Wine-Dark Old Bay

Deep Creek Cellars in Friendsville, MD, three hours west of Baltimore, is my favorite kind of winery–a boutique operation run out of the home of co-owners Paul Roberts and Nadine Grabania with vines in the side yard and a tasting room added on to the house. The westernmost winery in Maryland, Deep Creek Cellars is 15 miles from Deep Creek Lake State Park and just 11 miles from Ohiopyle, PA, home of the Ohiopyle State Park, miles of the Great Allegheny Passage, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

But Deep Creek Cellars is well worth the trip on its own for old school, natural wines that have gotten the attention of Washington, DC and Baltimore restauranteurs. Natural wines follow time-tested, Old World processes: they use native yeasts that occur naturally on the grapes, are unmanipulated and ulfiltered, and eschew sulfites and preservatives.

We visited in March, when the tasting room was technically closed for the season, but when we called ahead, Paul said to come by in about 45 minutes, which was perfect timing.

Paul, who hails from Pittsburgh, is a retired publications director for the Heinz History Museum where his wife Nadine was a curator. Years before founding Deep Creek Cellars in 1997, Paul apprenticed at the fabled Chateau Montelena in Napa and learned Old World wine techniques.

During our visit, we tasted two whites, a Pinot Gris and a perfectly dry Reisling, and three reds, the Artisan Red (86% Sangiovese), the Watershed Red (98% Cab Franc), and a Pinot Noir. After hearing that I hail from the state of Missouri (where Paul also lived), he ran inside the house for a bottle of Norton, a indigenous American grape that, according to his own book on the topic, remains the official grape of the state and helped make Missouri the second-largest wine producing state in the country prior to Prohibition, which shut down wineries and uprooted vineyards.

Deep Creek’s Pinot Grigio and Cabernet Franc grapes are grown nearby at Bear Hill Vineyard in Allegheny County, while Frontenac and Norton grow on the vines in Paul and Nadine’s yard, on the hillside which they say was the draw when they selected the property, which they’ve found to be best suited to the area’s cold climate and high winds. In keeping with the ethos of natural wine, their approach is not just to identify the grapes best suited to the area, but to let the wine find the expression “best suited to the site–that is, what the wine here wants to be, rather than trying to conform to Eastern industry notions about what such wines should be,” Paul explains. This means that their Cab Franc and Pinot Noir are small-bodied, complex wines that open up beautifully with food–check out the website for recipes to make for pairing with each wine.

Image of front cover of Maryland Wine Passport Booklet. — Maryland Wine Passport book from the program launched in 2010.

In 2010, when I moved to Maryland from Austin, TX, there were 40 wineries in the state. I began visiting them on weekends, covering about half in my first years here, motivated by the Maryland Wine Association’s then-active Wine Passport program. In those years, new wineries were popping up every month–by 2017, the number peaked at 91.

Unlike Virginia’s 300-year-old winemaking history, Maryland’s industry is relatively young, the oldest winery, Boordy Vineyards, founded in 1945. The growth is partly due to the Maryland Winery Modernization Act of 2010 and the start of direct shipping in 2011. I’ll write more about these policy changes later, but in short, they dramatically expanded wineries’ ability to make, market, and sell their products to the public.

But even before these changes, the industry was expanding. From 2005 to 2010, 23 new wineries appeared. These new wineries were not the work of established vintners relocating to Maryland, but second career devotees and young entrepreneurs who inherited long unfarmed family land.

The Maryland Wine Passport included 40 wineries and four spaces for “New Winery.”

I’ve noticed lots of changes since I began visiting Maryland wineries in 2010. Not only has the number of winemakers expanded, but newly planted vineyards have matured, winemakers have adapted to soil and growing conditions, local viticulture knowledge has developed, and larger consumption has allowed for greater and more diverse production. As a result, I’ve found more dry table wines, an ever expanding range of grapes, and an increased quality across the board, beyond early trendsetters and superstars like Boordy and Black Ankle.

In this blog, we’ll travel through the vineyards of Maryland and beyond, linking the stories of individual wineries and winemakers to developments in law, economics, viticulture, and to social and historical shifts, as a new crop of winemakers plants and presses new wines along the Wine-Dark Old Bay.