For decades, Pennsylvania’s wine makers mostly have been limited to producing sweet and fruity flavors because of the grape varieties that are able to survive the harsh winters, largely keeping the state out of the big leagues in competitions.
But nestled between renowned wine regions in Virginia and the Finger Lakes in New York, Pennsylvania growers are finally making their mark. In June, alongside the Bordeaux reds and New Zealand whites, wineries from seven states in the United States won 294 awards at the annual Decanter World Wine Awards, one of the top global competitions, and Pennsylvania producers claimed five prizes: two silver, two bronze and a gold.
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Benigna’s Creek, a Klingerstown winery specializing in fruit wines, won a silver medal for its Tears bottle, a white made from Cayuga grapes, and gold for its Traminette white, a fruit-forward, dry wine made from a flavorful French-German hybrid plant with high acidity.
“It’s just such a unique, great varietal that we can grow here in Pennsylvania,” said Jake Masser, co-owner at the Schuylkill County operation that’s less than 3 hours from Philly. “It’s got that real floral bouquet, but it also has the fruitiness when you taste it and the taste just lingers on your tongue and then you have the bite of the acidity, it sort of just invites you back for another sip.”
Until recently, Pennsylvania wineries weren’t getting recognized on a global scale. Then in 2023, Benigna’s placed at Decanter, winning bronze for Traminette to become the first winery in the state to medal at the showcase.
With the rise in hybrid grape plants that can survive the cold, a shift in popularity toward the whites and sparkling wines that grow well in the state’s soil and a maturing group of growers and wineries, some in the industry say the state is poised to compete with some of the country’s more established regions.
“I feel like we’re on the edge of something right now in Pennsylvania,” said Leigh Ann Wilson, a winemaker at Mural City Cellars in Philadelphia. “Whereas, prior, you kind perceived PA wine as fruit wines or sweet wines, I think that notion is shifting a bit, and there’s more of an audience now, especially in urban areas.”
Climate challenges
When Nicholas Ducos, a winemaker and co-owner of Mural City, first started working with Pennsylvania wine in 2017, there was a huge supply and demand issue for grapes. There wasn’t that much fruit to go around in the first place, and most of the growers had established their relationships and worked with the same wineries for 20 years, he said. No one was eager to work with someone different.
“That has dramatically changed over the course of Mural City’s life, and we now have an abundance of growers and people getting into the industry,” Ducos said. “There’s a lot of fruit out there and a lot of fruit diversity that we get to play with. It’s an exciting time to be making wine in the region.”
It’s a symbiotic relationship, he noted, because the boom attracts more growers, and more growers means there are more unique wines to be made.
One of the biggest challenges is the climate. The state doesn’t have the large amounts of sunshine like California or the temperature shift of Oregon that can replicate conditions of historic wine growing regions, said Frank Kinyon, beverage and service director at Philly’s a.kitchen+bar. There’s also more humidity and a higher risk of disease, so grapes need to be able to withstand the winter and be resistant to pests, mildew and rot.
As a result, hybrid grapes — which are a cross between multiple species to mix qualities such as taste and hardiness — have become a popular choice for growers. But it’s not as simple as picking one and carrying on, according to Cain Hickey, a viticulture extension educator at Penn State University. The state is full of smaller microclimates, so what grows in the southeastern region around Philadelphia might not do as well up near Erie. What’s most important, he said, is picking a good spot to grow and putting in the work to make it thrive.
“I don’t want to paint this picture that, ‘Oh, European grapevines are impossible to grow in Pennsylvania,’ because they’re not,” Hickey said. “It’s just that they take a little bit more resources and good sites and follow through on management practices. But hybrid grapes require inputs, too. It’s not like you just plant them and walk away from them.”
For Kinyon, though, that challenge brings an opportunity to develop growing methods and plants, which can lead to more interesting bottles.
“I think because of that fact, we get to see a lot of creative winemakers at work experimenting with traditional grape varietals and hybrids in blends or just hybrids on their own,” Kinyon said. “There’s a lot of creativity on this side of the state because we don’t really have other options, this is winemaking on hard mode.”
A changing palate
Up until the last few years, Pennsylvania wine was stuck in a “loop of predictability,” Kinyon said.
“The wines have either been made with lots of additives to mimic taste profiles of the Old World or of California, or the wine is made sweet to appeal to a much wider drinking audience,” Kinyon said.
Since there’s limited amount of sunshine, grape skins often don’t get thick enough for dark red wines to do well in Pennsylvania. Instead, similar to the rest of the Mid-Atlantic, the state is starting to be known for whites, rosés and sparkling wines. And as the industry continues to grow, customers are putting more trust in what local makers can produce.
“There’s been a shift in focus. Consumers are more interested in where what they’re consuming is coming from, so locally sourced, sustainability, all these buzzwords,” Wilson said. “I feel like that has an influence on this boom, too, just having a general care in where their product is coming from.”
The rise in popularity of the state’s wineries coincides with the shift away from sweeter dessert bottles, Hickey said. Producers are looking to compete on a national and even global level, and turning toward drier tastes that mimic more classic tastes because sweet dessert wines don’t typically get recognized in the same way.
That change is starting to pay off. A.kitchen+bar recently won a best of award of excellence from Wine Spectator for its wine program, and Mural City took home five medals in the Mid-Atlantic Winemaker’s Challenge from the Libation Magazine & Wine, Beer and Spirits Awards. (Ducos also competed on the “Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars” series last year). South Shore Wine Co. and Mazza Vineyards, both located near Lake Erie, also won two bronze and one silver medal at Decanter, respectively.
“That’s why those (classic) wine styles are made because they kind of have this staying power in this cultural and social and historical tradition, where some of the sweeter wines might be kind of New World in context,” Hickey said.
The next glass
There has been a rise of wineries in cities and urban areas, creating a spiderweb effect of knowledge-sharing about the industry and a growing demand for grapes from growers, Ducos said. He also thinks it sets up Pennsylvania wines to reach areas outside the state.
“The conversation 10 years from now won’t be West Coast versus East Coast or anything like that,” Ducos said. “It’s just going to be the United States and look at all the diversity and regions of this one country, just the way people look at France and they talk about the Loire versus Bordeaux. We’re not that far away from that.”
For Hickey, as other Mid-Atlantic hot spots continue growing, the rising tide will lift all bottles. He also thinks customers are more open to other varieties besides the dark, bold reds of the West Coast, and Pennsylvania’s rosés, oranges and whites will be a natural fit. Simultaneously, rising temperatures will extend the growing season and bodes well for fruit maturity, he added, priming the state for success.
“North of us we have the Finger Lakes and south of us we have Virginia, and I think most knowing industry members of Pennsylvania would say that those two industries have gotten their shake at recognition on at least a massive scale,” Hickey said. “And so what I would say is, as logic would have it that if we’re smack dab in the middle of those two regions that have gotten recognized, well why not us?”