Ep 601: Pollak Vineyards – A Leader in the Monticello AVA of Virginia
Wine for Normal People
Wine for Normal People
4.6 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Pollak Vineyards is a small family-owned winery founded in 2003 when Margo and David Pollak bought a farm west of Charlottesville, Virginia. David's experience in wine was pretty extensive – he worked in the 1970s in Sonoma's Russian River Valley and was a founding partner and investor in one of Napa Valley's first Carneros wineries, Bouchaine Vineyards. Years later, when he thought about retirement from the corporate world, he saw huge potential in Virginia and he and Margo took the chance to help shape this emerging region.
Photo: Pollak Vineyards. Credit: https://www.pollakvineyards.com
In this show, I host Ryan Pollak Gardner, Dave and Margo's daughter and their successor, and Benoit Pineau, the long time winemaker. We discuss the story of Pollak, the terroir of their site, and what makes their wine so much better than so many others in Virginia.
For me, Pollak is among the Grand Cru of Virginia – the top of the top. Their wines are stunning, their property is beautiful, and they are doing all the right things to showcase how incredible the wines of VA can be. And I'm not alone: in 2025, Pollak won five gold medals in the VA Governor's Cup Competition, more than any other winery.
A great show on what it takes to run a winery of this caliber in a challenging climate and terroir, and how far Virginia has come, due to places like Pollak.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it. |
| 0:15.9 | I'm your host, Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book, and Certified Wine Dork. |
| 0:21.8 | Join me as I hit record on this conversation with a friend in the wine industry. |
| 0:26.2 | This and all shows with guests are informal, but educational discussions between passionate |
| 0:30.9 | wine friends. All guests are personal friends or friends of friends in wine, not strangers. |
| 0:36.5 | And like any conversation between |
| 0:37.9 | friends, we're going to talk back and forth, interrupt each other, laugh, have fun, debate, |
| 0:43.1 | tough questions, voice opinions. Most of all, enjoy sharing our time together and with you. If you're |
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| 1:23.0 | and for helping the show keep going. Pollock Vineyards is a small family-owned winery founded in 2003 when Margo and David Pollock bought a farm west of Charlottesville, Virginia. |
| 1:36.0 | David's experience in wine was pretty extensive. |
| 1:38.1 | He'd helped found one of Napa Valley's first Carnarous wineries, Bouchain. |
| 1:43.4 | He saw huge potential in Virginia and a chance |
| 1:46.3 | to help shape this emerging region, and they took the plunge. To add my two cents, I think |
| 1:52.0 | Pollock is among the Grand Cru of Virginia. I've talked about that before the top of the top. |
| 1:57.8 | Their wines are stunning. Their property is welcoming and beautiful. They're doing |
| 2:02.1 | all the right things to showcase how incredible the wines of Virginia can be. And I am not |
... |
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