In 2020, as their world narrowed and the Covid lockdown dragged on, Leila Nowroozi and Reynolds Wilson felt like the walls of their Clarendon townhouse were closing in on them and their two teens. They looked westward, toward the wide-open spaces in the Blue Ridge foothills, for an escape.
Wilson dreamed of buying a plot of land they could use as a camping spot. Nowroozi added “cute log cabin” to their Redfin searches for a 10-acre property within an hour and a half drive of Arlington.
The cabin that popped up on her screen one day was “oozing curb appeal,” she says. Toll Gate Farm, as it was known, had once served as a toll collection point on a dirt road that extended from Front Royal to Richmond in the late 18th- and early-19th centuries.
The red-painted dwelling on the property—whose provenance dates back to 1750—was actually two log cabins that were combined at some point for a total of three bedrooms and three bathrooms, including a sleeping loft accessed by a spiral staircase. While the original rough-hewn logs and chinking were still visible, the structure had been renovated and updated. This was a relief since their budget didn’t include much wiggle room.
In fact, the 30-acre property in Flint Hill had more than they bargained for, including a pond tucked amid its pretty rolling hills. That’s not all. “Reynolds is looking past the cabin, saying, ‘What is all that stuff they’ve got planted?’ I just see green,” Nowroozi recalls.
As it turns out, those fields of green were a 6-acre vineyard. Undeterred, the couple sized up the line of cars they encountered at the open house and made the winning offer in July of 2020. “Candidly, we spent more time researching a Dustbuster than we spent thinking through the purchase of this property,” Nowroozi says.
“She’s not wrong,” Wilson confirms. “We normally sort of overthink, but this was not one of those situations. We just saw it. We loved it. We had not a clue what we were doing.”
Prior to their impulse purchase, the couple—who met as undergrads at UVA in 1992—always had a full wine rack at home. That was the extent of their oenophilic knowledge.
Toll Gate’s previous owner had grown and harvested four varieties of grapes on the property, selling them to other winemakers for wine production. This wasn’t an option for Nowroozi and Wilson, both of whom are tied to desk jobs during the day. (She’s a marketing executive and he’s a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.) They hired a small, seasonal crew to tend the vines that first summer and quickly realized their grape-growing operation was losing money.
Though they weren’t in a position to become farmers, what they could do as a side hustle was become winemakers. If any profit was to be made, they realized, it would be from selling bottles of wine, not just grapes.
They stopped selling their yield and partnered with the Walsh Family Winery in Purcellville to begin producing wine under a new label, Toll Gate Farm & Vineyards. Walsh now handles the processing, pressing and bottling while Nowroozi and Wilson manage marketing, sales and branding. They’re still waiting to break even, but both say they’re enjoying the journey.
Wilson designed the wine’s label, a drawing of the original log cabin with a scrawling typeface that looks like colonial handwriting. “It was fun. It used a completely different part of my brain than my day-to-day life,” he says.
The hand-drawn X on the back of the bottle is a nod to his New Orleans roots. Known as the “Katrina cross,” it resembles the marks rescuers painted on houses that were cleared during rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina left its path of destruction in 2005.
Today, the X is a symbol of resilience in the face of steep odds. Wilson’s parents survived Katrina and still live in The Big Easy.
Nowroozi, who grew up in Norfolk, is learning the ins and outs of distribution, finding humor in the moments that belie her naivete—like the day she arrived at the Walsh farm to pick up their inaugural vintage, assuming she could just transport the wine in the back of her Subaru.
“There were maybe 50 cases, and I pull up and there’s a forklift with them,” she says, laughing. “The guy helping me was saying, ‘Um, do you have a truck coming?’ I had no clue.”
The venture has also turned them into amateur meteorologists, fretting over a late season Mother’s Day frost, or summer deluges from tropical storms.
Figuring out how to sell wine without running afoul of Virginia’s alcoholic beverage laws was another step in the learning curve. In 2024, they sold to individual customers via their website, using a Virginia ABC license. But by 2025, they were producing more wine than they could sell online and deliver locally—about 3,500 bottles—and realized they needed to work with a distributor. They now use the Virginia Winery Distribution Co., a nonprofit under the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which provides wholesale wine distribution to state farmers at a lower fee than commercial distributors.
Nowroozi is a pavement pounder. She diligently sends cold emails to area restaurants and shops with hopes they will agree to carry the Toll Gate Farm label. About one in 10 get back to her. “I totally stress about it, and [Wilson] has to walk me off the ledge,” she says, “but I’ve come to embrace the stress. I think of stress as motivational, inspirational energy.”
She’s still trying to make inroads with major retailers such as the Clarendon Whole Foods, but is pleased to report that Three Whistles cafe across the street carries their wines. So do Lyon Hall, Fire Works Pizza and The Brew Shop in Arlington.
Farther afield, they sell at the Sperryville farmers market on Saturday mornings. Their repertoire includes cabernet franc, rosé, sparkling rosé, viognier and sparkling viognier.
A particular point of pride is that their wines are made exclusively with grapes from their property. Virginia rules state that in order for a wine to be called “Virginia wine,” at least 75% of the grapes must be grown in state.
Five years in, they’re still in growth mode. “It’s been mishaps and accidental learnings. We honestly are bumbling our way through,” Nowroozi says. “One of the reasons we are able to do this is that everyone in the grape and wine industry has been the sweetest, kindest, most helpful person. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. Give us a try.” Cheers to that.
Barbara Ruben has written about historic houses and farms throughout the DMV.