Spinning Wheel Wines is putting Mid-Atlantic fruit front and center

Perry Conner and Peter Szilagyi didn't necessarily intend on starting a wine project. 

"Spinning Wheel started as a bit,” Conner recalls. A very niche bit. 

The two wine professionals were joking about the idea of a sparkling red wine, like Lambrusco, made from chambourcin, a French-American hybrid grape, cheekily calling it “chambrusco.” But within a few hours, they went from kidding about it to actively trying to source grapes to make it a reality.

The idea jumpstarted Spinning Wheel Wines in the summer of 2022, a project spearheaded by Conner, Szilagyi, and Alyssa Anderson. Now on their fourth vintage, the trio has focused on making low-intervention wine from grapes and other fruit grown exclusively in Maryland and Virginia. They emphasize hybrid grape varieties, which are created by crossing two grapevine species, and coferments, or drinks made by allowing different fruit — apples, berries, cherries, multiple grapes — to ferment alongside each other. 

“With (Spinning Wheel), we're really into keeping the winemaking as simple as possible and just showing off the fruit,” Anderson said.

Each of them first found their way to wine in college. Szilagyi and Anderson, both 27, met at Cornell, where Szilagyi initially studied winemaking, and Anderson grew interested in cidermaking, given the Finger Lakes region's abundance of apple trees. 

After college, Szilagyi returned to their home state and worked for a winemaker in western Colorado’s North Fork Valley, before moving to D.C. in 2021 and working in wine sales. They were drawn to winemaking as a holistic process rooted in farming, transformed by fermentation in the cellar, and ultimately shared with others. 

"Being in a cellar space during harvest is one of the most thrilling things that happens in my life,” Szilagyi said. “It feels like there's a big emotional attachment to this moment where a season's worth of hard work in the field comes into the cellar and becomes a made product.”

Anderson, who lives in New York, cut her teeth working at Greenpoint Cidery in Hudson, New York, making her own cider from wild-harvested apples in the fall of 2021. 

“That was my introduction into the sort of addiction to fermentation cycles — the harvest and seeing what that can turn into,” she said.

Meanwhile, Conner, 28, completed a yearlong research project on winemaking while studying chemistry at St. Mary's College in Maryland, before working their first harvest at Martinelli Winery in California. Originally from Alexandria, they later worked at Michael Shaps Winery in Charlottesville before landing at a D.C. coffee shop. 

Conner and Szilagyi first met in March 2022, hitting it off after they both discovered they were young wine professionals; a few months later, Szilagyi reached out to Anderson to help with Spinning Wheel.

The "chambrusco” that they produced ended up as a coferment of about half Maryland chambourcin grapes and half York apples from Virginia. It was one of two wines they produced that first year in a process that at one point, Szilagyi recalls, wound up with them finishing up work at 4 a.m. and sleeping on the cellar floor. The other was a rosé coferment they called Not Nothing. 

“I feel like the whole energy was captured in the name,” Anderson said. “It was the longest 48 hours of our lives, and we ended up with … so little fruit after so much sorting.” But when they had pressed the grapes, “it was the most incredible juice we'd ever tasted.”

Meanwhile, the name Spinning Wheel, Conner said, is emblematic of the process of using a raw material and transforming it into something more than the sum of its parts. Right now, they do this by operating as négociants, a traditional term for winemakers who purchase grapes from other growers to make their wine. 

They've sourced fruit from across Maryland and Virginia — chardonel and chambourcin grapes from Mount Airy Farm in the Shenandoah Valley, muscadines from Thompson Vineyards in Pittsylvania County, mixed hybrid grape varieties from Zephaniah Farm Vineyard in Loudon County, and even York apples from an abandoned orchard in Virginia. 

Producing their wines out of Rocklands Farm Winery in Maryland, the three winemakers have slowly increased production while keeping the endeavor manageable. The first vintage had about 480 bottles, and 2024 will have about 2,400.

They're still figuring out what the long-term future of Spinning Wheel looks like, but in the short term, they intend to focus solely on Virginia fruit and hope to get their hands on new grape varieties.

But the project's growth is highly dependent on the fruit available each year. Emphasis on the land is a core tenet of the project, which seeks to capture the unique characteristics of the region's fruit by intervening as little as possible during the winemaking process.

“From a curiosity and exploration standpoint, it's really special to be able to make something that's that unique, and I think that's what should be drawing folks to Virginia wine — is the capacity to do that,” Szilagyi said.

Producing wine in the Mid-Atlantic is not without its challenges. Unlike the West Coast, the region is extremely humid, making it easier for fungal disease to infect and destroy grapes, sometimes ruining entire crops. The East Coast also has more dramatic temperature changes and year-round rain, instead of a milder climate with a wet and dry season. Late frosts add another layer of complexity, as they can damage buds and shoots, affecting yields and fruit quality.

“It is the difficulty, though, that is also a real opportunity to create a sense of place, and that informs a lot of what we do,” Szilagyi said. “We're in it to work with fruit that grows well in this very difficult place to grow fruit, and given those parameters, we want to make something we like to drink.”

While there are limited quantities of Spinning Wheel's 2023 vintage still available, the first wine from the 2024 vintage will be released in a few weeks, with two other arriving in late fall or early winter, they said. Check their Instagram account for updates on the releases.