The Field Studies of Deirdre Heekin in Vermont
Deirdre Heekin at La Garagista in Barnard, Vermont.
The Field Studies of Deirdre Heekin in Vermont
What a New Terroir Can Teach Us About Wine
Vermont has quickly and unexpectedly become one of the most talked about and admired regions in the wine world, drawing journalists, sommeliers, and would-be wine growers and makers. But much of what makes Vermont wine so beguiling — its small scale, unusual varieties, cool climate, and largely unexplored terroir — also threatens to limit it. Labor is scarce. Financial barriers to entry are high. State investment and generational knowledge are lacking. The climate is changing. There are not nearly enough vineyards or grapes to meet the demand of wineries or consumers. And the possibilities have only begun to be charted.
Last year, the 30-member Vermont Grape and Wine Council proposed the state’s first American Viticultural Area (AVA). If approved by the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the appellation would cover some 25 vineyards and roughly 115 acres in Addison, Chittenden, Franklin, Grand Isle, and Rutland counties and delineate geographic and climatic features that affect how grapes grow. That would be a leap toward national and international recognition.
Behind Vermont’s rise to prominence is a clutch of dedicated growers and advocates. None have been more influential than Deirdre Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, of the little mountain domaine La Garagista on Mount Hunger in Barnard, Vermont. Among their contributions is a pioneering exploration of the landscape of Vermont wine, which they call Field Studies. In their own vineyards and through collaborations with other growers, they are revealing much about wine, and beyond, in Vermont.
The long, narrow state, almost entirely contained within 43 and 45 degrees north latitude, is surprisingly well within the band at which viticulture has traditionally been possible. It is only that few thought to try and even fewer took the trouble to do in ways uniquely suited to Vermont’s landscape and climate. Vast, spectacular Lake Champlain limns the state’s northwest boundary with New York, the majestic Green Mountains form its central spine, and the Connecticut River to the east forms the border with New Hampshire. The steep climbs and deep forests that make Vermont a mecca for outdoor sports and nature enthusiasts cover elevations from near sea level along the lake to almost 4,400 feet at the summit of Mount Mansfield, its highest peak.
The soils reveal Vermont’s complex, turbulent geological history. The state was the coast of an ancient ocean. Over eons, volcanic ranges pushed in violently from the west, squeezing the geologic layers into the present hills and mountains. Grinding and mixing by glaciers created a patchwork of soils — granite, limestone, quartzite, shale, slate, sandy loam, and clay — a billion years in the making.
Vermont sits at a point where cold, dry air descending from the Arctic meets warm, moist air sweeping up from the Gulf of Mexico. That makes the state susceptible to wild weather. It made headlines this year with an unaccustomed killing frost in May and historic flooding in July. Persistent rain and humidity followed, pushing fungal disease pressure in vineyards off the charts. The year before, the summer was so dry growers began to consider humidity a form of precipitation.
“Vermont wine” still raises plenty of eyebrows. Beyond its improbability in a state associated with skiing and ice cream, maple syrup and cheese, craft beer, and quarrying, it also recalls a short history of wines aimed largely at tourists. But the axiom that new wine regions start out by imitating old ones never really applied. That’s largely due to the quiet, forward-thinking work of growers like Heekin and Barber, along with Ethan Josephs of Shelburne Vineyards, Andy and India Farmer, whose nursery supplies many of the state’s growers with vines, and Todd Trzaskos, an author and winemaker whose behind-the-scenes advocacy for Vermont wine has been key in helping the outside world see its potential.
But Heekin and Barber’s stubborn commitment to small-scale, organic, and biodynamic farming of hybrid grapes allowed the state to avoid detours on its path to recognition. Moreover, their sensibilities — Italian, French, alpine, hedonic, holistic — now mark the state’s wines to a remarkable degree. It is rare that a new wine region develops such a focused, recognizable character in so short a span.
The couple met in the 1980s as students and dancers at Middlebury College in Vermont, graduated, lived in New York City, then married and set off for Italy. There they inhaled the intoxicating food and wine culture, and resolved never to get off the high. When they returned to Vermont, they focused on recreating the Italian culture of hospitality they so deeply appreciated. In 1997, they opened a small, acclaimed restaurant, Osteria Pane e Salute, in Woodstock. For two decades, Heekin ran beverage and front of house, while Barber procured or grew produce for the Italian dishes he cooked. They wrote three books drawn from those experiences.
Heekin, to gain a better understanding of the bottles she offered at the restaurant, launched into experiments with bathtub wine-making, then with backyard grape-growing. She read and tasted. She visited European growers she admired and braved a course on biodynamics taught in French. Again and again, she posed questions and took the answers back to the little experimental vineyard and cellar on Mount Hunger. She worked out answers that, vintage by vintage, made ever-clearer sense for her terroir.
