The Untold Truth Of Trump Winery

It may come as a surprise that the 45th President of the United States of America, famous teetotaler Donald J. Trump, owns a winery in Abelmarle County, Virginia, but then again this is a person who also has also slapped his name on everything from steaks, to ties, to spring water, to colognes, so perhaps Trump owning a vineyard isn't such a surprise after all. Perhaps the bigger surprise is that unlike so many ventures the Trump Organization has launched or bought into, so far this one seems to be a success.

The Trumps acquired the 227-acre vineyard, winery, and a 45 room, 26,000 square foot mansion now used as a boutique hotel and for events in a series of fire sale purchases from longtime Trump family friends Patricia Kluge and her ex-husband billionaire John Kluge. The winery was purchased in 2011, the rest of the estate the following year, and the property has subsequently been expanded to a total reported size of nearly 1,300 acres.

The Trump Winery produces several types of wine including sparkling whites, a sparkling rosé, several white wines, and several reds. From the approximate 200 acres planted with grapes, the winery produces some 36,000 cases of wine each year. It is one of more than 300 vineyards in the state of Virginia, the state with the fifth most vineyards in America after California, Washington, Oregon, and New York.

And as you have likely come to expect from a venture run by the Trumps, there is a lot about this Virginia vineyard that is questionable at best, and certainly interesting regardless of your politics or oenophile status.

At a Democratic Party fundraising event in March of 2016, a number of months before the election that same year, President Barack Obama took a shot at Republican hopeful Donald Trump, saying in part: "Has anybody bought that wine? I want to know what that wine tastes like. I mean, come on: you know that's like some five dollar wine. The slap a label on it, they charge you fifty dollars, and say it's the greatest wine ever."

In the same appearance, Obama also called out Trump Steaks, expressing bewilderment at all the products onto which the presidential hopeful had slapped the family name.

While the former president did not call out businessman and reality TV celebrity Trump by name while making the jests about the wine itself, it was an unequivocal jab at the man who would soon take over the office of POTUS. Trump Winery does indeed sell multiple bottles of their wine for around $50, including a sparkling rosé and a New World Reserve red blend, while other bottles sell for as much as $100 a piece. Still, to be fair, the winery does offer more affordable bottles as well, such as an $18 chardonnay and multiple half-sized 375 milliliter "split bottles." Or you can spring for the $349 Ultimate Collector's Bundle.

In March of 2016, then presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that the Trump Winery was "the largest winery on the East Coast." This was a falsehood on multiple fronts by multiple metrics. 

First, by volume of wine produced, the Trump Winery is far from the largest winery on the East Coast of America and is not even the largest in the state of Virginia. As PolitiFact reported shortly after his claims, while the Trump Winery produces about 36,000 cases of wine annually, both the Williamsburg Winery and the Chateau Morrisette wineries produce approximately 60,000 cases of wine each year. And zooming outward to look at the East Coast in the bigger picture, Duplin Winery in North Carolina produces nearly 400,000 cases of wine annually, dwarfing the Trump Winery's output.

When looked at in terms of acres under vine (meaning actively used to produce grapes for winemaking) the claim that Trump Winery is the biggest on the East Coast is also easily demonstrably false. There are at least two vineyards in New York that are notably larger than the Trump Winery in terms of active acreage. Trump Winery has about 200 acres under vine, while the Wagner Vineyards Estate Winery of upstate New York has 250 active acres and Pindar Vineyards on New York's Long Island has 300 acres of grape vines planted. (And both properties produce significantly more wine, too.) That metric does, however, make it the largest vineyard in Virginia... but that's not what he said, is it?

While his surname may be on the winery, it's almost certain that no drop of Trump Winery wine has ever been inside the President of the United States. Donald Trump is a well-known teetotaler who never takes even a sip of alcohol aside from rare communion sips. "When we go in church... I drink the little wine, which is about the only wine I drink," he said once, and on a limited number of other occasions he has been seen taking a small single sip of wine after a toast at a major business or political function, but his wine glass is always then quickly spirited away by an aide, usually replaced with Diet Coke or water.

Is Donald Trump an alcoholic? No, but by his own admission he fears he would be if he drank, saying: "Can you imagine if I had [alcohol]? What a mess I would be. I would be the world's worst."

Trump does not drink primarily because watching alcohol ruin and ultimately end the life of his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., left a painful and lasting scar on the president, who adored late Fred despite his troubled life. Fred Trump died at just 42 years old after an alcohol-induced heart attack, and President Trump has stated: "Fred told me not to, and I saw what happened to him when he didn't follow his own advice."

The backstory of the property today called Trump Winery is complex and rather depressing, so let's try to move through it efficiently. In 1981, Iraqi-born British-American former model and socialite Patricia Kluge married America's second richest man, billionaire businessman John Kluge. She was 33, he was one year more than twice her age. A few years later the couple relocated to a sprawling property and massive mansion they built near Charlottesville, Virginia, partly in order to raise an adopted son, largely to enjoy their own private 18-hole golf course, massive game preserve, multiple manmade lakes, and so on. In 1990, the couple divorced and Patricia got most of the estate as well as a reputed $100 million. It was time for her to follow her own dream to start a vineyard and make world-class wines.

She would invest "everything [she] had into the vineyard" and by the early years of the 2000s, the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard was indeed producing world-class wines that won awards and accolades and wide. Then came the financial crash starting in 2008. Soon the winery was losing a million dollars every two months. Kluge listed her mansion for $100 million; soon the price was slashed to a quarter of that. Still it would not sell. When her longtime friend Trump finally acquired the house, he paid $6.7 million. He had already bought the vineyard and winery out of foreclosure for $8.5 million.

According to reporting in Newsweek, immigration lawyer Anibal Romero (who has represented numerous workers of Trump Organization businesses) revealed in January of 2020 that the Trump Winery had knowingly employed numerous undocumented worker to tend to and harvest their grapes. These are the exact same type of people the president and other in his administration would deride as illegal aliens and whom they had spent much time and effort trying to ban from the United States, even in cases where the aspiring migrant workers were fleeing violence and persecution.

According to Romero, many of the workers had been identified as undocumented yet worked at the winery for many years, and then following the 2019 harvest, when their work was no longer needed for the season, multiple undocumented workers were summarily fired. "Getting rid of them [before] that point could have caused problems for the wine," Anibal Romero reportedly said, which makes it clear where Trump Winery's priorities lie.

The Trump Organization has also been accused of using undocumented labor in many of its other enterprises, from their golf clubs to restaurants to hotel properties. "It's almost as though the president wants the political benefit of treating undocumented immigrants as subhuman menaces while simultaneously receiving the economic benefit of being able to hire people who he can pay less money and not provide health insurance," said writer Bess Levin in Vanity Fair.