During the election, Donald Trump made some controversial remarks about undocumented immigrants from Mexico, but his son’s vineyard in Charlottesville has asked for permission to bring six Mexican workers into the country. Several other wineries in the area rely on guest workers to prune, spray and harvest grapes, and they wonder if they’ll have any problems getting the visas they need with a competitor’s father in the Oval Office. Sandy Hausman has that story.
At this time of year, grape vines are dormant, but workers at Veritas Winery in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains are busy -- pruning.
“January the 22nd is called St. Vincent’s Day, and St. Vincent is the patron saint of vines, and according to tradition one starts pruning on January 22nd," says owner Andrew Hodson. He's getting an early start to produce fewer grapes.
“The wine is made in the vineyard, so your wine is as good as the fruit that you grow. It’s a paradox that the more fruit a vine produces, the lower is the quality of the fruit.”
And with a hundred acres, he needs help to provide maximum exposure to light and and air through the canopy.
"If there’s no air movement then that predisposes to fungal infections,” he explains.
Hodson’t brother-in-law, Bill Tomkins, arrives by ATV to offer a tour of the high meadow where a crew of ten Mexican-Americans from Waynesboro is working. He’s spent the better part of five years training them. Albino Zurita is the crew’s chief.
“I try to do the best I can," he says. " I try to learn, every year, something new.”
In the distance, he can see snow coming over the mountain. It’s 20 degrees, and the wind makes it feel much colder, but Zurita doesn’t complain. He likes almost everything about this job, but not the wine.
“My wife doesn’t let me drink anymore," he says with a laugh.
Winemaker Andrew Hodson is also happy with this workforce close to home.
“Overall it’s more expensive if you’re a small producer to bring in guest workers,” he says.
At Horton Winery, 40 miles east of Veritas, it’s another story. Winemaker Michael Heny relies on 18 people who come from Mexico on H-2A visas for ten months a year.
“We’re fortunate in having had much of the same crew over the past 20 years," he says. "Their knowledge is amazing. They can say, ‘You know the eighth row, the fourth panel down, the third plant the left side. I’m a little worried about it.”
The winery covers round-trip transportation from Mexico, housing, food, weekly trips to Walmart and pay of $10.72 an hour. Horton’s does advertise for help as required by the Labor Department before H-2A visas are issued, but Heny says they haven’t had much luck attracting skilled locals.
“Everyone wants to be outside when it’s nice in April, but they’re less eager to be outside when it’s cold in January,” Heny says.
And much of this work must be done by hand. At Early Mountain Vineyard in Madison County, winemaker Ben Jordan says he can’t use mechanical pickers for certain wines which shake individual grapes from the plant.
“There is a very high quality way of pressing chardonnay – it’s called whole cluster pressing, which involves throwing the clusters in whole and pressing them gently so as not to extract a lot of tannin from the skins of the chardonnay." he explains. " If you stem them before hand, you’re going to extract more tannin from the stems of the chardonnay and make a different wine. Champagne in particular would be hard to do that way.”
So his vineyard also hopes to bring in a few hands from Mexico to help out. If the federal government were to refuse visas for Mexican workers, Michael Heny says these vineyards could be in trouble, and he hopes the neighboring winery owned by Donald Trump’s son Eric won’t lead the White House to intervene. It takes approval from the State Department, the Labor Department and Homeland Security to get the visas foreign workers need, and the President appoints the secretaries of all three agencies.
“We hope that it doesn’t affect the labor that we really depend on to make a quality product and run this whole business.”
Back at Veritas, Andrew Hodson also keeps a wary eye on Eric Trump.
“He is a loner within the Virginia wine industry," says Hodson. "Everyone’s just waiting to see how it evolves. We’re just keeping our fingers crossed that his presence won’t make that much difference.”
Libby Whitley scoffs at the idea that Trump would interfere in any way. She runs the largest H-2A agency in the nation – a Lovingston company called Mas Labor.
“I’ve worked with Trump Vineyards for years.," she says. " They understand their obligations under the law. I have.no reason to believe that the scenario that you posit would even remotely enter anyone’s mind.”
But she is concerned that some of Donald Trump’s allies, many in Congress, don’t like guest worker programs and might do away with them. If that happened, Virginia wineries, orchards and farms would lose more than 33-hundred seasonal workers from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Whitley thinks growers would be forced to employ undocumented people. Most U.S citizens, she says, won’t give up unemployment benefits and other government assistance to leave their homes in cities or suburbs for low paid work in the country. In Central Virginia, I’m Sandy Hausman in Charlottesville.