A Major Touch of France From Slater Run’s Winemaker

A Major Touch of France From Slater Run’s Winemaker

By Ali Patusky

“The vineyard is one of the only cultures where you go from the beginning to the end,” Griaud said.

Griaud giving the Roots Vertical tasting in the Slater Run Vineyards tank room.

It might be surprising to learn that Katell Griaud left France to pursue winemaking in the United States, but when a job opportunity presented itself, she took it.

“I actually didn’t think I was going to go to America,” said Griaud, the highly accomplished winemaker at Slater Run Vineyard in Upperville. “But I thought it was way more fun to come and make plenty of different types of wines.”

Griaud’s parents and brother are in the wine industry as well, but their familial roots were far from it. When she was born in Limoges, France, her father was working for IBM and her mother was a nurse. Despite her father being “ very successful” in his job, it was his “dream…to own a vineyard,” his daughter said.

Griaud attributes that dream to the French culture he was surrounded by when he was young, a period in their lives when she said her parents were so-called “hippies” .

My parents were both born in 1950, and in the ‘60s, there was a type of young revolution in France,” she said. “My dad was especially active on that. He went to work in a big corporation but I think he wanted to go back to the roots.”

This dream was fulfilled in 1992 when the family bought a property with a vineyard and house in the Monbazillac commune of Dordogne, France. They split their time between Limoges and Dordogne until 1995 when they moved to the vineyard full-time, a change of pace for then eight-year-old Griaud.

“It was a big shock because we had always lived in suburbs outside of cities or apartments in the middle of cities,” she said. “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it and I really enjoyed it. Starting at this point, my brother and I knew there was no way we were going to walk into an office.”

After completing high school, she was accepted to an academically rigorous course at the University of Toulouse. France. Unsure of what sort of career she wanted to pursue, she attended for one year before deciding it was not the right program for her.

“Everyone around me told me ‘if you are accepted, you should go,’” she said. “I went, it was not my thing After one year, I moved on to a more practical twoyear study in agronomy. I wanted to see different aspects of the vegetables.”

During that time, Griaud participated in multiple farming internships, some with animals and some with plants, including data collection on disease in various vineyards in France. That experience, paired with her love of living in the countryside and the nature of the winemaking process, cemented her career path.

Griaud standing in the barrel room at Slater Run Vineyards.

“The vineyard is one of the only cultures where you go from the beginning to the end,” she said. “You plant your vine, you take care of your vineyard. You transform the grapes into wine, and you can actually present your wine to the client who is going to buy it. You express a little bit of yourself

She eventually attended Faculty De Enology of Bordeaux, where she spent three years completing her masters degree in Oenology while also attending the opposing harvest seasons in New Zealand and France. Ultimately, working in a laboratory with Michele Rolland, a “big time consultant in the wine world, connected her to the Kluge Estate Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she began to work in 2009.

“He [Michele Rolland] knew I was going to start looking for a job and that I wanted to go back abroad,” she said. “He started to tell me about a place in Virginia that was looking for a new winemaker. I started my job on April 1, and I remember that date because I thought it was a big joke, because I was 25 or something like that.”

When the Kluge winery went bankrupt in 2010, Griaud returned to France to begin looking for another job. However, she soon returned to America to work as the winemaker for Trump Winery, following Donald Trump the Kluge Estate, turning down another opportunity to work for a well-known French Chateau.

“In Bordeaux in Médoc, you make only red wine,” Griaud said. “Otherwise, if you plant something else, it’s a little bit more complicated to justify. As much as I love some traditions and culture in France, sometimes it’s a little bit restrictive, and I like the fact that here we can play.”

Griaud was employed at the Trump Winery until 2014 when she began working as the winemaker for both Casanel Vineyards and Winery in Leesburg and Slater Run Vineyards in Upperville. She left Casanel in 2018 and now focuses on Slater Run and also works with her husband, Tim Rausse, at Gabriele Rausse Winery in Charlottesville.

And when she’s not making wine in Virginia, she’s helping out at the at her family winery in France, Chateau Kalian. It’s a busy schedule, but she’d have it no other way.

“I can actually say that I do a job I enjoy,” she said.

Photos by Kristen Finn Katell Griaud