Golf meets grapes at The Crossvines in Poolesville, Md. Photo by Jon Lobenstine
The Potomac Valley likely never will rival Napa Valley when it comes to winemaking chops, but the former is gaining ground. And a golf course is at the center of it.
The Crossvines is a 380-acre community winemaking hub in Poolesville, Md., that is backed by the Montgomery County (Md.) Revenue Authority, which owns and operates nine public golf courses in the region northwest of Washington, D.C.
The course at the center of The Crossvines opened in the 1960s as a country club around which its owner had hoped to build housing. The course thrived, but the housing never developed.
Golf continued, and the old Potomac Valley Country Club Lodge operated independently as an events center/banquet facility before it developed a bit of a reputation. “It was like the old roadhouse, a lot of Friday night bar fights — the place to go in town,” says Jon Lobenstine, the MCRA’s GCSAA Class A director of agronomy.
Eventually, the Lodge tenants were kicked out, and the building sat empty for about 16 years as the Revenue Authority considered its options. (Fun fact: The official music video for Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1994 hit “Only Wanna Be with You” is filmed in part in the lodge and at two of the MCRA’s golf courses.)
Keith Miller, CEO of the MCRA, and Marc Elrich, now the Montgomery County executive, were discussing ways to grow the county’s economy, and Elrich’s one-word utterance — “wine” — started The Crossvines project.
“He wanted to put Montgomery County wine on the map,” says Lobenstine, a 26-year GCSAA member. “There were some wineries being built, but he really wanted to put Maryland on the map.”
Neighboring states Virginia and Pennsylvania had built winemaking into billion-dollar industries, while Maryland was only a tenth of that.
The Crossvines — which resides in the 93,000-acre Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve, which is closely regulated to preserve agriculture and conservation just outside Metro D.C. — aims to close that gap.
Because the MCRA is a quasi-governmental operation, it didn’t want to compete with local industry, so it approached the project from a research and educational standpoint. As an example, the University of Maryland began developing a fermentation science major before ground was broken in 2021.
Two years prior to that, Lobenstine planted his first grapevines — about 275 vines covering ¼ acre. But before that, he attended his first educational conference for the Maryland Grape Growers Association, which he likened to the GCSAA Conference and Trade Show except for grapevines instead of turfgrasses.
Session topics were similar, like dealing with drought stress and integrated pest management, but there was a twist: “You get to drink wine in class,” Lobenstine says with a laugh. “You don’t get to do that in turf class.”
The, um, fruits of Lobenstine’s 2019 planting efforts ripened in 2021, in the form of 1,700 pounds of Chardonel grapes, which were delivered to the UMd research facility in Keedysville — at that time the largest batch of fruit that facility had ever processed — and that eventually became the first batch of wine to come out of The Crossvines. It also went on to win a silver medal — thanks to the efforts of Joe Fiola, Ph.D., UMd Extension’s small-fruit specialist — in the Maryland Comptrollers Cup, which Lobenstine chalks up to “beginner’s luck.”
The project has grown considerably since. In 2023, as The Crossvines all-new events center, winery and upscale Farmhouse Bistro, was nearing completion, a commercial planter put in nearly 5 acres of vines, with 19 varieties represented. The first harvest of that larger vineyard will be this year.
Now equally well-versed in terroir as turfgrass, Lobenstine tended the early smaller vineyard with the help of superintendent Mike Otstot, but The Crossvines now has a vineyard manager and winemaker on staff.
The Crossvines currently makes seven wines, like a Front Porch White and a Fairway Rosé, and seven clients — startup wineries, new producers who never before made wine — will produce their own wines there this year.
“We are growing the industry,” says Lobenstine, who jokes The Crossvines’ vineyard might be the only one in the world that has range balls occasionally landing in it. “We’ll probably never be Napa East, but we want to put Maryland wine on the map. We can produce quality wines here. The response from the golfers has been incredible. This events center is basically a country club we built for them. There’s a very high-end feel to the whole facility. The winery is a whole separate thing, and it has brought a lot of new people to the facility, people who aren’t there for the golf.”
Andrew Hartsock is GCM’s editor-in-chief.