Improbably, Heekin made her first four vintages in a cramped shiplap structure. “We would do all of the destemming, crushing, early fermentation in the barn,” she explains. “Then for the winter, we’d move into an” — equally tiny — “insulated élevage space, with demijohns and one barrel.”
They named their winery La Garagista. The name is in part an Italian play on the 1990s French garagiste phenomenon and in part a tribute to an old garage on the property that Barber later handsomely repurposed into a table and raised beds. Heekin notes that the name is “also sort of a nod to the concept that you didn’t need a million bucks or château to make wine. You could do it with good fruit and good intentions in a garage and that was really all you needed.” The wines gained attention in all the right places. Heekin’s skill and resolve were championed by well-placed early supporters, including Trzaskos, the journalists Rémy Charest, Alice Feiring, and Eric Asimov, and the sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier. Like outsider wines everywhere, these were beloved far from home before they were embraced locally. By 2017, wine had the couple’s full attention. They closed Pane e Salute. Soon after, Asimov hailed La Garagista in The New York Times as “perhaps the most creative wine project in the United States.” Younger growers started knocking, drawn by dreams of a wine landscape they might call their own.
Today, La Garagista encompasses 11 acres, making about 1,200 cases a year from two small sites at the home farm at Mount Hunger and from two larger vineyards in Vergennes and West Addison, close to the eastern edge of Lake Champlain. They make a range of still wines as well as sparkling ones in méthode champenoise, pét-nat, and piquette styles. The winery’s identity is ever-evolving. “Somewhere along the line,” Heekin posted to Instagram this year, “we changed from a small project to a domaine, and somewhere along the line I began thinking of these lands and these vines and fruit trees as Domaine de la Forêt.” That domaine now employs a trio of young growers and makers who have helped broaden the offerings to ciders, inventive co-ferments, and solera-style and botanically infused wines and elixirs. Field Studies joined the fold as a way to bring in new sites, growers, and fruit. But this is far more than a bought-fruit program. It is a way of expanding Heekin and Barber’s scope while preserving a scale that allows them to remain hands-on doing the work they cherish.
Sheep trimming the grass at Ellison Estate Vineyards on Grand Isle, part of Deirdre Heekin’s Field Studies.
Hybrid varieties became Vermont wine’s vernacular in remarkably short order. To understand why, it helps to know a little about hybrids. Grape geneticist José Vouillamoz defines a hybrid as “a cross fertilization between two individuals of two different species.” For wine grapes, this means selecting European Vitis vinifera varieties, such as Pinot Noir or Schiava, for characteristics such as flavor or yield, to cross with wild North American V. labrusca, riparia, rupestris, or other species, selected for traits such as disease resistance, cold hardiness, or suitability to short growing seasons.
This is not genetic modification. It is a process that mimics natural cross-pollination and requires years of trial and selection without any guarantee of good results. Some of the most successful hybrids have a bogglingly long and complex parentage. (Trzaskos points out that in Jancis Robinson et al’s exhaustive Wine Grapes, the biggest fold-out is for Brianna, which has dozens of varieties in its family tree — from Gouais Blanc and Garnacha on the vinifera side to fistfuls of obscure labrusca, riparia, and rupestris varieties to many varieties that are themselves hybrids.) It is this hard-won “grab bag of genetic structure” (in Heekin’s words) that supplies hybrids’ adaptability and resilience.
The business of wine-grape hybridization got its serious start in the late 19th century when a triple threat of North American pests and diseases — the vine louse phylloxera and downy and powdery mildew — were inadvertently introduced to European vineyards. The vinifera vines had no natural defenses and chemical treatments had not yet been discovered. The results were almost immediately catastrophic. Grape breeders sought a solution that would combine North American vines’ native disease resistance with European vines’ desirable wine qualities. Although grafting, not breeding, proved to be most effective, breeders discovered they could develop many desirable traits through cross-fertilization.
The hybrid varieties Heekin and her Field Studies growers favor are mostly the work of a 20th-century amateur grape breeder named Elmer Swenson and researchers at the University of Minnesota. The varieties are primarily the reds Marquette and St. Croix, the whites La Crescent and Brianna, and the Frontenac family — Noir, Gris, and Blanc. Their advent is surprisingly recent. Marquette, for instance, a marquee hybrid for Vermont, was bred in 1989 and commercially released only in 2006. Where “old vine” elsewhere can mean decades old, in Vermont it typically means a plant in its teens or twenties.
