Meet the Winemakers: Tom Croghan

1.Who taught you?

Beyond what I learned from my parents, which was crucial, maybe the most important teachers I have are plants. We learn from them. If you attend to plants, you realize they’re pretty smart. If you think about it, they figured out how to get us to take care of them. They’re sedentary, and they’ve learned to survive without being able to run away. That’s quite a dramatic intelligence. So in the spirit of Robin Wall Kimmerer, I like to credit plants and nature as my teacher.

As a viticulturist and a winemaker, I also credit some of my early medical school and residency professors, people like Ed Flink at West Virginia University and Mac Harvey at Johns Hopkins, who really instilled the power of observation. When I was in medical school, we had “Stump Dr. Flink” rounds. One morning there was a woman who spoke no English. She was from Eastern Europe, so she couldn’t give him any history. We knew the answer because we’d done the tests, and we gave him what little we could tell him. He walked in, turned around, walked out two minutes later, and said, “She has pernicious anemia” (a form of anemia caused by vitamin B12 deficiency). He was right, of course, but we were aghast. He said people with pernicious anemia have a very unique little fold in their earlobe. That power of observation is so important when you’re growing grapevines.

The other set of lessons is about becoming the kind of person you want to be. When I was at Stanford, I made friends with Paul Berg, my biochemistry professor, who won the Nobel for being the first person to clone a gene. At the time, I was having trouble cloning a gene in my lab, so I asked him if we could get a cup of coffee so I could pick his brain. We got together, and he said, “You know, Tom, it’s been a long time since I cloned a gene. You have to talk to the postdocs in my lab. I couldn’t help you with anything.” That was a lesson in humility. We ended up striking up quite a friendship. We’d meet once a week for coffee. They had these unbelievable oatmeal raisin muffins at the coffee shop at Stanford. We’d split one because they were huge.

And one more. My wife, Polly Pittman, worked in human rights in Argentina in the 1980s and ’90s. She got there at the end of the military government, and from that experience, we have a very close-knit group of friends who are exiles from that period. A number of them had family members who were disappeared. The strength of character, the friendship, and the sense of the preciousness of life and freedom are lessons I’m so grateful for. It’s also a big lesson for today’s world, to be persistent. But let’s go back to nature.

2.Who have you taught? Where are they now?

Very few. We’ve only been at this for fifteen years. I do have a few folks who’ve come through Dodon. One has a vineyard on an island in Sweden now, and that’s really rewarding. But most of the people who’ve come through have left the industry for one reason or another.

I value another kind of teaching. I don’t know whether I’d say I teach, but I do teach, and I also learn. I’m very involved with the Porto Protocol, an international climate network, and I lead a project called the Living Vineyards Project, where we learn from each other across the globe. The lessons are unbelievable. We’re in a subtropical climate with lots of rainfall, so we have a lot of cover crops and hence experience managing them that we can share. We also have a deer problem. I mentioned it one day, and somebody from South Africa said, “Oh, I can help you with that. It’s no problem.” They’ve rewilded tens of thousands of hectares in the Cape, and you can imagine rewilding in South Africa involves some pretty big animals, like rhinos, so they figured out how to do wildlife corridors. The project includes forty-two operations in fourteen countries on five continents. I make my contributions and others make theirs. The reciprocity is really wonderful.

3.Which vintages do you date your life by?

Without doubt, 2018. We had an enormous amount of rain in the spring, then a drought until mid-July, when the spigot turned on. We had thirty-five inches of rain in August and September. We made no red wine. We had puddles all over the vineyard and no infiltration. Two lessons came out of that. One was that we can’t keep doing what we’re doing. That was our first, or maybe our second, taste of what was going to happen with climate change. Our daughter lived in Argentina at the time, and we spent the month of December with her there. I spent two or three hours a day learning about agroecology and figuring out how to bring it back and apply it to the vineyard. That’s why I date that year. Before 2018, we’d dabbled on the fringes of sustainability, but after that, we went all in.

The other thing is that we tried to make red wine despite the rain. We dropped half the fruit, and what was left was still terrible. We tried every which way to get rid of the off flavors. We used all the standard fining techniques and then some non-traditional methods. By the time we were finished, there was no flavor at all. So we took maybe 60 or 70 percent of the wine to a local distillery, distilled it, brought it back, blended the distillate with the remaining wine, and aged it three years in barrel. The result resembles a fortified dessert wine, about 17 percent alcohol. It’s turned out to be a really beautiful wine. The lesson there is that nature will always give you something beautiful if you just stick with it.

