart about a vine that's still alive, removing it, but I also joke that we're lazy and we just don't want to have to try hard in the vineyard. The truth is, if you have to try that hard on the vineyard, people can taste it in the wine.
Margot: Absolutely. You mentioned briefly Japanese beetles. I'm curious about the challenges that you see in the vineyard, and especially as someone who is thoughtful about sustainability and viticulture, how you approach those challenges.
Maya: So I'll say this has been a really rainy year for us. We utilize hand labor a lot. We have a fantastic crew that's with us for the whole growing season. Many of them were actually here before I got here, and then some are retired and their sons have come on. They know how we like to farm and they've developed and changed with us as we change varieties and implement different approaches. I'm really grateful that they're here and they keep coming back. It's really important to remember that none of us could do what we do without having fantastic people who help us farm.
I would prefer not to rely on chemical intervention. I would rather use hand labor. We have an air impulse deleafer, so it hooks up to a tractor immediately after bloom. It clears out the fruit zone, so that inherently gives you a lot more air flow. It blows the caps out of the clusters too. It’s an effort to get that tractor through because that tractor likes to overheat, but we have a fantastic vineyard manager, Dustin, who's always on there. Some of those types of techniques we love, like our vineyards look like they're hedged really well because we have established leaves. Rot or different mildew and disease pressure tends to be attracted to the youthful softer green tissue. We try and get that out.
Since I got here, we've never used herbicide. We cultivate under the vines, so I like that for mitigating some mildew because downy will live in the soil, so if you're cultivating that does help. We also mow, especially in these watery years, trying to keep letting some of the grass suck up moisture. I use a lot of clay. The clay helps with so much pest pressure that we have up here. People never like the look of it, but it does so much. I will put it on after rain too or before rain. I've had great success with a lot of biological applications too, and it sounds like a really simplistic thing to say, but it's that integrated pest management. It's not any one thing, it's all the things at the right time.
Margot: What kinds of biologics are you using?
Maya: We've also used a lot of calcium. There's certain calcium that have silica in them. They're organic, but that will help deter downy as well. I have used milk and whey, and part of it was actually to emulsify, an orange oil too. Milk is a great emulsifier. You can just dump the orange oil in the sprayer. I try to stay away from dairy products though. I was raised vegetarian, and I want to use those products responsibly. My mother is vegan. There are different types of oils people can use. Exactly contrast to what I just said, a fish oil, or a seaweed extract. We tend to use a lot of the seaweed extract less of the fish oils. That's part of almost every spray.
I'll work with the vineyard manager—he was my assistant when I was a vineyard manager. We've been able to devise some of these programs together. There are some biological bacterial strains out there, and they're all very similar too. I think of them as outcompeting in many different ways. I'm lucky to work with somebody like Dustin who is the best scouter. If I get pretty cynical or very paranoid about I'm gonna miss something, he will catch anything and he is on it.
Margot: It sounds like you do a lot of experimentation in the vineyard. Would you say that you're experimenting in the winery as well?
Maya: I would like to think so. It’s more of a wine growing team. It definitely starts in the vineyard and the idea is we can only mess it up in the vineyard. We do experiment with maybe skin contact or fermentation vessels or fermentation timing. We work only with ambient fermentations. I always feel like I need to knock on wood.
One of my favorite projects we started in 2018. We drove up to New York. 2018 was a pretty rainy vintage but this winemaker that we talked to, he was like I have this tank of Riesling fermenting on some old lees. Do you want to taste it? He pulled the lees out of the bottom and they're so fresh and so delicious. I remember my boss at the time was like, I don't wanna try that. I've always hoarded lees—if we have some that came out of Chardonnay, put them in with the sparkling if they're getting ready to bottle sparkling. I'd rather they're a little lees-y, I think there's fun and nuance in doing that and can add character in different ways.
We had a ten hour drive back from the Finger Lakes trying to outrun the storm and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was like I gotta try this with Petit Manseng. It's a high acid variety. It has high potential alcohol. We hadn’t bottled our 2017 Petit Manseng. I waited until we had the 2018 juice, immediately took the ‘17 wine out of it, left all the lees at the bottom, put the juice directly on top. Did not touch the barrel. Did not clean the barrel. Left the lees. Totally different fermentation kinetic, like it was wild, so fast. If you're working with an ambient fermentation, especially with a high osmotic pressure, like high sugar wine, high acids, it’s not always the fastest process. It goes through malo early. Everything they teach you in school—and this is where you have to work against what you're taught—is that you don't want your wine to go through malo mid fermentation because that is ripe for spoilage, but then when you step back and go that's using commercial strains where they're meant to be highly competitive. We're just letting it be.