Vermont has its own hybrid-specialist nursery, Andy and India Farmer’s Northeastern Vine Supply, in West Pawlet. For over two decades, they have been providing growers across the Northeast with vine material, some 40 varieties currently, as well as expertise. The Farmers have a particularly keen understanding of the conditions the state’s growers contend with. (For a glimpse of the possible future of Vermont wine growing, check the varieties they stock, which include Petite Pearl, Verona, L’Acadie Blanc, and Prairie Star.)
Critics long claimed that hybrid grape wines tasted too much like their wild American forebears: simple and foxy — the latter typically referring to unspecific musky or candied flavors (theories abound on the term’s origins). They cringed at hybrids’ grapey aromas and shrill acidity. They mocked the vines’ propensity for high yields and low quality. But Heekin saw virtue in these supposed vices. The high acidity is ideally suited to the bright alpine-style still and sparkling wines she adores. She recognized that the hybrids’ characters and flavors were suited to sensitive, creative cellar work. She appreciated that the hybrids’ disease resistance gives hope in Vermont’s increasingly unpredictable climate. Perhaps most important, she understood that conventional farming and interventionist winemaking had been holding the hybrids back. When she began to cultivate them with attentive, intuitive care, they proved to be the keys to delicious Vermont wine.
The excitement about Vermont as the next big thing in wine ignores a crucial point: everything about the state’s wine industry is tiny. There are no official figures, but total vineyard acreage may be just 150 to 170 acres; the largest estate is Shelburne, at just 22 acres. “With all the articles that are coming out about Vermont as the next natural wine place I’m like: ‘Stop! Everybody stop. We don’t have any wine!’” says grower-maker and Field Studies contributor David Keck of Stella14 in Cambridge, Vermont. That’s not quite true, of course. Wines from each of the Field Studies growers and La Garagista are available on their respective websites and from a few regional and national distributors. But the quantities are tiny.
The small scale presents obstacles to growers trying to make their wines affordable and accessible. Heekin points out that growers like her must cover recently inflated costs of materials and land, fair labor, planting, trellising, and equipment, as well as weather-inflicted crop losses, which can weigh more heavily on organic growers, who work without synthetic chemicals. Moreover, compared with European wine growers, Vermont growers don’t benefit from government subsidies or inherited land.
“None of us produce enough wine to get economies of scale,” says Keck, “so Vermont wines end up really expensive. We would like to be able to produce enough to bring the price down, so that somebody who wants to try Vermont wine for the first time isn’t dropping 40 bucks a bottle.” He acknowledges the tension between producing at a larger scale and “everybody wanting to keep the small-farm spirit of Vermont.”
After more than a decade of growing grapes, Heekin and Barber have a profound understanding of their particular terroirs. The alpine climate and habitat of the home vineyard, at 1,600 feet, contrasts with those of the low-lying lakeside sites. “From early on, I was very interested in understanding the different terroirs of other parts of Vermont where we don’t farm, for more ways to work with our environment and our climate,” Heekin says. “It’s something that intrigued me personally, but also something I felt would be useful to others wanting to make wine here and to the wider world in understanding Vermont as a complete wine region.”
There is only so much farming Heekin and Barber can do themselves, so they are “always on the lookout for likely collaborations around the state — whatever’s available, as long as the fruit is organic or biodynamic,” Heekin says. To that end, the Field Studies grapes come from four sites that dot the state south to north. West Brattleboro’s Lilac Ridge has young Marquette and Brianna; West Bridgewater’s Red Horse Farm has Marquette and La Crescent; Cambridge’s Stella14 has still older Frontenac Noir; and Grand Isle’s Ellison Estate Vineyard has old-vine St. Croix.
The project is “ever-moving,” Heekin says, because grape sources keep changing. A winemaker suddenly without a cellar has fruit to sell. A hobby grower, harboring a few rows of hidden vines, makes his crop known. But sources dry up, too. Ellison Estate and Stella14 have started using all of their own fruit, and Red Horse Farm, a little vineyard just across the mountains from La Garagista, is also in question. The only constant so far — “a cornerstone of this project,” as Heekin sees it, is Lilac Ridge.
Of Milk and Wine: The Thurber and Kamal Families, Lilac Ridge Farm
At Lilac Ridge, a dairy farm in West Brattleboro in southern Vermont, third-generation farmer Ross Thurber, his wife, Amanda, and their family nurture 600 acres of rolling pasture and forest, 40 head of Holstein cows — and many questions about the future.
Vermont’s identity is bound to its landscape of small farms like the Thurbers’. A 2022 legislative task force report on dairy in the state concluded, “Dairy farming is the core, the blood, and the bones of Vermont.” It’s also vital to the Vermont economy, with more than half of Vermont farmland being used for dairy or related activities and the sale of dairy products accounting for over 65 percent of the state’s agricultural sales, or about 18 percent of the state’s gross domestic product.
