JOLO Vineyards Just Beat 388 Other Wines For Best On The East Coast. The Reason Is Under Pilot Mountain.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
In a ballroom at the Marriott Tysons in Virginia during the second weekend of August, twelve judges worked their way through 389 wines pulled from ten states. They were looking for the best of the East Coast, from Maine down through Florida and inland to a handful of near-coastal states like Vermont, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. When the Atlantic Seaboard Wine Association tallied the results for its 2026 Jefferson Cup, one bottle ranked above all the rest: the 2023 Carolus XII, made at JOLO Vineyards, a family winery sitting in the Yadkin Valley at the foot of Pilot Mountain.
If you live here, you've probably driven past the entrance sign more times than you can count without thinking much about what's happening behind it. This is what's happening behind it.
The Jefferson Cup competition isn't a local ribbon-cutting. It's the largest wine competition in the country focused exclusively on East Coast wines, and this year's field spanned 29 varietal and blend categories. Out of that field, the judging panel produced:
JOLO didn't just place. The winery walked away with five total gold medals, putting it among only two wineries in the entire competition to hit that mark. And the Carolus XII didn't just earn a gold. It was named Best of Show, meaning the judges rated it the single strongest wine entered, out of nearly 400 bottles from across the region.
Carolus XII is a red blend built around Petit Verdot, which is an unusual choice to lead with. In most Bordeaux-style blends, Petit Verdot is a supporting player, added in small percentages for color and backbone while Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot carries the wine. JOLO built this one the other way around, with Cabernet Franc and Merlot rounding out a Petit Verdot-dominant base. The wine opens with a nose of black fruit, and the Cabernet Franc and Merlot bring in a layer of warm spice touched by oak. It spent 27 months aging in French oak before it was bottled in January 2026.
Getting a Petit Verdot-forward wine to hold together for that long in the barrel and still taste balanced instead of harsh takes a specific set of growing conditions. That's where the ground underneath the vines starts to matter more than the winemaking technique.
Pilot Mountain is what geologists call a monadnock, an isolated knob of harder rock that has outlasted the softer stone around it as everything else eroded away over millions of years. The same quartzite that makes up the mountain's core runs underground through the surrounding valley, and it's produced the soil JOLO's vines are planted in: stony, well-draining, and mineral-rich. That minerality is exactly what shows up in Carolus XII, giving the wine the firm structure the judges scored so highly.
Getting a wine to express that terroir instead of masking it takes deliberate work in the vineyard, not just careful barrel aging. Winemaker JW Ray has described the approach in blunt, practical terms.
"We deliberately leaf-pull on both the east and west sides of the fruiting zone each year, just after berry set."
That kind of canopy management controls how much sun and airflow the grape clusters get on both sides of the row, which affects ripeness and concentration in exactly the way a Petit Verdot-heavy blend needs. It's a technical decision, but it's the kind that only makes sense if you're trying to let the site itself, quartzite soil and all, come through in the glass rather than compensating for it with more oak or a different varietal mix.
It's worth understanding how JOLO got here, because a Best of Show trophy can look like a fluke if you don't know the backstory. JW and Kristen Ray founded the winery in 2010, naming it after their two sons, Joey and Logan. Both boys are now active in the business, which the Rays describe as a multi-generational project rather than a single-vintage bet. In 2020 they acquired Hutton Vineyards, which now serves as JOLO's production facility, expanding their footprint well beyond the original tasting room. Three years later, in 2023, Ray founded a second estate, Rayson Winery & Vineyards.
That timeline matters because it means the Carolus XII didn't happen by accident in a single good growing season. It's the product of a decade and a half of the same family refining the same site, adding capacity when the wine justified it, and building toward exactly this kind of result.
For anyone in Pilot Mountain who wants to try the wine that just won, the practical details are straightforward. JOLO's Tasting Lodge houses both the tasting room and End Posts, the winery's own restaurant, which serves lunch and dinner Thursday through Sunday and has been ranked Top 10 in Winston-Salem and Top 100 for Brunch in America by OpenTable. The Seasonal Tasting Flight runs $35 per person plus tax for seven wines, and reservations are required.
One small quirk worth knowing before you book: if you're making both a tasting reservation and a dinner reservation for the same visit within a two-hour window, JOLO asks that you use a different name on each one, a workaround for how OpenTable's booking system handles back-to-back reservations at the same restaurant. It's a minor thing, but it's the kind of detail you only find out by trying to book the visit yourself, or by reading it here first.
JOLO sits within the Yadkin Valley, which became North Carolina's first federally recognized wine-growing region back in 2003, and the winery is part of the Surry County Wine Trail alongside several neighboring vineyards. None of the others on that trail can currently point to a Jefferson Cup Best of Show, though.
The mountain gives this town its name, its skyline, and its identity on every welcome sign heading into downtown. What this year's Jefferson Cup result shows is that it's also doing quieter work underground, shaping the soil that produced a wine good enough to beat out nearly 400 competitors from up and down the East Coast. That's not marketing copy. It's geology showing up in a glass.
It's also the kind of detail that tends to matter to people thinking about putting down roots here, whether they grew up down the road or are looking at Pilot Mountain for the first time. A town's daily texture, the local vineyard, the specific soil, the ten-year track record of a family business, says something about a place that a listing photo never will.
If you're weighing what makes Pilot Mountain worth calling home, or you're already here and thinking about your next move, Pilot Group Real Estate knows this town street by street and vineyard by vineyard. Request Your Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what your next chapter here could look like.
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