4.What has changed in the trade since you started that a new hire would walk right past?

Consistent with what we were just talking about, it’s nature. I consider myself a newcomer to the industry, but even in this short time things have changed dramatically. Polly’s family has been on this farm for three hundred years. I started coming here twenty-five years ago, and nobody who was here then could remember a late spring frost event. We’re just a couple of miles from the Chesapeake Bay, and we were protected by the maritime climate. We never had late frost. You could pretty much count on no frost after April 15th. In 2020, however, we had a Mother’s Day frost and lost most of our white production. We’ve had frost every year since. We got cold drains, and they protected us until this year, when we lost 70 percent of our production overall. We walked out on April 21 and saw the devastation. It was region-wide.

Ten years ago, we never had a rainstorm of more than an inch or two, but torrential downpours have become the norm. In 2025, on Friday, June 13th, we had five inches in an hour and fifteen minutes. I regularly get flood alerts now on beautiful sunny days because of sea level rise. In the twenty-five years I’ve lived here, the sea level in Annapolis has risen six inches, and the city dock in the downtown area floods regularly.

The other thing is that Maryland has incredibly archaic alcohol laws. We planted our first vines in 2007 as field trials, and in 2010 the state passed the Winery Modernization Act, which allowed on-premise wine tasting. Before that, you could give people a one-ounce pour and take them on a tour, and they could take a bottle home, with a maximum on how many. Now people can come sit on our patio or out on the lawn and have some wine and cheese and a nice time. You couldn’t do that when we started.

5.Walk me through a day at the peak of harvest, hour by hour.

I read several of your other interviews, and most of the answers were something like, it’s really hard work, we get up early, check the wines, and go out to the vineyard. But I’m seventy-two now, and harvest takes a lot of preparation. There are the usual things, like making sure all the equipment works, because something’s going to break. But for me, and I try to instill this in our team, there’s also physical and mental preparation. As soon as harvest is over, I start working out again. I like to ride a bicycle, maybe lift weights. It’s the physical preparation to get through the grueling moments of harvest. Our winemaker left us in July this year, so I came out of retirement to fill in. It was a light harvest, and that had its silver lining.

There’s also a lot of mental preparation, preparing for a three-month marathon that consumes every moment. We always start our harvest days with a prayer of thanksgiving, because we’re so grateful for the opportunity to be together. At Dodon, it’s all hands on deck. We’ll pick three or four days a week, sometimes more, but we’re always glad to be together. I used to run marathons, and the actual picking is much like those long-distance runs or long bicycle rides. You get in the “zone,” and it just passes, and you really enjoy being in the moment with the vines, out in nature. It’s a really lovely time. Of course, it’s a lot of work too, picking, getting things picked up and refrigerated, the crush pad, all of that. But I really appreciate that we can accomplish the mission as a team.

6.What decision do you make that you cannot fully explain to somebody else?

I bet several of your other winemakers have already mentioned the picking decision. For years I never really knew what I was doing. I could get all the objective signs, and we’d go out and taste. We’re pretty good at detecting tannins in the fruit and understanding when the fruit is phenologically ready.

In 2024, the weather was beautiful, and the forecast was even better. We’d already picked the whites, and they were all in and doing fine. Our general manager, Regina McCarthy, and I were out in the first of the red blocks, and I was tasting, and the signs were a little confusing. I said, “The weather forecast is great. We can wait.” But as I kept walking down the road, attending to what the vines were saying, I looked over at Regina and said, “Regina, the vines are telling me to pick.” I don’t know what made me say that, but I felt it. We wanted to pick some early Cabernet Franc for rosé anyway, so I said let’s go ahead and pick that tomorrow. That was a Sunday. We picked Monday, and Monday evening a nor’easter spun up off of Miami and started tracking up the coast. We got our keisters in gear. Everything was pretty much ready, and there was no sense in being greedy. Nobody took a break. We were picking with customers watching. We had a big harvest that year too, I think the largest ever. We finished at noon the following Tuesday. At one o’clock it started raining, and it didn’t stop for sixteen days. Many of our colleagues in the region didn’t make red wine that year.