And yet, dairy is failing.
Even as U.S. consumers pay the highest prices they can remember for milk, dairy farmers struggle to cover their production costs. This is especially true for Vermont’s 127 organic dairy farms, like Lilac Ridge, whose costs have rocketed. (In 2024, Vermont will spend $6.9 million to prop up those organic farmers.) A generational shift away from cow’s milk to plant-based alternatives is part of the problem. Yet total per capita dairy consumption, in the form of products such as butter, yogurt, and cheese, has been rising significantly. The issue is that dairy farmers are getting paid less for their fluid milk due to oversupply — much of it coming from industrial-scale farms — and less lucrative prices from international markets. “Farmers bemoan declining beverage milk sales because they consider [that] to be the iconic product but also because the prices paid to farmers by fluid milk buyers have tended to be higher,” notes Andrew M. Novakovic, professor of agricultural economics emeritus at Cornell University.
Amanda Thurber studied soil science at the University of Vermont, a background she brought to bear when the Thurbers converted Lilac Ridge to organic. Ross Thurber is a deeply thoughtful farmer poet. (His transfixing volume Pioneer Species supplied the names for a trio of Field Studies wines. At the farm’s roadside stand, his bound poems are set out beside bottles of maple syrup, as if they were another form of farm produce.) As members of the Organic Valley Co-op and as citizen farmers, the Thurbers have been strong advocates for Vermont dairy. “One of the arguments we made to the state legislature in asking them to buttress the Vermont milk industry was the cultural landscape, people having farmsteads on the land,” notes Ross Thurber. “It’s all part of a settlement pattern that’s quite elegant if it works.” On the day of my visit, saws whirred as the Thurbers readied a summer creemee stand. To make their farm economics work, selling milk and produce is just the beginning. They also host a farm-stay Airbnb, vegetable starts, pick-your-own flowers — and a one-acre vineyard.
Shabir Kamal, a California native who came east for college, is an ER nurse who lives near the farm with his wife, Ross’s sister, Hanna Thurber. Kamal’s interest in wine springs from a love of food and travel. Ten years ago, after working a few harvests at La Garagista, he decided to try his own hand at grape growing. He and Ross Thurber scoped out a site at Lilac Ridge. “Tons of wild grapes grow in the woods everywhere there,” says Thurber. “That was part of why we thought, ‘Why don’t we try up there?’”
Shabir Kamal among the vines at Lilac Ridge Farm in West Brattleboro.
They settled on an acre spread over an undulating ridge at 860 feet, swept by gentle breezes, surrounded by achingly beautiful pasture and views of distant mountains, and watched over by aptly named Round Mountain. The site faces south and sits on friable dolomitic limestone interspersed with glacial till. That combination affords excellent drainage, Kamal says, and allows the vines to access water even during extremely hot, dry years.
The vineyard was planted in 2015 with La Garagista as the intended receiver. Kamal and Thurber plowed and disced the field, put in posts and trellising, planted vines. Now seven long rows of Marquette and three of Brianna thrive there. On my visit in late May, a plush carpet of green underlay the high-wire trellised vines, already stretching their arms in the generous warmth of late spring. They’d come through the recent frost well, despite their pronounced elevation.
The vineyard is tended by hand, organically, with a nod or two to biodynamics. For instance, to combat the scourge of Japanese beetles, Kamal uses a sticky foliar spray, carried in a backpack sprayer, that combines nettles and kaolin. Copper, a powerful antimicrobial permitted for organic farming, also comes into play, but he minimizes its use. (As it accumulates in the soil, it can harm microbes and other organisms). He controls the ground cover by hand-scything. That may be a job for sheep someday, but for now the work is accomplished in a day or two with pleasure.
Kamal follows Heekin’s model of letting the vines follow their instincts. To accommodate the natural growth inclinations of Marquette and Brianna, for instance, he has trained his vines on single wires at about shoulder height, and he cane prunes, a method that produces a more controlled number of new shoots and buds, limiting yield. “These hybrids don’t seem to have a super-upright growth pattern like you might see with some vinifera,” Kamal explains. “They droop a little bit and what ends up happening is you get shade problems.” To address that and for added ventilation, he does some leaf plucking.
Grower and vintner are in touch throughout the season, then, navigating between Kamal’s job requirements and La Garagista’s schedule, they zero in on a pick time. The fruit is trucked an hour-plus to the winery, where it sits overnight, is foot-stomped, direct-pressed, then fermented and raised in demijohns until the wine is ready to be bottled about a year later. Kamal adds a few rows every year, and output has edged up accordingly, but for now the wines from this site remain rarities.
