LUCA PASCHINA

Estate director, winemaker

Like this vineyard’s founding owner, Gianni Zonin, who assumed the leadership of his family’s long-established winemaking enterprise more than 50 years ago, I inherited a commitment to food and wine, and particularly to viticulture, as a family tradition as well as a cultural reality of everyday life in Piemonte, my home province in Italy.

To grow up in the Nebbiolo and Barbera vineyards where my father consulted with many winegrowers, positioned not just my imagination and inspiration toward a career; it gave me a passionate respect for the majesty of what comes to us from the land.

The estate of wine is a divine gift without borders, linking humanity and our diverse cultural backgrounds to their most elemental and their most celebratory nourishment. I would not pursue any other employment. I was fortunate to be called by Dottore Gianni to Barboursville in 1990, where he had planted from scratch the first vineyards in Virginia in modern times, dedicated to the cultivation of European wine grapes, and where my task was to renew those vineyards and restore them to the path of producing the fine wines of great stature which Jefferson and he envisioned, on sight, within this “enchanted corner” in the Southwest Mountains of Piedmont Virginia. Ours is indeed an inspiring setting, for any knowledgeable viticulturist from northern Italy, and I found the transfer of my aspirations from Italy to Barboursville to be both natural and irreversible.
Our perspective on the rôle of wine in life is drawn from a trust in the land and a humility in the exercise of our skills to elicit its finest fruits. Wine, we know, is grown in the vineyard because we are, too, and then shaped in those academies we call wineries to offer the most civilized expression of themselves. We embrace technical innovation with the least intervention in this process, consistent with developing the wine’s inherent varietal character and signature of place and time. Our taste, bred of centuries of European custom, is for wine of great companionability with food, of elegant expression throughout a meal and, ideally, of longevity in the cellar, with harmonious balance.”