Our Story
We planted the first vines in 1995.
Before there was a vineyard.
At the time, the conventional wisdom on Virginia wine was not kind. The grapes did not have the pedigree. The climate was wrong. The soil was wrong. Serious wine, the thinking went, came from somewhere else — Napa, Bordeaux, the Willamette. Not the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
We disagreed. We still do.
Three decades later, Chapelle Charlemagne is a multigenerational family operation. The vines have grown into the land. The people who tend them grew up among the rows. What started as a wager has become a way of working — the kind of patient, attentive farming that you can only do when the place you are farming is also home.
We make everything by hand and in small batches, from our home base in Virginia. Single vineyard. No shortcuts. Each wine is aged for as long as it needs — anywhere from three months to four years — because the bottle is ready when it is ready, not when the calendar says so.
The grapes are the point. Virginia soil is rich and complex. The climate is more temperate than its critics admit. The sunlight is generous. Given the right care, these grapes yield wines with depth, brightness, and a sense of where they came from. We have spent a long time learning what each block of this property wants to grow, and a longer time learning how to get out of its way.
We do not think of wine as a trophy. We think of it as a way of living — something to share at a long table, on a porch, with people you love and people you are about to. Our family makes wine the way our family eats: slowly, together, with attention.
The next generation, in the foothills.
If you visit, you will probably meet one of us. That is part of the point too.