As I stood with Kamal in the vineyard, he pulled a chilled bottle of Blood Root Kindle ’22, a Marquette pét-nat Heekin and Barber make from this vineyard, from his bag for us to taste. He recalled the first big harvest at this site, “It was during COVID. We had a bunch of people come, in masks. They said things like, ‘I was supposed to take a trip to Italy this fall and this is a total stand-in.’ You can go to Europe. But you also have this in your own backyard. You’d think Vermont would have that figured out, but no, not fully.”
Old-Vine Island Wines: Kendra and Rob Knapik, Ellison Estate Vineyard
A very different vineyard lies a scenic 175-mile drive north on the low sweep of Grand Isle in Lake Champlain. Kendra and Rob Knapik founded Ellison Estate five years ago, when they purchased 10 acres of vines set within a 50-acre plot. When I visited, it was a socked-in, soaking day, but Kendra Knapik gamely walked the vineyard with me. On a clear day, she told me, the lake and the mountains would be visible. We bushwhacked through thigh-high grasses growing between the vines, talking above the wind, rain, and bleating sheep.
Kendra Knapik at Ellison Estate Vineyard on Grand Isle in Lake Champlain.
Knapik, a trained veterinarian, exudes optimism and energy, a faith that everything will work out, which seems to be an underrated strength among Vermont wine producers. Her vines were planted in the early 2000s by a couple who were part of the first wave of Vermont vignerons. Knapik was taking a viticulture class at the University of Vermont when she learned the Grand Isle vineyard was up for sale. She grew up on the lake, so she knew the climate was beneficial for grapes. It all felt right.
The vineyard is draped over a gentle slope on shallow limestone bedrock that is nearly impenetrable to her vines. “A lot of places in the vineyard you can’t dig down two feet,” she said. The plants struggle, making it a comparatively low-vigor site. Fortunately, the frosts of a week before had done very little damage to her Frontenac Noir, Marquette, and St. Croix. “We are really lucky to be in the islands,” she said. “Anything that was up on wire was fine.”
A flock of 24 sheep mows, fertilizes, and provides playmates for the Knapiks’ three young children. Animals are integral to biodynamic farming. At Ellison Estate, biodynamics includes working with horsetail and nettle tea sprays and the standard biodynamic preparations 500 and 501, made of cow manure and silica. Biodynamic farmers hold that a farm should function as a closed system — just like the earth — without external inputs such as feed or fertilizers. “The reason biodynamics speaks to me is that it’s all about balance,” Kendra Knapik says. “And it makes you farm with intention. That’s a huge part of the success of it.”
An eight-row block of old-vine St. Croix brought Ellison Estate into the Field Studies fold. Heekin fell in love with the fruit and did it justice in the dancing, sparkling red she calls She Can Find the World So. But with a growing number of customers and expanding distribution for her wines, Knapik now needs all her own fruit. Heekin plans to plant St. Croix for herself, but it will take years for her vines to reach the maturity of the Grand Isle fruit.
Wine Against All Odds: David Keck and Lauren Droege, Stella14
Forty-five minutes east, in Cambridge, I met David Keck out in his vineyards under the same steady rain. His bright smile and cheer were starkly at odds with both the weather and his story. A Vermont native and master sommelier, Keck, with his partner, Lauren Droege, moved back to the state in 2020 hoping to put his extensive wine knowledge to work in a project of their own. The pandemic rewrote those plans. The job Keck had initially lined up fell through, so with time on his hands he helped Heekin prune her Vergennes vineyard. Not long after, Heekin told Keck that the Cambridge vineyard was available for lease. Keck and Droege took the plunge.
David Keck of Stella14 in the town of Cambridge.
Now Keck tends what have so far been Field Studies’ northernmost vineyards and some of its oldest vines — three plots, just off the main road. He acquired the vineyards from the Boyden Valley Winery, one of the first two commercial wineries in Vermont. “They planted at the same time as Snow Farm out in the islands in ’95, starting with French hybrids, then planting over some in ’99 to Frontenac Noir,” Keck says. The current seven acres of vines, mostly Frontenac and Marquette, sit at about 600 feet on loam and clay.
In 2021, circumstances conspired to keep Keck from making wine himself. He sold Heekin his low-yield Frontenac Noir fruit for the Field Studies wine Law of Shapes. “I think what appealed to Deirdre about the fruit is that it comes from these gnarly old vines and the quality of the fruit’s really interesting: savory and herbal,” Keck says. Later, tasting the wine, I found it faceted and darkly luminous, but also compulsively drinkable, with bright, playful fruit contrasting serious asperity.
