Straight from Williamsburg: Adagio Debuts to Acclaim Among Wine Enthusiasts

By Amber Lester Monday, February 15, 2010

Ask Matthew Meyer what he does for a living and he’ll give you a one-word answer: “Winemaker.”

When pressed on what his job at Williamsburg Winery really entails, he admits it can be like any other management job: supervision, paperwork and meetings. But he isn’t often pressed for details; people are usually dazzled by the glamorous answer of “winemaker.”

And at times like this, the job is glamorous. Meyer just returned from New York City, where Williamsburg Winery debuted its newest wine – Adagio 2007. The wine had its coming-out party at Patsy’s, where Frank Sinatra once crooned, and famed wine educator Kevin Zraly was on hand to introduce the wine. He shocked everyone by revealing he had visited the winery in the past year without identifying himself and found it to produce “some of the best wines in the world.”

Adagio will soon have its local launch at Buon Amici and Alize, but the $65 bottle is already for sale at local wine stores. Adagio’s origin started with the price, not the grapes. Winery owner Patrick Duffeler told Meyer three years ago that he wanted the winery to produce one of the few $50 bottles made in Virginia. Meyer said, “Make it $65.”

From there, Meyer knew he had to find the perfect grape and he found it in three barrels of Bordeaux grapes purchased from a now-defunct vineyard south of Charlottesville. “I thought, ‘These grapes are really nice. Here’s Patrick’s $50 bottle of wine,’” he said. Within three years, the wine was ready.

The winery tested it with some local wine experts and connoisseurs in a blind tasting, comparing Adagio with highly rated wines from California and the Bordeaux region of France. In every tasting, Adagio was named the best.

Adagio is the latest of Meyer’s wines to win acclaim for the winery. Since he arrived in 2002, the winery has received high scores from Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast; its 2006 and 2005 Acte 12 Chardonnay were on a list of the “World’s Best Wines” by Decanter Magazine.

Meyer says his trade secret is passion. He was taught to appreciate wine at a young age. As a child growing up near Liverpool, England, Meyer was allowed to sip from his father’s glass. His father taught him to breathe in the wine’s aroma, swirl the glass and identify good food pairings. By his teens, Meyer was having a glass of wine with dinner. He says his favorite bottle of wine is “whatever bottle’s in front of me.”

The family moved to Indiana when Meyer was a teenager; his accent all but disappeared, but his taste for wine didn’t. He was studying international relations at the University of Maryland and spending all of his spare time in a wine club when his wife suggested he follow his passion. He enrolled in the renowned winemaking program at the University of California-Davis, where he double-majored in wine and grape growing, with a minor in business.

He worked at wineries in Northern California — Grgich Hills and Heitz Winecellars — where he learned some old-fashioned techniques and tricks of the trade, like how to plug a hole in a barrel with just a clove of garlic and a stick of chalk.

By 2002, he tired of the pretentiousness of Napa Valley and looked eastward. Virginia winemaking was on the rise, he said and he recognized Virginians were imbuing their wines with the magic ingredient: passion.

“People assume we can’t grow good grapes here,” he says. “I would challenge them to go to Bordeaux, France. The weather is very similar.”

He’s enjoying being part of Virginia’s relatively young wine industry. Winemakers throughout the state are still learning what grapes grow better in what regions. But the uncertainty is what makes it fun for Meyer.

“I’ll never stop learning and I’ll never stop drinking,” he says