At the end of July, this writer marked the 40th anniversary as a published wine writer, specializing in wines of Virginia and Eastern North America.

My first piece on the Virginia wine festival in Culpeper, in July 1986, was published in the Reston Connection’s “Magazine” section (thank you, editor Tom Grubisich).

That was followed in September with a piece on the New Dominion Wine Cellars (also in Culpeper, now defunct), published in Northern Virginia magazine in October, 1986.

A regular wine column in the Connection was followed by a series of articles in the Charlottesville Business Journal on the emerging Central Virginia wine scene. An article on Horton Vineyards and their inaugural vintage of Virginia Viognier was re-written for the trade magazine Vineyard & Winery Management, where I was made East Coast Editor in 1999.

That same year, I was invited to be the Mid-Atlantic and South Editor to the ground-breaking Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America, under Bruce Cass and Jancis Robinson MW, published in 2000.

Jancis Robinson MW, Richard Leahy (left) with other regional editors of the Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America

Moving to the Finger Lakes of New York in 1999, I wrote often on that local wine scene on the trade level, and also organized the conference program for the Wineries Unlimited trade show and conference program (now defunct).

In 2010, then-acquisitions editor Carlo DeVito of Sterling Publishing in New York invited me to write a book on the Virginia wineries, which we decided to title Beyond Jefferson’s Vines: the Evolution of Quality Wine in Virginia. Now under my own copyright, the book is soon to be published in a fourth edition.

When I first began writing the story of Virginia wine forty years ago, there were some 32 wineries in the states. Today there are about ten times as many, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the seminal “Judgment of Paris” wine tasting organized by the late Steven Spurrier, which put California wines on the map overnight when they out-performed the top French wines, Frank Morgan helped organize a similar tasting of Virginia wines against French counterparts, at the Cordon Bleu Institute in Paris.

This time, it was the Virginia wines which took first place (and in some classes, swept the top three spots), showing that in this 40-year period, Virginia wines have evolved in quality and reputation to the point where they stand where California wines stood 50 years ago; impressing the world wine community.

In fact, the late Steven Spurrier said in 2012 that “My favorite North American wine region today is Virginia, because it makes the kinds of wines I want a second glass of.” He also wrote the foreword to my current, third edition.