Rule No. 1 as a winery: Do what you're good at

Much of the fun of the blog, done in this format, is initiating the conversation and then allowing the winemaker or proprietor to run with it. A few weeks ago, chatting with Anthony Vietri of Va La Winery in Avondale, Pa., we got on the subject of how all of his wines have nontraditional names and whether that dissuades people from asking for advice because their tack on winemaking is so unique.

“I’m not saying what we do is for everybody or anybody,” he begins slowly, his thoughts then breaking into a sprint. “It’s literally like if somebody comes to our vineyard and they look at our spacing. I say to them, right to their face, there’s the fence. If I were to own the property on the other side of that fence, the spacing would be different, so it’s basically a matter that you gotta do what works for your spot. That has to do with the varieties, too. You know, we’re very very, very, very, very small, I’m not good at the big things, my family’s not. We’re good at the little things. We like to do that. We like to get to know people. We like to do it that way, but there are other people that are good at completely different things than we are.

“I don’t really like hearing all that dogma we hear in our industry, that, you know, like, ah, well, you should be growing this and you should be doing that. It’s really up to the individuals, you know. If someone wants to grow the best Chambourcin there is, then that’s what they should be doing. That’s what its all about, it’s what feeds your soul. You shouldn’t be going around saying, ‘Oh, so and so is growing this, so I want to try that.’ It doesn’t really work that way. It’s like when people ask me varieties, I’m like, seriously, don’t even waste time on it.

“It’s really about the kind of wine you want to make, then the ingredients to that wine will fall in place,” he continues. “But if you go the other way around, you’re just kind of just chasing your tail. First things first [ask] what do we want to do here, what kind of winery do we want to do? If you’re . . . Chaddsford, then it makes complete sense to have the varieties that people recognize right away [because of their size and scope]. So it would be crazy not to.”

The representatives from the six -- soon to be seven -- members of the Brandywine Valley Wine Trail get together minimum of once a month, says president Vietri. “The meetings that I run are five and six hours long and we spend [that much time] because we all work so hard we never see each other. I know there’s others that get together and I admire that, but its just not something that I can do, but when we do the mettings, that's why the meetings are so long. We really enjoy being together, it's a good time to get work done, [but] we also get to catch up with each other’s families and what’s going on.”