We have a full lab here, we can run the VAs till we're blue in the face. We can check the malo. So there's safety in being able to do that. That project, I've since turned it like perpetually. It felt like a solera of lees has ended up being a really important part of our team thing. The following vintage, we loved it in the blend. So come 2019 as I sized it up, I moved it to a thousand liter barrel, and we've been building on that and doing the same protocol on that ever since. That ends up making it better.
Margot: That's fascinating. Is it that you're using the previous years lees and then changing it up every year, or is it literally like a solera style?
Maya: It is a solera style. I'm starting to go through maybe too many lees in this barrel. I may need to remove some, because this past year I'm like, okay, so it's reductive. That's fine. It's always reductive. But the level of turbidity, and I tend to do a pretty high turbidity fermentation for Petit Manseng anyway, but this is so many lees. I joke that we don't actually know how many lees are in that barrel until we have to rack up the wine. But it is truly all the lees dating back to 2017 in that barrel. But it's not as much as you think. It's not half the barrel. I think there's probably like maybe 10% of the barrel. That’s where I'm like, I think that's probably a little too much. This year we're starting another one. We're going to start another perpetual because we're planting so much. It’s now a defining character to our Petit Manseng and I don't want to lose that percentage balance.
Margot: You've been at Early Mountain now for ten years. How have you seen the change over time, both at Early Mountain and as part of Virginia wine culture in general?
Maya: What is the saying? The days are long, but the years fly by. It's like that. We planted some in ‘15 and I was like, when are we ever going to see this fruit? We're putting so much effort into it. Even looking at the Quaker Run planting next year. Last year is when I ordered everything, and last year is when we started making decisions. You think, okay, that's two years from when we'll put in the vines and then another three years. Maybe it's an age thing, but it goes by so quickly. Even the Tannat Dustin had planted a couple years ago. We got the first real crop off of it last year and I'm like, that flew by. Didn't we plant it last year? Which we definitely did not.
I think what really thrills me is seeing how everyone here has embraced the correct varieties. This is the biggest endeavor for Quaker Run, and that really keeps me engaged. We try to do less, but obviously there’s intervention and we’re planting new vines, but in the long run, that’s important. It's been really exciting to be part of the regeneration of this site and even rehabbing how these sites are farmed.
When we go at the end of the season and we root cut to try to force growth downwards, I remember somebody completely losing it. You're gonna kill all the vines! I'm like, it's gonna be fine. Bu then there's that little brief moment where oh gosh am I killing them? No, I'm not killing them. This is what we normally do. Seeing all that come together in, both the work we do in the cellar and as the vines age, there's something so beautiful about it. It's cool when you get to first pick an older vine, but then seeing where they end up five years down the road and go I remember how squirrelly you were, and it gives you like such a cool context for them.
As much as I think of vintages and wines in a very emotional way, even some of the most challenging vintages, those are my favorite wines to try because I know if it's maybe not as extractive and big as this other really fantastic vintage, but look at how amazing the site did because it's the right fit. That to me is like the most special thing.
Margot: That's awesome. Have you seen the Virginia wine culture change around you?
Maya: I have. There has been a lot more focus on site. The beauty of Virginia is that it’s so site-specific. It’s not just oh here are the varieties that do well in Virginia. This is is my hot take. I think the AVAs here are rather arbitrary. It's not a really well established growing area that has very specific AVAs where oh, I can taste that here. So it's so much about site and I think people are embracing that more because what’s the point of making cookie cutter wine? We as a community are pursuing quality and looking to really put our wines out there for people to see. I think as more people do that they find there is something really special and nuanced versus just going, yeah, great Viognier or Cabernet Franc. It's here's my site, here's why it's unique. One is not necessarily better, but here's the diversity that we have.
This is a pipe dream, but it's really important. You're working in a young region, it’s about getting the wines out there. Most people aren't going to encounter Virginia wine. It's hard to encounter Virginia wine when you're flooded with wines from the West Coast. Something that Early Mountain does is we look to distribute outside of our area specifically with the idea that if somebody is able to try a wine from Virginia and actually likes it, like maybe that piques their interest. I think there’s a younger generation of people that want to know where their wines are coming from. They think about the overall responsibility that comes with consuming these products. I think we're a little bit more aware as a community.
Margot: I hope so! Drink local wine is a slogan that more people are starting to get behind. Thank you for your time and your important work!
Try the fantastic and exciting wines from Early Mountain Vineyards by ordering from their website and signing up for their wine club. The wines are distributed widely—ask for them in your local wine shop. Follow Early Mountain on Instagram to get the latest on their releases.
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This was a fun read about a area I know nothing about. Thanks!