PVCC students reap fruits of local viticulture labors

For close to four years Piedmont Virginia Community College has used its viticulture and enology programs to school students in the ways of winemaking.

But this year, for the first time, a class is taking students, hands-on, from the vine to the wine — five cases of Cabernet Franc, per student, to be exact.
Roe Allison is a student in the Custom Crush class. On Thursday, Allison was in the Free Union area at Tra Vigne vineyards, where he and close to a dozen others walked along the rows of vines snipping grapes into plastic yellow bins — roughly 80 in all.

Allison has a small vineyard — a little less than an acre — that he adds to a bit each year.
And he’s taken a couple of winemaking-esque classes at PVCC.
“I’ve learned enough just to be dangerous,” Allison said. “Enough to put a vineyard in at my place and have built a little winery building with aspirations of getting into [winemaking] … but the first thing my consultant told me was, ‘Don’t give up your day job.’”
Michael Shaps and Philip Stafford, who are teaching the class and own Virginia Wineworks in Albemarle County, said the demand among vintners for people with knowledge of winemaking has made PVCC’s programs popular — especially in a state with 135
wineries, according to the Virginia Farm Bureau.
“I think it will only gain in popularity once the word gets out,” Shaps said of the Custom Crush experiment.

In the coming months the class members will design their own label and then sometime next summer bottle the wine from the belly of the French oak barrels in which it will have aged.
Those barrels should yield about 60 bottles per student. Of the $1,200 cost of the class, about $1,000 is tied up in the value of the wine, Shaps said.
“This is the whole shooting match … everything from start to finish, harvesting to bottling,” said Greg Rosko, PVCC’s viticulture and enology program manager.

In states such as California and Washington there are community colleges that have entire operations dedicated to producing a signature wine for their schools.
Valerie Palamountain, PVCC’s dean of workforce services, said there has been talk of doing the same thing at Piedmont, but added, “Right now we don’t have any plans on the book.”
There are 156 students enrolled in viticulture and enology classes at PVCC, which is the only community college in Virginia that offers a comprehensive set of certificate programs and apprenticeships in winemaking and vineyard management.
But some students, such as Scott Keith, a recent University of Virginia graduate, are in it as more of a hobby. It was his father’s interest in winemaking that got Keith into the PVCC programs along with his dad.

But while his dad was laid up sick during the recent harvest, Keith was out with his mother, Diane, working the vines.
“It’s a family class,” Diane Keith said. “We’re all learning.”