Year by year, Keck and Droege have gotten the vineyards into healthy shape. Keck said that the Boydens had sprayed conventionally for fungal diseases, which are a big challenge in Vermont. “We converted to spraying just copper and sulfur, plus some stylet oil, kaolin clay, nettle and horsetail teas,” he says. This spring their vines were fully pruned, tied, and mowed, and then on May 22, they got hit with nighttime temperatures that plunged to 25 degrees F, killing all the early buds. (Hybrids offer more hope than vinifera for secondary growth, but Keck told me that secondary growth would supply no more than 15 to 20 percent of the crop he had been expecting at the start of the season.)
Despite all, Stella14 last year opened a tasting room in nearby Jeffersonville to sell directly and “have a space where people who live locally can go hang out and try wines,” Keck says. The couple made their ’22 vintage in a repurposed barn near their house and now offer six wines. The next step will be a big one: developing a business plan to put in 40 acres, which would make it the largest vineyard by far in Vermont. The question is: Where? The influx of out-of-staters during the pandemic pushed Vermont real estate out of reach for many people. “There’s just no inventory and certainly nowhere cleared to plant,” Keck says.
Here is where dairy’s decline and wine’s rise seem most likely to meet. Keck has been exploring the possibilities with state agricultural agencies, but it’s complicated. “It’s finding a farm when somebody’s selling,” Keck says. “Then it’s finding the finances to make the huge upfront investment — the past few years haven’t exactly been helpful in convincing people in this regard — and not recouping any of that for four or five years because it’s planting grapes. Then it’s finding the labor force, the infrastructure to plant.”
Keck makes a strong case for the economic benefits of state investment in developing Vermont’s wine industry “Ten acres, if it’s farmed well and you have a good vintage, can bring the state half a million dollars with wine. Or, you can farm three cows” — on the same ten acres — “and make a few thousand dollars and probably not break even because the price for milk is so low.” Either way, he says, “it’s still agriculture, it’s still a beautiful landscape, we’re all farming, and most of us who are really serious about it are farming organically if not also biodynamically and regeneratively and really focusing on what we can do to keep the character of this place.”
The complex dynamic brought me, inevitably and at last, to Heekin and Barber themselves. After years of consuming their beguiling books, articles, social media posts, and above all wines, I’d built up a thoroughly romanticized image.
On arrival, I was delighted to realize the reality matches the poetry. The gray wood-sided house where Heekin and Barber live. The clutch of outbuildings. The gardens, orchards, vineyards — all in transitional winter-spring disarray. “Nothing but potential here,” Heekin laughed. The biggest surprise was the estate’s small size. It is all very much on a two-person scale, a place best measured in stone’s throws and vine rows rather than acres.
In the quarter century that Heekin and Barber have lived on this farm, they have evolved a formal-informal choreography of wild and cultivated. Heekin was quick to supply an example. She walked me to the edge of the property, to what she called “the impetus”: a wild grapevine. It is a gnarled creature whose roots descend into a wet ravine and whose arms twist high into the trees. This was the vine that taught Heekin that grapes and wine could be part of the terroir of Mount Hunger and of Vermont.
Heekin’s farming philosophy, which she characterizes as “naturalistic,” draws on biodynamic and regenerative practices but eschews strict definition — and certification. (Her argument on this is, in short: Why should organic growers pay to prove they are not poisoning the earth when conventional growers get away with doing this for free?)
Everything is open to question. Pruning, for instance. In her Champlain Valley site, Heekin leaves some Brianna vines unpruned, a heretical proposition to most growers. But by observing the vines intently over many years — a study that may be unique in the world of hybrids — Heekin has learned how the vines find their own balance. “I’m a firm believer that in most hybrid varieties I work with, it’s great to have them go through a period of no pruning,” she says. “It tends to clean out their system of any diseases, such as foliar phylloxera, which is very typical out here and typical in hybrids.”
She explained that the attributes of hybrids require particular consideration. Brianna grapes, for instance, are thicker skinned; with extended ripening, their sugar levels don’t change much and they hold their acidity well. The long ripening allows a fuller range of flavors and aromas, but the tight clusters are susceptible to sour rot. Her remedy is to do nothing. “If we don’t prune Brianna,” Heekin said, “the bunches are much looser; we don’t get sour rot. So we’re now doing a rotation, within that block, of pruning half and not pruning the other half,” with earlier picks for the pruned and later for the unpruned.
