When Debra Vascik and her husband, neurosurgeon Dr. James Vascik, decided to found a Virginia winery nearly thirty years ago in Roanoke, they tapped their love of the great French Burgundies and of opera. Together, they enjoyed at least three full performances of the Wagner Ring Cycle, four operas that together total 15 hours of music – an unusually heroic accomplishment, even for opera lovers.
Inspired by the heroes of Norse mythology, they called their mountaintop winery overlooking Roanoke “Valhalla” after the eternal feasting hall of the god Odin. Their signature Bordeaux blend was called Valkyrie, named for the mythic females who spirit fallen warriors to their reward. Their Chardonnay became Rheingold, and their Cab Franc / Merlot blend Götterdämmerung.
But it was her simply named and lovingly produced 1998 Syrah that earned Debra undisputed first place among Virginia winemakers. It was her very first estate vintage and, in 2000, it put Valhalla’s name on the Governor’s Cup.
Yes, that’s right. Debra Vascik and not Cana Vineyards’ Melanie Natoli, as we reported from last year’s Governor’s Cup celebration (https://bit.ly/VaWomenWinemakers), was Virginia’s FIRST First Lady of wine.
If we were inclined to ignore this, we’d have ample excuse. The Virginia Winemaker’s Association press release in March of 2022 itself identified Melanie as the first female winner in the Cup’s 40-year history. The release was later quietly edited in June to name Debra as the first female winner, and to acclaim Melanie as the first in more than 20 years – a still formidable accomplishment. We say quietly because it took a call from Debra to correct the record, no formal correction was issued, and no one from the Association has ever called Debra back to apologize for the error.
The hard truth is, we should have known better. During Valhalla’s lushly productive and internationally heralded early 2000’s, this writer and her son poured for Valhalla, because it was then unarguably our favorite Virginia wine. Back then, in the heyday of Virginia wine festivals, oenophiles volunteered in return for bottles of wine. We did so happily and were made to feel part of the Valhalla family – always treated to a fine dinner with Jim to cap a festival weekend.
Should the Association also have known? There is a different head of the association and a new process for selecting the many more numerous Virginia vintages that are now produced. Back then, the winemakers themselves selected the winners from a blind tasting. Debra’s name wasn’t on the cup – only that of Valhalla. But plenty of folks should have known, and it’s incumbent on everyone to care about Debra’s landmark achievement. Women winemakers, more than their male counterparts, stand on the shoulders of a giant.
In 1994, what became the Valhalla estate was a peach orchard. Peaches and grapes require very similar growing conditions and the soil was decomposed granite, common to the Rhone Valley of France. They bought the place with the idea of putting in a few vines and making their own home brew, and “things went way over the top,” she recalls.
To get them started, both Paul and Robert Mondavi sent them wine barrels. The Antinori family and “a lot of the big wine names were very helpful in getting us started on what we wanted to do which was something totally different” than other local winemakers of the time, she recalls. Initially, Debra wanted to produce only red wines, but was persuaded to plant whites as well, producing a crisp citrus, barrel fermented Viognier and minerally, smooth Chardonnay, blended together as Row Ten – “but our passion was in the reds.”
“We didn’t release our reds until they were four or five years old. We held them all to age in barrel for a minimum of four years, and then in bottle for a year. We just felt the wines needed it and you know bottling was very disruptive to aromatics. So, our wines were older than standard of the Virginia industry.”
They were the first to produce a Spanish varietal called Alacante Bouschet – a great blender “because it added a lot of body and color. But it also made an incredible dessert wine, which is probably where we used it most.”
As for the winning Syrah, “1998 was our first estate vintage where the wine was made at our facility by me,” Debra says. “The vines were young. Syrah vines are incredibly intense and bold and dynamic when they're very, very young and very, very old. If you think of France, they have very, very old vines, and they're getting tremendous fruit, and in Virginia, very, very young vines.” 1998 was the second year they’d harvested their young vines and it was a very good growing year. “We got the brix (a measurement of sugar in liquid), the ripeness, the intensity, the color, the flavor – I mean, everything just fell together with that vintage when my vines were young and wild and crazy.”
