100% ESTATE GROWN GRAPES R. B. DEFORD FAMILY, PROPS.
Discover wines made entirely from our estate grapes
that are tended with extraordinary care in our vineyards and crafted by experienced hands in the winery to develop a soul that is distinctly Boordy.
Boordy Wine Clubs are free to join!
Landmark Wine Club
Boordy’s Landmark Wine Club provides you with selections from our Dry Bench Reserve Series of wines throughout the year, harvested from discrete sections of our vineyards whose unique soils and topography produce wines with finesse, concentration, and distinction.
This series includes single varietals, intriguing blends, reserve designations, and limited Club-only releases. Members will receive four packages per year, containing a selection of three Landmark Series wines chosen for you by Boordy’s experienced and discerning owners and staff. You may sign up for a red wine, white wine or mixed wine membership, and your package can be picked up at Boordy or mailed to you.
Private Schedule for Landmark Wine Club Members – click here
Cupola Wine Club
Membership in Boordy’s Cupola Wine Club will introduce you to new and current releases of Boordy’s Landmark Barn Series of wines. Harvested from blocks of our vineyards that produce crisp, aromatic whites and roses, sparkling wines, and approachable medium-bodied reds. These are wines of both freshness and elegance crafted for your enjoyment today, no cellaring required!
Members will receive four packages per year, containing a selection of four Landmark Barn Series wines chosen by Boordy’s knowledgable owners and staff. You may customize your package according to your preference, and your wines can be picked up at Boordy or mailed to you.
The Cupola Club is named after the distinctive structures that adorn the roofs of our handsome 18th century barns.
PICK UP PARTIES
Members of both the Landmark and Cupola wine clubs are invited to free quarterly pickup evenings to enjoy educational tastings of tank and barrel samples, multi-vintage vertical tastings, and wines from Boordy’s Library. You can come and enjoy the company of your fellow wine lovers – even if you’ve opted to have your package shipped.
-- Boordy Wine Club News from Rob Deford --
February 2026
Why Lousy Soil Makes Good Wine
Your Winter 2026 package includes the 2022 Dry Bench Reserve Merlot, one of the finest red wines that Boordy has produced – a full-bodied beauty with aromas of spices, cedar, cocoa, and licorice. The grapes for this wine were selectively hand harvested from the sections of our South Mountain Vineyard that we refer to as “Dry Benches”, where the soils are lean, rocky, and prone to drought. Terrible soil for corn or tomatoes, perhaps, but paradoxically well suited for high quality wines. While great wines are grown in many types of soil around the world it is generally accepted that what the best sites have in common are low fertility and poor water holding capacity.
The soil of South Mountain Vineyard could fairly be described as a boulder field with dirt wedged between the stones. Before we could plant vines in the hillside vineyard we had to clear a massive amount of rock. The vines’ roots penetrate the soil deeply in their search for water and nutrients, and their grapes are physically smaller, with lower yields and greater intensity of aroma and flavor. Within the vineyard are bands – clearly visible as lighter stripes in the attached aerial photo from Google Earth – where the topsoil layer is especially thin, with rock and shale lurking just beneath. (Note: for scale, the rock pile is in the lower right-hand corner of the Google image).
In our line of work, experience is the best teacher. Vineyard Manager, Ron Wates, first noticed that the fruit harvested in these bands was of superior quality, and he began referring to them as “dry benches”. It was this observation that led us to dedicate the grapes from our “worst” soils to our best wines: the Landmark “Dry Bench Reserve” series. Perversely, these zones do not parallel the rows in our vineyard but cut across them diagonally so our crew has to pick a few vines, then duck under the trellis wire repeatedly to follow the vein.
Hard work? Yes.
Perhaps a bit crazy? Yes.
Worth it? DEFINITELY!
Cheers,
Rob Deford, owner/president
Holding a special event? You can rent a Maryland Landmark: click here
November 2025
Where Good Wine Begins
There is a saying in our line of work that “good wines are made in the vineyard” – a lopsided truism intended to make you pause and reflect. Good wines are, in fact, the result of a continuum that begins with proper site and varietal selection, followed by obsessive vineyard management, precise timing of the harvest, uncompromising craftsmanship in the winemaking process, and patient aging of the wines. What the saying really means is that high quality fruit is the sine qua non of good wine, the genesis of a journey that begins in the soil ends up in our glass.
Rarely do visitors to Boordy see our crew working among the vines, but they are out there in all weather and in all seasons. Boordy farms about 50 acres of vines in two locations: Long Green Vineyard adjacent to the winery and South Mountain Vineyard 80 miles to the west in the Blue Ridge Province. Our vineyard management team, guided by the indefatigable Ron Wates, tends these vines with his two assistant managers: Sylvano Gross and Dan Skidmore. Working with them are two full time vineyard staff augmented by a seasonal crew who join us each year.
Ron’s hands-on approach to managing our vineyards requires that each vine receive at least 8 personal visits, beginning with pruning and ending with hand harvesting. We have about 75,000 vines, which extrapolates to 600,000 vine visits per season. I can’t calculate the miles walked by our crew, but I don’t think they need to go to the gym to stay fit.
The most important concept in managing a vineyard is balance: knowing how many shoots to leave when pruning in the winter, how many leaves are needed to efficiently capture the sun’s energy, how much crop to allow the vine to mature, and knowing when fruit chemistry has achieved the optimum balance for harvest. There is also the balancing of knowledge with intuition, guided by the vast collective experience of our crew, which well exceeds a century. This is wealth beyond measure.
With the 2025 vintage now completed we can indulge in a bit of reflection. A cold period in late spring caused some crop loss, and we had a hot, rainy July, but the sunny days and cool nights of fall were ideal for ripening.
While the crop we harvested was light in quantity it was of excellent quality. The first indications of this will be the white wines – Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Albariño, and Pinot Gris – to be released during spring and summer of 2026. The 2025 reds will be released in 2028, and early indications are that they will be worth the wait.
Let’s raise a glass to our hard working vineyard team for a job well done!
Cheers,
Rob Deford, owner/president