Vine health is more complicated than it appears. “Traditional teaching will say you put in your new vines, and you don’t give them any competition, to try to help them grow as much as possible in those first three years,” Heekin says. “But I don’t believe in all that! More competition is better. It makes the vines stronger. It makes them put their roots down. I don’t want to see a lot of aboveground growth or foliage, I want all that energy going into the roots. I think this works really well for hybrids, which have this bigger kind of tenacity.” This practice delays the first harvest for a year or two, but Heekin thinks the payoff is worth it. “We’re going for long-term vines.”
Lately, one of the biggest influences on Heekin’s home vineyard fruit is a new airborne threat. The changing climate is shifting migratory patterns, bringing these grape predators a full month earlier than when she started out. “Now we are literally running to pick fruit against the birds,” she says. She is also seeing earlier phenolic ripeness. “Everything used to ripen at the same time,” she said. “That’s not happening now either. So we can’t co-ferment all six varieties we have here.” She envisions a possible transition to making only méthode champenoise wines from this site. “Everything will be sparkling and we’ll focus more on single variety, not worrying so much about trying to do a still wine from here. That’s what we all have to do: adjust and adapt. We may not be able to make the wines we think we can make or have been making.”
A few steps away from the vineyard is the compact, efficient winery. A small crush pad, a shiny basket press, a waist-high amphora — made by a Montreal ceramicist and filled with Heekin’s skin-fermented La Crescent — are close-packed with a row of stout plastic Flextanks, a few ancient-looking barrels, and shiny demijohns. “No stainless steel,” Heekin points out. “Metal is an antenna, drawing in everything from the atmosphere in a really particular way. For me, that’s like fingers on a chalkboard.”
Three employees, all young women, including La Garagista’s assistant winemaker, Camila Carrillo, share the higgledy-piggledy cellar. Among the bottles and boxes, a hand-labeler rests on a table, ready to unspool La Garagista’s signature labels: textured paper, calligraphy, and intricate plant and animal images. (More than a few natural wine producers offload their branding to distant agencies, but La Garagista’s logo and labels are designed by a mother-daughter team who work just across the road.) In an unclaimed corner, Barber has hung a few cuts of ham to dry, on their way to becoming culatelli.
Though the orchards and vineyards invite languorous exploration, these farmers had work to do. We sat to taste at the rough-hewn table Barber made from the old garage within a low-walled garden. Above us light-gray skies and an audible cloud of bees, drawn to the magenta blossoms of surrounding fruit trees, set the tone. We began with the trio of Field Studies wines from Shabir Kamal’s vineyard at Lilac Ridge. Of Mint and Lightning ’21, from Brianna, was arrestingly complex, a rich brocade with bright acidity and an almost waxy texture. It made me wonder if Brianna’s genetic complexity, unlocked by Kamal’s attentive farming and Heekin’s responsive winemaking, was delivering some of the same layered intricacy that a field blend brings. We tasted it side by side with Heekin’s own-grown Loup d’Or ’21, also Brianna, from the same vintage and essentially the same winemaking but on Vergennes clay and limestone at 94 feet rather than Lilac Ridge limestone and granite at 856 feet. The Loup d’Or was deeper, more savory than the nervy Of Mint.
Heekin removed the crown cap from Kamal’s Marquette pét-nat, the Blood Root Kindle, and poured a glass. It delivered the startling freshness and tension I recognized from tasting it in situ: a bright, complex cocktail of orange and pomegranate flavors lightly washed with salt and herbs. “The seven-day maceration whole cluster, we’ve dialed that in here,” Heekin noted with satisfaction. But other things she’s still figuring out. The biome at Lilac Ridge, for one. “As it ferments, Shabir’s Marquette throws a flor” — a film of yeast — “we’ve never seen before. It impacts the wine in a really interesting way.” While she characterized the Marquettes she grows as “falling into a pretty traditional cherry fruit profile, kind of earthy and bacony,” she sees in Kamal’s the same earthiness but with much more bright raspberry and dusty blackberry fruit. She also noted that his Marquettes go through a period when volatile acidity is apparent, which she thinks is related to the flor. “There’s also a creamy, yogurty, lactose thing. I don’t know if it’s something about the cows being on the pasture for so long and the granite and limestone. It raises really interesting questions of how you understand and manage these things.”
Vermont winemaker and advocate Todd Trzaskos joined us, and we moved inside. For a long-time La Garagista follower like me, stepping into this space — with its dark walls, high wood ceilings, layers of furs and rugs and books, chockablock kitchen — was like stepping onto the set of a beloved film, sprung to life with the stars playing their roles exactly as imagined: welcoming, curious, witty, articulate.
