Lost Creek Winery
- Lost Creek Winery has gone through significant transformations. The tasting room on the Eastern side of Loudoun County, between route 15 and the Potomac River, has closed. Lost Creek wines are available at the Henkle’s downtown Leesburg wine bar, Echelon Wine Bar. Owners Todd and Aimee Henkle, met at the University of Texas at Austin; he has an MBA from Babson; both have corporate backgrounds. They started the winery in 2012. “Sustainable viticulture” practices that “let the fruit speak for itself.” 100% Virginia grapes, partly bought in from elsewhere in Loudoun and from Charlottesville. The winery predates its current owners – had been started by the daughter of owners of Hidden Brook winery (one of Loudoun’s first wineries) next door.
- Wine: Tier II. Lost Creek’s 2022 Chardonnay was awarded a gold medal at the 2024 San Francisco Chronicle wine competition — one of the largest and most prestigious tastings in the country. Otherwise the winery has not fared as well in Virginia competitions in recent years as they had earlier. They were awarded five silver medals at the 2025 Virginia Governor’s Cup event, for their 2019 and 2020 Allure, 2021 Genesis and Petit Verdot, and 2022 Chardonnay. At the 2024 Loudoun Wine Awards, Lost Creek entered eight wines, and came away with only eight bronze medals. They currently also produce wine for newly opened Holmes Winery.
- Setting: One star. Exterior views of fields and woods. Large indoor fireplace, very cozy main tasting room if not overrun (great place to go in the offseason). Excellent food menu – of the best among VA wineries — with their own chef, good for lunch as well as tasting.
- Stories: One star. Civil War – Crossing the Potomac. The Potomac River was the diving line between the North and the South in the Civil War, the boundary between Union Maryland and Confederate Virginia. Crossings of the River were momentous occasions, invasions of one side or the other. In the first year of the war, it was all a question of Union forces moving into Virginia, expecting a swift end to the rebellion of the South, but those expectations were quickly dashed by battlefield losses at Manassas, and at Ball’s Bluff just south of here. The balance of power evolved rapidly. At White’s Ford, a few miles from this winery, Confederate General Robert E. Lee in September of 1862 crossed to the Maryland side of the Potomac with his army, for the first time invading the territory of the Union. Lee’s objectives were to damage the morale of the North ahead of the November Presidential election, and to find untouched farmlands in Maryland and Pennsylvania which could better feed his troops that the ravaged and depleted farms of northern Virginia. A successful invasion, it was also thought, might bring slave-holding Maryland to switch allegiances and join the secession, forcing an end to the war. General Lee brought an estimated 55,000 men, who crossed at White’s Ford. The invasion was turned back on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, in the Battle of Antietam Creek – the single bloodiest day of battle in American history. 22,000 were either dead, wounded or missing by the end of day. White’s Ford is now a Regional Park. A commemoration of the crossing has been held annually since 1998.