Our Annual Conversation with Annette Boyd

6 January 2026.  Hello Gentle Readers and Welcome to the Year 2026!  We are beginning the year with our fifth annual interview of Annette Ring Boyd, Director of the Virginia Wine Board Marketing Office in Richmond.  Our discussion took place on January 6, 2026.  Annette has been involved with marketing Virginia wine since June 1987 when she became the wine marketing specialist for the Virginia Department of Agriculture.  She was instrumental in creating October as “Virginia Wine Month,” establishing the Virginia Governor’s Cup wine competition and recently the Governor’s Cup Wine Trail.  In 2007, she was awarded the contract to manage the Virginia Wine Marketing Office as its Director.

 

As with last year, this post paraphrases our discussion and does not directly quote Annette.  I hope that I have captured the discussion accurately.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Roger.  Just so you know, my wife and I made it to around 40 Virginia wineries in 2025, and sampled around 230 wines.  We’re hoping to get down to Southern Virginia along the North Carolina line this year.  But it’s a long road from here.

Annette.  Rosemont should be at the top of your list. 

Stewards of Virginia Wine Awards.  2025 was the first year the Virginia Wine Board honored restaurants, wine bars, and retailers with the Stewards of Virginia Wine Awards for demonstrating exceptional support for Virginia Wine.  You recognized 18 establishments.  I know you’ve spoken before about steps to encourage the food industry to incorporate Virginia wine.  What were your criteria for selecting these?

Desiree Harrison-Brown is our trade marketing specialist.  She started over a year ago with our office.  She developed the criteria;* she came up with a list of judges to review the applications.  Applications can be submitted by people in the trade, by consumers, and establishments can self-nominate for the awards.  Desiree follows-up for missing details and gives the applications to the judges.  And the awards resulted.

How have the awards been received in the food industry? 

We envision that the Steward awards will be an annual event and that the number of awardees and applicants will grow with word-of-mouth.  I would love to see the program double.

The awards were announced in November.  Applications were due so that restaurants would get credit for any event happening in Virginia Wine Month – October.

Are the Steward awards going to be linked to the Governor’s Cup or will they be a stand-alone thing?

Stand-alone.  We love our Governor’s Cup and the Steward Awards will a totally separate program.  Last year saw the award of around 85 gold medals in the Governor’s Cup.  There are around 300 wineries in Virginia.  Our office has to promote them all whether they medal or not. 

Virginia Wine Trails.  I think that Virginia’s Gold Cup Wine Trail Passes grew out of the pandemic to promote people traveling to gold medal wineries.  I see now that you are promoting a Norton Trail.  Any thought about incorporating some of the local or regional wine trails like Monticello Wine Trail or the Shenandoah Valley Wine Trail?

You are right that the Gold Cup Wine Trail came out of the pandemic.  The Norton Wine Trail is a pilot program applying that Gold Cup Wine Trail idea across the state.  Now that the Norton Trail is up and running, we are in conversations now about having a “Women Winemakers Trail,” or a “Sparking Wine Trail,” or a “Cabernet Franc Trail,” or a “Hybrid Wine Trail,” or who knows, a “Petit Manseng Trail.”

We do a matching grant process where we send out notices in February for wineries interested in collaboration within the industry, and we are going to encourage wineries to submit applications for that.  We use a software called “Vin Wingo” [Annette may be referring to “VinNow.”] to support those trails. 

There are already so many regionally-based trails, like the Monticello Wine Trail or the Loudoun Wine Trail, that “region” is probably one criteria we won’t use in deciding on grant applications.  Many of the regional wine trails are quite established and well-funded.  We want these new trails to be more unique and use different criteria.  This would be another interesting way to look at wineries out there, you know.  It could build some interesting new consumer focus.  So, the regional trails can continue doing their own thing separate from this effort.  

Maybe even a Viognier Wine Trail so I can encourage my wife to drink more of that.

Absolutely!

Eastern Winery Exposition.  The Eastern Winery Exposition is the largest wine production industry event east of the Pacific.  In March 2026, the Exposition will be held in Richmond for the first time [March 24-26 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.]  I imagine your office had a lot to do with this.

We’ve been working with those organizers for years to get the Exposition down to Virginia.  They had deep relationships in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and New York State and we’ve been working to overcome several hurdles they had.  For example, the way ABC licenses work in Virginia, the programming of the local and state events in Pennsylvania and New York.  We had to work the timing of the Exposition to minimize disruption to their annual events. 

We’re very excited that they chose to be in Virginia this year.  It will benefit Virginia wineries for them to be in close like this.  Having many different products (barrels, sprayers, wine presses, and farm equipment) in close is a bonus for us – the industry.  It’s the second biggest wine equipment trade show after “Unified” in California [the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium].  Wineries from Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and all along the East Coast attend the Eastern Exposition.

Governor’s Cup.  You’re usually hard at work organizing the Governor’s Cup at this time of year.  Any changes in the competition or the gala that are noteworthy this year’s Virginia Governor’s Cup?