I explain it this way, and I think as a park ranger you’ll understand. When a plant is under stress for whatever reason, it’s emitting volatile chemicals that maybe we can perceive and maybe we can’t, but they’re there, like in a glass of wine. I think they’re telling us when something is going to happen, or when they’re under stress and need something, if we pay attention. That’s happened several times now, and in the last few years I feel much more confident just attending to the vines and listening to what they’re telling me.

7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong. Start at the beginning.

I guess it depends on what we mean by wrong. You can think about it different ways. Harvest was terrible this year because we lost 70 percent of our fruit in April. I also think about years when the team hasn’t been completely in sync. There’s that notion that we’re not working together as well as we should, and I think that’s partly a preparation thing.

Some of the hardest times have been since COVID. We haven’t been able to get day labor, and if we have five or six tons of fruit to get in in a day, that’s a lot for our small team. So there have been a lot of challenges to overcome. But when something goes wrong, it’s often because we haven’t prepared properly, so we try to avoid that. On the last day of harvest last year, in 2025, we went out and turned on the destemmer, and it didn’t start. We spent two hours trying to get it going. Fortunately, we had a backup. That’s redundancy. I just wrote an article for Wine Industry Advisor on redundancy. We try to have a backup so we can get through those hard times and avoid something going terribly wrong. I was telling that story to one of our customers who’d served on a submarine, and he said, “We have a lot of systems on a submarine that are so important that we have eighteen different backups. I get it.”

8.Who is the legend around here? Somebody people tell stories about.

Many people in the wine industry have been incredibly kind to us, freely sharing their knowledge, skills, and friendship. The people in the mid-Atlantic deserve a special shout-out. There’s a sense throughout the region that we are all better off working together, whether that’s on legislation or helping to build strong university training programs. Tim Mondavi remarked once that it reminded him of Napa Valley when he was a teen.

But Polly’s father is the legend around Dodon. He led the most interesting life. At sixteen, he hoboed across the country, spent the summer on a cattle ranch in Montana, then hopped trains to get home. World War II was starting when he graduated from college. He secretly worked for the government, building airports in North Africa. One day somebody came up to him in Khartoum and said, “Can you take this lion to the zoo in Cairo?” So he had a lion sitting at his feet on the airplane for however long that takes. After the war, he went to law school and started a successful law firm that now has several thousand lawyers in it.

He was in a men’s group with Edward Teller, one of the key figures in the Manhattan Project, who later advised President Kennedy on nuclear weapons. When it was Steuart’s turn to lead the discussion, he picked civil defense, how to defend ourselves against nuclear war. He didn’t think much about it. A few days later the president said, “We need somebody to really invigorate our civil defense,” and Teller, sitting in the room, said, “I know this guy Pittman.” So Steuart Pittman went on to become assistant secretary of defense for civil defense. You have enough gray hair to remember all the bomb shelters we had. That was his project.

He was in that role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the president came to him one day and said, “What happens if the Russians have a nuclear warhead in Cuba and launch it in response to an invasion of Cuba?” Steuart said, “I’ll be here first thing in the morning.” He went home, worked on it, and came back to the president the next day and said his best guess was that thirty million people would die. The president said, “I can’t let that happen.” They decided not to invade Cuba, despite the president’s brother, Bobby, and Robert McNamara encouraging him to. We now know the Russians did have that missile ready to go, and they probably would have launched it. So there are some people who say Steuart single-handedly prevented nuclear war. Now that’s the stuff of legend.

Steuart was always curious, right up to his death in 2013. After Polly and I moved to the farm in 2006, we started reading books on cosmology and neuroscience and would discuss them over dinner every Friday. I’m so fortunate, because we became very close friends toward the end of his life.

9.Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year? Same thing, same way.

On the day of the last picking, when the last grapes come off the crush pad, we always sing the Ban Bourguignon, the Burgundian drinking song. My wife hates it. Our general manager hates it. But the vineyard manager and I get a kick out of it. And of course we do it properly, because about ten years ago we had an intern from Meursault who taught us how. Then we always have a post-harvest celebration where the team can get together and decompress. We have a number of H-2A workers who come up from Mexico, and we always like to celebrate with them before they go home.

10.What do people outside the trade always get wrong about this work?

We have something like twelve or fourteen thousand unique visitors here every year, and many of them take one of our tours. We take that as an opportunity to educate them. I think they’re very surprised by the amount of ecological science that goes into this business. We’ve taken ecology as our way of operating, and they’re surprised by that. I think it’s a useful lesson.

