Apologia
The Education of Pete Verdot
After a hospital based six-week professional lung therapy course, it seemed appropriate to continue and increase the duration and intensity of exercises at a community gym.
The pulmonologist had been luke-warm at best about the program in March 2026, but my lung metrics were not improving without further intervention.
The therapy sessions exceeded expectations by quite a bit and I learned the routines that were effective for my condition on treadmill, seated bicycling and weight lifting. With my rehab coach’s advice, I was cleared to jog again: an inveterate note and record keeper, the spreadsheet went back to 2010, a daily record of weight, exercise, weather and mood. It had tailed off as responsibilities as a winemaker increased from harvest-only, to year round.
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The 2023 and 2024 harvests had been good. In fact, we garnered a number of Gold Medals in the San Francisco Chronicle International Wine Competition and in the annual statewide Governor’s Cup Wine Competition.
But with the winery on the market in autumn 2025, outside consultants and advisers turned out to be unequal to the task of marketing and selling the property, much less managing the complexities of the ongoing operation day to day. The badly considered cost-cutting measures left several large lots of excellent wine I had made, to molder in tanks while management dithered over the expense of bottling. Likewise, the excellent but expensive prior consultants were terminated and incompetents who were less expensive, were brought in.
The 2025 harvest had been compromised by many issues throughout Virginia. This problem was compounded by a consulting vineyard manager who made the uninformed decision to employ spray drones instead of a tractor-pulled 400 gallon CIMA sprayer. Many wineries saw a 40-50% harvest in 2025. Spotted lantern fly (SLF) appeared late in the 2025 season. Our site yielded 15 tons which normally yielded 60-70 tons of grapes previously in 2023 and 2024.
Bottling that year was an uncoordinated mess of competing managers and consultants all wanting to be the lead on ordering bottles, labels, corks and preparing the wine to be bottled, in my opinion a task that should be orchestrated exclusively by the winemaker, not by sales managers or off-site consultants unfamiliar with operations.
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I informed the owner that I resigned my position in December 2024 but would continue until the business was sold to a new ownership at which point budgets and staffing could be reevaluated. I expected change of ownership sometime during 2025.
It lingered on the market another year in (2025 and the first months of 2026) during which three qualified buyers had bid and negotiated, only to be shut down at the last minute. At that juncture, I made good my plan to leave.
I had worked through my two periods of hospitalization in 2025 but these were during the slack period of the winegrowing season. Likewise, I had an excellent part-time assistant who was responsible and thorough, to cover the cellar duties in my absence.
Harvest 2025, with its low yields and my physical/medical state, were challenging to say the least. On April 21, 2026, I watched from the sidelines as vineyards of the entire northeast suffered a severe frost hard upon warm weather that encouraged the fragile emerging stems, only to be killed back by frost.
It took six months to recovery medically to the point of being able to work normally and there had been a year’s neglect at our home farm of 35 acres to address.
Slowly, the medical challenges resolved and there was time and strength to slowly address my home chores in a way that had been impossible for five years.
It had always been my intention to write about Virginia winemaking. For this reason, I spent many seasons in the fields and vineyards, in the crush pads and cellars and supplemented with excellent courses at the Capital Wine School in Chevy Chase. In addition, I took the Cornell Winemaking Certificate online as well as the first three levels of WSET.
This, and my experience as a long time genetics and biochemistry professor, give me a different perspective on the wine industry.
As promised, there will be a book, now a decade in the making, given sufficient interest…