Rappahannock Cellars, which entered the wine business in the late 1990s, has raised $975,000 after finding an unexpected bounce in its business post-Covid.
Founded by John Delmare, a Stanford University graduate who moved to Virginia to live amid the vibrant Catholic community in Virginia, Rappahannock Cellars is based in the town of Huntly. Of 12 children of Delmare and his wife Marialisa, the adults work at the winery, and the winery itself recently added a distillery that makes vodka, gin and brandy.
Call of Religion
“We couldn’t keep up with the orders going out the door,” Delmare once recalled, referring to the period after the first ordered shutdown of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. “Pallets of wine going out every day. We had our biggest year ever.”
Three years after Covid-19 seemingly opened the floodgates for its business, Rappahannock Cellars might be on to further expansion, given its recent fund-raising. Still, for Delmare the winery has never been only about making wine, even when he claimed, with some gusto, that Rappahannock Cellars has “arguably one of the best, if not the best, wine making teams in Virginia.”
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The magic elixir for Delmare and his wife is the intertwined religion. “When you tend the vineyard, you get an appreciation for why Christ used the vineyard analogy so much in the Gospels,” Delmare told Catholic Herald in a 2022 interview. “It’s a peaceful place, it’s wholesome, it’s Biblical.”
Complementary Skills
The duo — Delmare and Marialisa — began wine-making nearly 25 years ago at Saratoga Vineyards, in California’s Santa Cruz mountains. Marialisa comes from a family that had been in farming and fruit packing business for a century. Delmare came with degrees in economics from Stanford University. The couple made good progress with 90-year-old Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, and Zinfandel vines, crafting those “varietals into wine in a 100-year-old redwood winery, cellar, and tasting room.”
Eventually, Virginia and the Blue Ridge Mountains beckoned, with the call of religion and the duo’s desire to raise their children “in a wholesome, family-friendly community.” Today, what was originally Glenway Farm has given way to Rappahannock Cellars. The Delmares live in an 85+ acre farm, consisting of 30 acres of vineyard, and perhaps ripe for expansion.