Because she loved the French style of Syrah, she would always pull about 20% of the juice off 24 hours after the crush to increase the intensity of the wine’s flavor. “I remember the dark, pruney fruit and the amazing raisin character and the French oak barrel. It was just a tremendous wine from the start to the finish; it had a forward palate and a mid-palate and at least a minute finish to it. A lot of wines that are made in Virginia tend to be lacking body; they're somewhat thin. And I just remember you could almost chew it, it was so robust.”
Much as today, all the wines submitted for the Governor’s Cup were passed blind through varietal panels, rated, then ranked for the top 12 wines in the Governor’s case. In 2000, as was the case with Melanie, Debra had two wines in the Governor’s Case – her Syrah and Götterdämmerung. Well over 200 wineries existed in the Commonwealth back then, though not all submitted.
So, just ten years into an award tradition, “' Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to have a woman winemaker?' we asked. 'Boy, do you have that story wrong,'" Debra laughed.
“Winemaking was a boys club,” she recalls. Women winemakers then included just herself and one other in Middleburg at Swedenburg Estate Winery, which became Greenhill Winery in 2013. “We had to really work hard to be respected,” she remembers. “There were some people that were very supportive and very friendly to women in the industry” – Bob Bergen at Chateau Morrissette, Shepherd Rouse at Rockridge, Dennis Horton from Horton Vineyards and Luca Paschina from Barboursville “All were incredible, and absolutely wonderful to me, very helpful and kind and respectful... but the majority were not. They were not pleased when I won the Governor's Cup. They didn't feel that it was appropriate, and they did not have a lot of really nice things to say.”
Change came slowly but inexorably from that point, she says. “Women had to work twice as hard. They had to be twice as good. But once I won the Governor's Cup, I finally garnered a little bit of respect as a person in the industry not, as I was called, a ‘bored housewife’ which was never true. I worked 8-10 hours as a physical therapist then another 8-10 hours running a vineyard and making wine and raised two kids doing it.”
Which is why it stung when people forgot. Just a couple of months prior to the 2022 awards, Debra lost her husband Jim to a heart attack. “Jim loved wine. He loved food and wine, and he loved to grow the grapes. He didn't want any part of anything else other than growing the grapes. I did all the winemaking and I managed the business but that was his relaxation from neurosurgery, to go out into the vineyard and prune a few vines or walk and check things and set up a spray schedule. That's what gave him peace after a really hard day in the operating room.”
She’s now 68, so after 25 vintages, she’s taking life a little easier. By October, she’ll be able to enjoy her second grandchild. The 200-acre winery had 21 acres under vine at its peak, but now only three. They’re still producing though she has likely done her last major bottling. During COVID, she says it became extremely difficult to find anyone who would tend the vines run the tractor, even with hundreds of agriculture-immersed undergrads at her doorstep.
On that note, there are 2500 cases of exceptional wines that remain to be enjoyed, dating back to the early to mid-2000’s, including some truly exceptional Valkyrie. The Vasciks always maintained that their perfection-driven winemaking lent itself to the longevity of their reds. A great treat of those early wine festivals was a “library tasting” Jim presided over himself. But Debra maintains that longevity is just one side benefit of her craftsmanship. “We had conditions that allowed our grapes to ripen fully. To get the brix level we wanted we focused on the maturity of the seed and skin tannins and maintained the acid levels that add to longevity. We always hand-harvested and we never brought in a bad cluster. If I didn't like the fruit, I didn't make wine out of it because you cannot make a good wine out of bad fruit. That's why neither of us could quit our day jobs!”
“We wanted to be different,” she adds. “We wanted to make a better Virginia wine and we succeeded. We raised the bar.”
Debra does hope to retire by the time she’s 70, but allows that her boundless energy, intelligence and hard-earned repository of knowledge about growing and producing Virginia wine could still be of use to the next generation of winemakers. First, she’d like to see all her wines go to “good homes” of those who appreciate perfection, and she’d love for the winery to be sold to someone who could continue the tradition.
To be one of those lucky homes, you’ll have to go there. The winery is open weekends until the weekend before Christmas, but check the website to be sure: https://valhallawines.com/.
“We wanted to be different. We wanted to make a better Virginia wine and we succeeded. We raised the bar.” Debra Vascik