Our tasting of the Lilac Ridge Field Studies wines concluded with The Teeth of Artemis ’21, a Marquette and Brianna field blend that defies easy description. Trzaskos compared it to the little-known Italian variety Ruché, with Ruché’s delicate nose and palate of rose, violets, and earth. While Heekin, Trzaskos, and I moved between the Field Studies and domaine wines, Barber set out a lunch that was immensely satisfying with the wines. Tender rosemary- and garlic-suffused roast pork. A tile of lentil socca. Brown-edged, thin-sliced potatoes, salty and unctuous with pork fat. An orange-zested slaw to enliven it all.
Caleb Barber, Deirdre Heekin’s husband and partner in La Garagista.
“It’s strange that there are two polar opposites that the wines tend to pair well with,” Heekin says. “The obvious choice is alpine: cured meats, cheeses. But also Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Sicilian foods, with certain kinds of spices and flavors and fruits.” She pointed out that Vermont has parts of the oldest known fossilized tropical coral reef on the planet, the Chazy Fossil Reef in northern Lake Champlain. Even if that connection lies deep within the past, some of the state’s flora — sumac, ginseng, wild garlic, several invasive species of bamboo — are also at home in subtropical places. “It’s not all just what we think of as alpine stuff, it’s a real mixed bag in terms of what you’re experiencing from the narrative of the wines,” she said. “For me, that’s also an exploration of Vermont.”
We moved on to the second set of Field Studies wines, named for Dada-esque voice-to-text autocorrects. Early on, Heekin decided against putting grape varieties on her labels; she didn’t want people to focus on their being hybrids. “I feel differently now,” she says. “Still, it should be the wine first, and a place, not the variety.”
First up was She Can Find the World So ’21. Heekin is enchanted by St. Croix and was delighted to get three vintages from Kendra Knapik’s old-vine block on Grand Isle. Heekin noted that the grape is more vinifera-like when picked at lower Brix levels and is ideal for sparkling wines. “We did a blind tasting of it alongside Bugey Cerdon” — a coveted French alpine méthode ancestrale sparkler — “and no one could tell the difference. Ours had a shade less sugar,” she says. Barber’s praise is emphatic: “The irony of She Can Find the World So, in terms of the grape it comes from and the profile enjoyed by that grape — which is zero — is that nobody knows about St. Croix. But if it can be this? Why isn’t everybody planting this?”
The sixth Field Studies wine, Love Work Mountain, is a co-fermented sparkling light red of Marquette and La Crescent. The fruit came from hobby vineyardist Jack Lilly, whose hillside Red Horse Vineyard, on volcanic soils, is over the mountain from La Garagista. But Lilly passed away this year at 88, and the future of this collaboration is uncertain. The wine was bright, charming, brimming with June cherries cut with quinine, and a long, satisfyingly salty finish. I am still haunted by its beauty.
Bottles ready for tasting.
Trzaskos excused himself early. The door wasn’t fully shut behind him when Heekin and Barber began to bubble over with praise for his work. “Todd was instrumental in helping people see wine as part of the bigger culture here,” Heekin says. “He and I started making wine at the same time. We have always been bouncing off each other. Of course, I was also talking with Europeans I had connections to. But they didn’t know hybrids. Todd steeped himself in hybrids.” Barber explained the dynamic in ecosystem terms. “I think of Todd as the mycorrhiza of Vermont wine culture, while we’re more like a vine that’s trying to reach out. But he’s the root system, the information system.”
In this context, we mused on the bigger aims of Field Studies. “The daunting part is making sure we don’t fuck up somebody else’s good fruit, knowing the work involved!” He’ll know it’s a success, Barber said, when it “opens people’s eyes to what’s possible and gives them confidence in what’s happening in their own backyard — one of the hardest barriers to break.”
“What I think is interesting about this idea of Field Studies, or terroir,” Heekin said, “is the human element and how that is affecting the wines that come out of a certain place too. It goes both ways. When I started, I really didn’t look at the human element as part of terroir. The more I do this, the more I understand how much each affects the other.”
Heekin, ever the writer, sees the Field Studies as a collection of short stories. She says they are told “on one level out of curiosity. But also very much as part of developing what Vermont is as a region. What is possible in all these different locations? What if we keep planting, exploring, experimenting, trying to understand?” She drives home a point she has been making by her own example since the very beginning of La Garagista. “At the end of the day,” she says, “it’s the person — your farming and your intention — that make a site great, or the site is great on its own. If you are humble to it, in service to it, and can see it for what it offers, it can be anywhere.”
If one person can be said to have shaped the taste, the aesthetic, the dynamic of Vermont wine, it is Heekin. With Field Studies, she is subtly shifting her focus outward, helping to prepare Vermont and the world for what comes next.●
From issue 112The post The Field Studies of Deirdre Heekin in Vermont appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.