Founded in 2011 by three siblings on the Maryland farm they grew up on, Old Westminster Winery has become one of the most important names in East Coast natural wine, proving that Maryland's varied soils and cool-climate grape varieties can yield wines of genuine character and complexity.
Backstory
Drew Baker, Lisa Hinton, and Ashli Johnson shared a vision: to rescue the family farm from disuse and transform it into a working winery. Lisa, trained as a chemist, took on the role of winemaker. Drew manages the vineyards. Ashli oversees business and marketing. Their Home Vineyard went into the ground in spring 2011 at 800 feet of elevation in Westminster, Carroll County. By December 2016 they added Burnt Hill Farm, twenty-five miles south, where they experiment with native American grape varieties alongside European cultivars.
The Region
Westminster sits in the rolling hills of Carroll County in north-central Maryland. The Home Vineyard's channery loam soils overlie greenstone schist, providing excellent drainage and a mineral backbone rarely associated with the mid-Atlantic. The region's four distinct seasons, humid summers, and cold winters pose real challenges, but they also force the vines to work and produce fruit with genuine acid structure.
Vineyards & Farming
Old Westminster farms pragmatically, using organic inputs wherever possible and limiting synthetic treatments to situations where they are demonstrably less damaging than the alternative. The Home Vineyard carries Cabernet Franc, Syrah, Chardonnay, and Albariño. The winery also sources Chardonnay from Pinegrove Vineyard and works with a network of Maryland growers across a dozen or more varieties including Pinot Gris, Gruner Veltliner, and Tempranillo. Diverse cover crops support beneficial insect populations throughout the growing season.
Winemaking
Lisa Hinton ferments all wines with indigenous yeasts and processes fruit with a sorting table before it enters the cellar. She moves juice and wine by gravity rather than pumps, and bottles without fining or filtration. Techniques vary by variety and vintage: she employs semi-carbonic maceration, skin fermentation for whites and orange wines, petillant naturel sparkling, barrel fermentation for reds, and even canned formats. The guiding principle is to work with what nature provides rather than engineer a predetermined outcome.
The Wines
Old Westminster releases include varietal bottlings of Albariño, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Cabernet Franc, and Syrah alongside Bordeaux-style blends, orange wines under labels such as Terracotta, pét-nat sparkling wines, and canned beverages. The estate produces roughly 120,000 bottles annually and ships to a wine club of more than 2,000 members.
