A Distinguished Dozen

Athena Eastwood has never forgotten how difficult it was to plant her roots in the wine industry.

“I lived in Charlottesville 20 years before buying a farm in 2016. Unlike many, maybe naively, my daughters and I did not work with a consultant when we started Eastwood Farm and Winery.”

Today, Eastwood’s enterprise just west of Charlottesville is prospering, with a tasting room outfitted with a stage for live performances, a tented pavilion on an overlook where gatherings great and small are hosted, and more than 20 acres under vine producing award-winning merlot, petit verdot and cabernet franc.

But it wasn’t always that way.

“It’s a very tough industry to get into, and even tougher to succeed in. It was partnerships and friendships that helped us get started with our orchards and vineyards,” said the lawyer-turned-vintner, now a Distinguished Dozen honoree.

After leaving behind the legal library, Eastwood didn’t start out making wine. She started out making hard cider.

“The farm has several acres of heirloom apple and pear trees, which led us to seek the assistance of a very kind woman who, at the time when we purchased the farm, was running the apple orchards for the Chiles family at Carter Mountain Orchard. Our farm is also along the Carter Mountain ridge. That was our first introduction to the Chiles family and the beginning of the idea that maybe we could partner with them and other farming families to create something special here for the community,” Eastwood recounted.

Success in cider led to other alcohol aspirations.

With some help from the Saunders — another local farm family who run Saunders Brothers Farm Market in Piney River, where Eastwood crushed her apples for cider— she planted her first grapevines. The rest is horticulture history.

“Where we are now is less the result of a grand design and more the result of working alongside so many talented people,” Eastwood said.

As the late David King, founder of King Family Vineyards in Crozet, used to say, “A rising tide
lifts all boats.” Those words were quoted on multiple occasions in 2024, when Wine Enthusiast
magazined named the Virginia wine country the best in the world.

Inspired by the collaborative culture of the Virginia wine country, Eastwood and her team founded the Virginia Wine Collective last year.

The collective, based in what was once Michael Shaps Wineworks Extended just south of Charlottesville, offers small-scale wine producers a place to ferment, blend, bottle and pour all under one roof.

“Before the collective, the only way to get started without a production facility of one’s own was to have a third-party-contract winemaking facility make the wine, which can be a good solution for a lot of small businesses, but winemakers who want to be making their own wine need another alternative that enables them to take a more hands-on approach,” said Eastwood.

To date, eight small-scale winemakers have joined the collective, including Joy Ting Wine, Dogwood & Thistle, Jake Busching Wines, Present Company Wine, Cataldos Perfezione, Delve Wines, Almaviste Agriculture and ZC Wine. 

The resources available through Eastwood’s collective allow new and small winemakers to grow their businesses without the capital investment normally required for real estate and equipment.

“A wine project that exemplifies what we’re trying to do at the collective is a project of Tasha Durrett’s,” said Eastwood.

Before she joined the collective, Durrett was the founder of Black Women Who Wine, a group dedicated to increasing opportunities among Black women to learn about and influence the wine industry — where less than 1% of wineries are Black-owned and even less are owned by Black women, according to the Association of African American Vintners.

Eastwood and Durrett were introduced when the former was assembling a panel for Charlottesville’s 2023 Tom Tom Festival, a celebration of innovation in the city best known for native son Thomas Jefferson, not only an innovator but a lover of wine.

“I had so much fun talking with Tasha and learning about her journey in founding Black Women Who Wine. We started talking about her goals for a wine project, which she has since developed into the ZC Wine label,” Eastwood said.

This past harvest, Durrett worked with Joy Ting, head of the Virginia Winemakers Research Exchange and another member of the collective, to develop a new sparkling red wine.

“Tasha’s sparkling red wine will be released early this summer and is a perfect example of the type of collaboration and innovation that we are hoping to achieve through the collective,” Eastwood said. “Each of the winemakers working on their wines at the collective brings their own particular skill set to the group in a way that makes us all stronger.”

Eastwood knows the collective is a bit of a curiosity, so she has made the space appealing to visitors who not only want to sample wines produced there but witness the production itself.

“The upstairs portion of the tasting room features glass walls looking out over the main production floor, enabling guests to watch production. This area will also be expanding with more lounge seating and game tables in the spring,” said Eastwood.

Now that Eastwood has tackled the back of the house, she’s setting her sights on the front.

“In terms of the future, it’s hard to say. There are still a lot of challenges to tackle, including getting more Virginia wine onto the menus of Virginia restaurants, hotels and other institutions,” she said.

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