By Thomas Heath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 19, 2007

John Kent Cooke for years devoted himself to the red burgundy of his beloved Washington Redskins, of which he was president under his father and team owner, legendary entrepreneur Jack Kent Cooke.

But these days a new shade of red has a claim on John Cooke's heart: the red Bordeaux-style wine produced at his new Boxwood Winery in the Virginia horse country.

Cooke, 66, has poured millions of dollars into Boxwood, which occupies a corner of his sloping, 150-acre Middleburg farm. He hired a top local architect to design the four buildings at the state-of-the-art winery, which is made from glass, concrete, stainless steel and Virginia fieldstone. He paid the French government a royalty for certified grape vines. He bought an expensive, high-tech bottling machine from Italy and hired an up-and-coming winemaker to oversee everything from the growing of grapes to the blending of wine.

To lure wine lovers, Boxwood opened a wine bar in downtown Middleburg, complete with a machine that allows wine to stay open for days without spoiling.

"Everything has been done first class, and not a penny has been spared," Cooke said. "French Bordeaux is my favorite, and that's why we are trying to make the same stuff. It's all the best."

While Cooke minds the business side, his stepdaughter Rachel E. Martin, 36, oversees the wine production and marketing.

The plan is to produce 5,000 cases a year, or 60,000 bottles, of high-end Bordeaux-style wines for sale to exclusive restaurants, hotels and well-heeled oenophiles. The bottles will retail for around $45, but could sell in restaurants for around $60, Martin said.

Martin said the winery's first homegrown wine, known as estate wine, will be a 2006 vintage and will be bottled this February. Boxwood is now selling wine from grapes that it purchased elsewhere because its own vines took a couple of years to mature.

"We are using the highest-quality grapes that we could find on the market," Martin said. "I kept it as a boutique winery so we can be able to control the quality. That's all that really matters for us. It's manageable. We want to be something special. We don't want to be enormous and have to compete with Gallo."

Keeping it small will add to the challenge. Gerhard von Finck, owner of the nearby Piedmont Vineyards and Winery, said it will be difficult to earn much of a profit without producing larger quantities of wine and bringing in more people for tours and tastings to take advantage of economies of scale.

Von Finck said Piedmont has 13,000 paying customers a year, many of whom will spend no more than $20 for a bottle of wine.

"Once you get over $30, it's going to get really difficult to sell Virginia wine," said von Finck. "There are a lot of California wines, Oregon, Washington and Australia, and they are a lot cheaper. Who is going to pay these very high prices?"

Cooke said he expects to make a profit on the operations but will probably not make back his capital investment during his lifetime. Cooke would not disclose his investment.

"Of course I want to make money at it, but it's more at this point a labor of love," Cooke said. "My heirs will probably make money when they sell the property. Almost the same thing as the Washington Redskins."

The Redskins did not turn much of profit until 1997, when the team moved from Washington's RFK Stadium to its current home at FedEx Field in Landover. Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997, and his estate sold the franchise two years later to Daniel M. Snyder for $800 million. The Redskins are now one of the most profitable teams in professional sports and are worth more than $1 billion.

After failing to buy the team from his father's estate, John Kent Cooke moved to Bermuda. In 2001, he returned to Middleburg, where his father had lived, and bought his current farm from the Rosenthal family, which owns auto dealerships. The farm was once owned by Gen. Billy Mitchell, the controversial general known for advocating American airpower following World War I.

"My wife and I wanted to settle down on a farm in Middleburg in 2001, and the best way to justify the farm was to have a vineyard," Cooke said.

Before launching their venture, Martin attended Napa Valley College in 2003, where she studied the science of winemaking. She also spent time at the University of Bordeaux, where she learned how to evaluate wine. After talking to a wine consultant, she and her stepfather decided the soil and climate were best suited to producing Bordeaux-style wines.

They bought special French grapevines -- called clones -- that could be grafted onto U.S.-grown root stocks. The goal was to grow high-quality grapes while resisting a small root-feeding bug, phylloxera. She hired Adam McTaggart, a winemaker from Ontario, Canada, in 2005 to manage the vineyard and make the wine.

Among the 12 employees are four at the wine bar and four vineyard workers. The vineyard grows five kinds of Bordeaux grapes, including merlot, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, petit verdot and malbec. The winery will bottle two labels of Bordeaux. Topiary will be a blend of merlot, cabernet franc and malbec. The Boxwood label will blend merlot, cabernet sauvignon and petit verdot.

McTaggart eventually wants the wine to be among the world's best, sharing shelf space with such highly regarded brands as Cheval Blanc and Rothschild Opus One.

"We have lofty aspirations," he said.