Eden winery wins Shore’s 1st Governor’s Cup

• Tom Shelton’s Bordeleau Vineyards & Winery in Eden is the 2014 winner of the Maryland Governor’s Cup Best in Show.
• Shelton’s winning wine, a 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon-Amarone Style, was made in Italian style that involves the drying of fruit to concentrate the flavor.
• Bordeleau Winery’s tasting room is at 3155 Noble Farm Rd., Eden. Hours are Wednesdays-Saturdays noon to 6 p.m.; Sundays 12:30 to 6 p.m.. Mondays and Tuesdays by appointment.

Tom Shelton savored his victory, then hurried back to his harvesting.

He made history, becoming the first Eastern Shore winery to win Maryland’s Governor’s Cup Best in Show honors.

His 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Amarone, an Italian style wine, was judged tops earlier in the spring by more than 20 experts who tasted 100 or more sparkling, whites, roses or red wines.

Shelton celebrated the Governor’s Cub at an awards ceremony at last weekend’s 31st Maryland Wine Festival in Westminister. Then he rushed back to his Bordeleau Vineyards and Winery in Eden to pick more grapes, bottle more wine and introduce what he expects to be more award-winners.

“I’m in the middle of harvest,” Shelton said. “You plant something and hope it grows well.”

Shelton’s chambourcin variety of grapes went into the 2008 prized red wine that also swooped up gold medals at recognized wine competitions earlier in the summer.

“The grapes were grown at Bordeleau’s vineyard in Eden,” according to the Maryland Wineries Association. “This is the first time that a Governor’s Cup Best in Show has been awarded to a winery from Maryland’s Eastern Shore.”

Fruits in Bordeleau wines are grown at the sprawling vineyards off the Wicomico Creek in Eden. “The chambourcin variety grows extremely well on this property,” Shelton said. “It is an East Coast variety.”

If 2008 was a good year, wait until judges taste wines from 2009 through 2020, he said. “I wouldn’t say that I’d win year after year, but I will try to,” said Shelton, surveying more than a dozen medals that drape several of bottles on a shelf.

“It is not easy to win,” he said. “I’ve won more silver and bronze and less gold.”

Some wine labels have lot numbers, which references the total number of wine batches of the same variety bottled.

Said Shelton: “My goal is this: Every year when we bottle wine of the same variety, it is better than the year before. If I keep doing that, the quality of the wine gets better and better.”

He started growing grapes at Bordeleau since 1999, and was licensed to make wine in 2006. The business expanded in 2008 with the opening of a tasting room and private spaces that annually host hundreds of local and visiting wine tasters, as well as occasions as bridal showers.

Tourists from Connecticut stopped by in mid-September to sample a bottle of white wine. They delivered the “unvarnished truth” about their Bordeleau experience:

“It’s great sitting out here. It’s beautiful,” said Sandy Poirier, who lives in Simsbury, Connecticut. “I’m taking home the cork as a remembrance.”

She and husband, Dave, and traveling companions Phillip and Peggy Nolan of Windsor, Connecticut, sat next to a walnut tree on the lawn of the tasting room on Wicomico Creek.

The picturesque setting, amid walnut trees and vineyards and a dock trail to tidal waters of the creek, is one of the best seats on the premise, Shelton said.

“A lot of our customers for the tasting room actually come by boat,” he said. “There is a 10-foot depth at the end of the dock. We have regulars that come from the yacht club down the way.”

Right now attention at Bordeleau is on blackberry wine that’s ready to debut for retail in a few weeks. Shelton expects the wine to be better than his blackberry jelly.

“When you win Best in Show and the Maryland Governor’s Cup, you can’t get better than that,” he said. “I didn’t want to be in the winery business unless I could make good wine.”

dgates@dmg.gannett.com

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