11.What’s the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

In 2012, I think, we had a Japanese beetle infestation. If you’re from the East Coast, you know about Japanese beetles. We sprayed carbaryl, commonly known as Sevin, six times. I was a brand-new newbie. A friend of mine, a very experienced vineyard manager, was coming out for dinner, and he drove into the vineyard and said, “Wow, your leaves are rust-colored.” He walked over and said, “You’ve got red spider mites. You’ve got to do something about that. Get out the miticide.” I said, “No, we’re not going to do that. We’ll survive.” The vines were three or four years old at the time, so they weren’t going to produce great wine anyway. We rode it out.

Then I started thinking about how we could address the problem ecologically, and that’s really where we got our start. We created field borders, which wasn’t hard at all. We just let the weeds grow. Wingstem, crownbeard, and goldenrod grew spontaneously, providing habitat for scoliid wasps, for example, which are digger wasps. They fly over the turf grass, drill down into the soil, and lay their eggs in the grubs, the beetle’s larval form. Because the Japanese beetles were coming in from outside the vineyard, we were essentially sending out the cavalry to take care of them. When everything woke up in the spring, the wasps consumed the grubs, so suddenly there were no more grubs. That helped a lot.

That story ended in 2017 with a sentinel moment. The field borders worked so well that we got down to two sprays a year for the beetles, and I started thinking I was clever. We had the opportunity to spend half a day with Jean-Michel Comme when he was still at Château Pontet-Canet, and he said, “Yes, yes, that’s a very good practice, a very good organic practice. But you don’t understand nature.” He was absolutely right. I wasn’t looking at the problem holistically. I wasn’t thinking in three dimensions or about the adaptive complexity of how nature really operates. I thought I was clever enough that reading Nature, Science, and Cell would give me all I needed, and it didn’t. We really had to attend to what was going on around us, and Jean-Michel was the first to pick up on that and tell me. I’m glad to say we reconnected earlier this summer. He’s since left Pontet-Canet and consults, mostly in California, and we had a lovely conversation. He said, “You know what? You still don’t understand nature.” I think he’s still right.

12.Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?

We leaf by hand. We have to adapt it every year to the conditions. We’re increasingly getting more abiotic breakdown, particularly in Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, so we have to do the leafing with a great deal of precision, and we just brute-force it. The summer afternoons are very hot here, so we have little garden carts with umbrellas, and the guys can sit in the shade and spend their afternoons leafing, which keeps them a little safer from heat injury. But we still leaf by hand.

13.What were you taught that you’ve since stopped doing?

The state of the art, at least here and maybe everywhere, is that a vineyard should look like a golf course, with nicely mowed turf grass and a clean herbicide strip under the vines. That’s certainly the standard here. We’ve never used herbicides except to address an invasive species, whether that’s Johnson grass, which is a C4 grass, or ailanthus. Other than that, we don’t use herbicides. We’ve always tilled under the vines. But we stopped mowing between the rows.

I think it was in 2018, when I was learning about agroecology, that we learned about roller crimpers. A roller crimper is basically a big drum with steel blades welded to the drum every six or seven inches, in a chevron shape so it rolls smoothly. We have fescues here that grow right up to the fruit zone, which is about thirty inches above the ground, and that’s about where the seed head is. When the seed head matures, right around bloom, we take the crimper and knock the grass over. That terminates it by putting little kinks in the stalk.

What happens after that is just a miracle. The seed head is mature, so it’s self-seeding. The crimped-over stalks become mulch, so if we have rain during bloom and fruit set, the rain is broken up and you get much less splash, and therefore much less fungal pressure back up into the fruit zone. And bloom is when the grapevines have their root flush, so you’re terminating the roots of the grass, releasing their nutrients right when the grapevine needs them. It’s just unbelievable. What we’re left with is a highly biodiverse bed of grasses and forbs, six to eight inches tall. It varies across the vineyard, but there are somewhere between twenty and thirty different species per square meter, which provides habitat for all the beneficial insects. Mowing provides no help in the vineyard at all, except that you can work there and maybe play croquet.

14.Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

No, we don’t name things. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Rudolf Steiner, the German philosopher from the 1920s. There’s another German philosopher from that era, Martin Buber, who taught the distinction between inanimate objects and living beings. Our relationships can be viewed as “I and It” and “I and Thou.” In other words, we have respectful names for living things, whether it’s our pets or our plants. Robin Wall Kimmerer would say we have respect for those living things, and that’s why we have unique names for them. So I like to make that distinction. The stainless steel tank, the destemmer, the tractor, they’re inanimate. They’re Its, no names.

