The vineyard on the outskirts of Burkittsville has stories to tell.
“We’ve found musket balls here before, but never an arrowhead,” Rob Deford says as I examine the quartz relic his son Phineas has discovered in the vineyard on a sunny September morning. Its tip and edges only slightly dulled by a sojourn in the soil, the arrowhead speaks of centuries of history along the Appalachian Mountains, long before modern man decided this would be a good place to plant grapes.
The vineyard, which covers 20 acres on a 114-acre farm straddling Gapland Road in western Frederick County, was the site of early fighting in the battle of South Mountain, as Union troops overwhelmed a Confederate vanguard to take nearby Crampton’s Gap in September 1862 and push Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops back toward a bloody and fateful showdown at Antietam.
More recently, and much less dramatically, the vineyard has played a role in the rise, fall and modern resurgence of Maryland wine.
It was first planted to vines in the mid-1970s to supply red grapes to Catoctin Vineyards. Catoctin was part of a heyday of Maryland wine in the ’80s, along with wineries such as Montbray, Byrd, Boordy and Basignani. Then Montbray, Byrd and Catoctin ceased operations during the tough economy of the early 1990s. As neighboring Virginia’s wine industry thrived, Maryland’s languished, hampered by a prevailing belief that it is impossible to ripen wine grapes in the humid, rainy Mid-Atlantic climate.
The vineyard had been abandoned for two years when Rob Deford, the owner of Boordy Vineyards in Hydes, Md., leased it. He was looking for a source of red grapes along the Piedmont ridge, where the growing season was 20 days longer and less rainy than at his own plantings farther east in Baltimore County. But the site, which he named South Mountain Vineyard, suffered from disease and poor rootstock, and the vines were widely spaced in a manner still common along the East Coast. Deford began a piecemeal restoration, but after nearly a decade he realized something more drastic was needed if he was to produce the wines he desired.
“We were hitting a glass ceiling in the quality of our wines,” Deford says, citing an “anemia” afflicting his reds. He brought in vineyard consultant Lucie Morton in 2005, and on her advice he decided to rip out the old, established vines and replant the entire vineyard, using different rootstocks and grape clones and increasing vine density from 660 per acre to 1,663. (Advocates of dense planting say it helps control vigor in the vines and promotes even ripening of the grapes.) He hired a full-time vineyard manager, Ron Wates, in 2006 to oversee the project.
“We were wrestling with so many legacy issues that the way to make improvements on the high-end wines was to act as if we were a new winery starting from scratch,” Deford says.
Deford, 60, is now more than halfway through a 10-year project to transform Boordy’s vineyards in Frederick and Baltimore counties, as well as its entire winemaking program. South Mountain Vineyard today is a patchwork, with plots of three- and four-year-old vines alternating with areas of newly planted ones.
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