Lovingston Winery
Located in Lovingston, in Nelson County 35 miles south of Charlottesville off of Route 29. Family owned, boutique-type winery owned by Ed and Jan Puckett, University of Virginia graduates whose first foray into wine was with a small vineyard in Georgia. Vines were planted here in 2003, and the winery opened its doors in 2006. Winemaker Riaan Roussow hails from South Africa, and has brought planting of the distinctive South African grape Pinotage to Lovingston: only a handful of Virginia wineries offer this type of wine.
Wine. Among the Top 100 wineries of Virginia. The Lovingston 2017 vintage Estate Reserve Josies Knoll was awarded a gold medal at the Virginia Governor’s Cup state-wide wine competition. The 2019 Cabernet Franc and Rotunda Red won silver medals at both the 2023 and 2022 Governor’s Cup competitions, as did their 2019 Pinotage. The 2017 Merlot, along with the 2019 Rotunda Red, also were awarded silver medals at the 2022 Monticello Cup wine tasting competition. The winery’s focus is on small lots of Bordeaux-style reds, with the Pinotage being a very different touch. The Puckett’s daughter Stephanie assists Riaan Roussow in the winemaking.
Setting. Small and not generally crowded. Tasting room is upstairs in the winery itself, which works if you like to get the feel of the production process. Nice deck, and an open pond, but otherwise views are not as expansive or spectacular as they are in other parts of the Monticello AVA or near the mountains. Limited snacks.
Stories: A Streetcar Fortune from Virginia: Thomas Fortune Ryan
Thomas Fortune Ryan was born in Lovingston in 1851. Age 2 when his mother died and his father remarried and moved to Tennessee, Ryan stayed in Lovingston to be raised by his mother’s extended Scotch-Irish family. He moved around and wound up in New York City, and through his wife’s connections managed to get a broker’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The building of his eventually massive fortune began when he founded, in 1883, the New York Cable Railroad, from lower Manhattan to Midtown – one of the world’s first streetcar lines. Public transit was finding a huge market in New York, as immigrants arrived by the hundreds of thousands to work in the booming factories of the city. By 1900, Ryan’s now-reorganized Metropolitan Traction Company controlled the majority of New York City’s streetcar operations, with some 3,000 cars and 300 miles of track through the city. Though the streetcar company’s finances were hit by competition by the newly built New York subway, Ryan’s fortune only grew. His public transit profits were plowed into tobacco, and Ryan became one of the founders of the American Tobacco Company, and subsequently British-American Tobacco. Having converted to Catholicism, Ryan funded the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, and was generally a large philanthropist. He passed away in 1928.