15.Somebody walks in knowing nothing about wine. What do they already know that you can build on?

They certainly know about food, and they certainly know the difference between a fresh, local tomato and a tomato that’s commoditized, grown for shipping. So we can take that knowledge and help them understand the difference between what we do and what they’re buying in the grocery store, or in Maryland, at the liquor store, and really distinguish the importance of ecologically grown, farmed food.

16.Whoever pours this wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn’t in the tasting notes?

We have a terrific set of tour guides, and they set the stage for this very nicely. They take folks out into the vineyard and down into the cellar. Maybe they meet the sheep or the pigs. They see our philosophy in action. From that, people seem to recognize the passion and love that go into the wine, which we do on behalf of our community. That’s what we have to offer. It’s such hard work that we couldn’t do it if we weren’t passionate about it. You just can’t sustain that level of effort. And people get that over the course of their time with us.

17.What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?

I like to say that 90 percent of my job is perspiration. I try to get out in the fields some during the year. But when somebody comes during harvest, and I’m dripping and smelly, and my clothes are dirty, they get it. It’s not romance. I think it’s that, and the passion and love that go into it, that really separate a drinkable commodity like Coca-Cola from wine, from something beautiful.

18.What’s your favorite wine that you don’t make?

I love Barolo and Barbaresco. We love Nebbiolo. I tried every which way to grow it, but it’s just too disease-prone in our climate, and we finally ripped it out. I’d love to be able to grow it, partly because I just really like it. It has that freshness. It’s a little bit thin, but it has a lot of tannin and a lot of acid. And my wife and I were in Bellagio when I proposed to her, and that’s what we had for dinner.

19.When you make a great one, do you know right away?

Like the devastating vintage we talked about earlier, a great wine is in the eye of the beholder. Two of our children live in Indianapolis, and I was flying home one day during the Iraq War, sitting next to a soldier who had just gotten home after six months in the war zone. I asked him what the first thing he was going to do when he got home was. He said he was going with his family to Boordy Vineyards, one of the local wineries here in Maryland, the oldest one, actually, run by a terrific family. The soldier said he loved to sit on the Boordy patio and have their fruit wine. I’m not a fruit wine drinker, so that doesn’t sound very appealing to me. But I thought it was so lovely, because that’s what he defined as great, and I think that’s an important lesson we all need to learn.

For my own palate, I know in the vineyard what I’ll like, even before we pick the grapes. I now know, in the vineyard, that these grapes are just what we want to use in the cuvée. We rarely get that opportunity, because we’re very often threatened by a storm or breakdown or something we have to attend to. But when we have that opportunity, it’s really inspiring.

20.One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

We actually had that opportunity the other night, and it was quite funny. We were hosting a reception, and Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, was there. There was speechmaking going on, and he reached over to get another pour from one of the servers, and I grabbed a bottle of Dungannon, our Merlot-based cuvée, largely from the area of the vineyard we call Block 28, and it’s routinely wonderful. I didn’t have to say a word to Martin. He just smiled. That wine spoke for itself.

One more: What does this work take away from you that people don’t see?

Oh, the gifts of being in this industry are much more than anything it could take out of me. I’m trained as a physician and did health policy for most of my career, and I liken the first ten years of this business to my internship at Johns Hopkins. That was back in the days when there were no rules about how long you could work as a resident physician. I’d go to work on Friday morning and come home Monday night. Those were hundred-hour shifts, and that takes a lot out of you.

The comparison is what winemaking has given me. Despite the stress and the effort, it’s rejuvenated my interest in life. My wife says I’ve recreated my old life in policy, because I get so involved with agricultural policy and that became part of health care policy. People now say that food is medicine, and they’re right. I have the opportunity to work with an incredible group of people half my age who are so passionate and so committed to what we’re trying to do here on the farm. There’s the response of our community when we get a chance to tell them our story, the opportunity to interact with nature the way I do, and the chance to learn a science I didn’t know. I also trained at Stanford in immunology, so I have deep roots in science, and this lets me learn and do more. And I’ve met so many incredible people around the world. No matter where we go, whether it’s Argentina or Chile or Europe or California, people open their doors and say, “Let’s have some wine. Let’s talk shop.” The gifts are so much greater than the effort. It’s so rejuvenating. It doesn’t take anything. Occasionally I don’t sleep as well.