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“My first thought when I realized we were doing pretty good with this wine,” Pelton says of the 2009 Veritas Viognier that has earned her heaps of praise, “is ‘Thank goodness I have a lot of it!’” |
If, when she was studying infectious diseases in the far reaches of India, Emily Pelton couldn’t imagine becoming a winemaker, she certainly could not have foreseen the day (in 2007) when she’d be named Woman Winemaker of the Year or would be among the industry’s leaders as Virginia wines start to earn a national reputation.
Pouring her award-winning Viognier for First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a State Department function, as she did in March, was probably far out of her imagination, too, not to mention earning the esteem of a leading national wine critic, Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post. Just last month he assembled a panel to taste many of the state’s best Viogniers and declared the Veritas Vineyard’s winemaker’s 2009 vintage the “BRAVO!”—the favorite. Not too shabby for a 34-year-old mother of two and self-professed introvert who thought her career would be in medicine.
Pelton’s parents, Patricia and Andrew Hodson, started Veritas in 1999. Pelton joined them for what would be a one-year stint. But being surrounded by family and working in the vineyards proved too enticing. She stayed. Her early teachers were local masters such as vineyard consultant Chris Hill and winemakers Brad McCarthy and Claude Thibaut. “They’ve shaped who I am,” she says. In time, her confidence grew in her own winemaking and management style.
“To get my master’s in fermentation science, I had to take the GRE. I got a perfect score in the logic section. ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ I thought.
“The field that I’m in, there is a lot of art, but quite honestly, it’s logistics: Make sure the grapes fit in the press. Then everything has to fit in the tank. And you want it full. Then you have to think of the juice in the barrels. And you have to harvest at a certain time.
“If you don’t pay attention to all the details in between, you’re ticking away at the optimum.”