We anticipated a lot of fallout and upheaval from the changes we made in 2024.  But what we found was that the upheaval turned-out not to be as significant as people anticipated.  I’m not aware of any changes we’ve made for the 2025 competition, which tells me that either there are no changes or, if there are changes, they aren’t controversial.  I haven’t followed it that closely this year, but if there were controversy, I’d hear about it.  People are still absorbing the earlier changes.

Paris Wine Expo.  Last December when we talked, you were excited about Virginia wines participating in the 2025 Wine Expo in Paris.  I see that six wineries exhibited in February along with a nice reception at the U.S. Embassy.  How did you select the six wineries for the Expo?

To select the wineries, we first went with wineries that already had exports in place.  There were four wineries that met the export criteria.  For the other two slots, we sent a general notice to all Virginia wineries to elicit any interest among them to enter the export market.  Sixteen or 18 wineries let us know they were interested in exporting.  Four of them already had exports in place – customers, distributors and those guys got precedence to get a booth at the Vin Expo.  We then held a random drawing among the remaining (12 to 14) wineries to select the last two slots for the trip. 

How did we do? 

Michael Shaps, King Family Vineyards, and Rosemont Vineyards all had serious interest and orders based off of the Expo.  But carrying through on sales, even domestically, not to say internationally, you need relationships with distributors, shippers, starting the sales process and actually getting the product on shelves and building a customer base, and this takes a long time.  Hard to do one palette at a time.  We are at the very start of the process.  We will need more product to sell, which is difficult in a time of declining retail wine sales.

We have noticed an uptick in wineries interested in national and international distribution.  We are working with Virginia Economic Development and other states to talk about long-term partnering prospects.  We know wine sales are down nationally by about 5% and there’s a similar decline in Virginia.  As a result, the Wine Board budget was cut by around 5%.  Since the Marketing Office is under the Wine Board, our operations have also been cut.  (As you know, the Wine Board is funded out of the excise tax wineries pay to Virginia ABC based on their sales.)

Because of that budget decline, we are not doing the Paris Vin Expo in 2026.  It breaks my heart since I feel that we had momentum and energy from last year, but we had to make some tough decisions with those budget cuts.  We moved our focus to wine sales in Virginia and Washington, DC to stop the sales decline. 

We are partnering with the Virginia Department of Agriculture - International Marketing Department, as well as a group of wineries that are interested in international distribution who are starting the process to try to get Federal export money.  Did you know that the lobbying and marketing organ for the California wine industry, the Wine Institute, has its international marketing efforts funded by over $7 million in Federal MAP funds annually?^  California has opened-up that grant to assist in the export of Oregon and Washington State wine but they are not sharing it with Virginia. 

We’re exploring other options to access Federal funds, such as the Trump Administration’s new “America First” program, which is aimed at exports.^^  There is an effort among the Virginia wine industry to get set-up to access those funds.  The Wine Board doesn’t have its own Federal ID number so we can’t apply for a grant (at the Board level).  Further, the Virginia Department of Agriculture, of which we’re a part, has another team in forestry that is also pursuing Federal export funds.  Anyway – it’s a long-term project to access Federal funds.

New Initiatives.  So, for promoting wine sales within the Commonwealth, what are some initiatives you’re working on now?

As you know, last year we were very excited to hire Desiree Harrison-Brown as our trade marketing specialist.  She has had a very busy year launching a ton of new initiatives.  She inaugurated the Stewards of Virginia Wine that we discussed earlier.  She started trade and consumer newsletters and is growing our subscriber list; we hosted trade tastings in Washington, DC, Virginia Beach, and Richmond; we delivered two master classes on Virginia wines with a large number of wineries and trade representatives in attendance; we participated in wine expos in California, Texas, and Boston. 

I feel like our efforts are working as we noted a 21% increase in sales through distributors from October 2024 to October 2025.  For 2026, we plan on doing a Trade Tasting in Roanoke and (tentatively) a tasting event with Virginia beer and cider in May.  Of course, the Governor’s Cup Gala is in March.

And last , we are planning a Wine Summit in June focusing on trade partners.  This will be a day-long education series on Virginia wine.  These events are a year in the making and have 200 attendees.  Very expensive.  Not a small endeavor.  We did four Summits between 2012 and 2018.  COVID hit in 2020.  Then our consumer communications took precedence and the wine shops had a hard time building back.  So, we have to balance the momentum on the digital side while bringing back the shops and retailers. 

In marketing, there is a lot of trial and error.  AI is changing the way we work.  Staying on top of it is a challenge. 

Roger.  I do appreciate your time as always.  I hope to get down to Richmond to meet you and Desiree in person some time.  

Annette: That would be great. 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 *  Each application is evaluated using the following five categories, with scores ranging from 1 to 5 for each:  Presence on the Wine List or Shelf, Consumer Promotion & Storytelling. Creativity & Collaboration, Staff Engagement & Education, and Commitment to Virginia Wine.  See, https://pages.virginiawine.org/stewards-of-virginia-wine/.

^  The Market Access Program (MAP) is run out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service.  It makes grants to organizations to build commercial export markets.  See, https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/market-access-program-map.

^^  The America First Trade Promotion Program (AFTPP) is also administered by the Foreign Agricultural Service of the USDA.  See, https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/america-first-trade-promotion-program.