After an incredibly challenging few years, the Baker siblings are sowing their future at Burnt Hill Farm
By Lydia Wooliver
Photography by Justin Tsucalas
March 2026
IT’S LABOR DAY LAST SEPTEMBER, but that’s of no concern to Drew Baker, who’s been up since before the sun. The cool nights of autumn have started slipping in, and with only a few more weeks of warm weather in Maryland, that means it’s finally go time at Burnt Hill Farm. By 7 a.m., he’s out the door and off to work, soon standing wide-eyed before a rolling expanse of ripening grapevines, now ready to be picked.
As light breaks over the horizon, his six-man crew is setting the morning in motion. They dart about the vineyard, dropping stacks of yellow crates at the bottom of thousand-foot rows, each to be filled with inky fruit before lunchtime—about four tons in total.
“That’s my back-of-the-napkin math,” says Drew, his hands tucked into his Patagonia pockets, as the current 50 degrees feels downright cold after the dog days of August. He looks around approvingly. “We’ve got a lot to pick.”
By all measures, at Burnt Hill, it’s been an extraordinary year. Not every season is great for growing, which the 38-year-old has learned the hard way on his two farms. First, at Old Westminster Winery in Carroll County, where he broke ground with his sisters Lisa Hinton and Ashli Johnson in 2011. And now with this promising plot 25 miles south in Montgomery County, sitting on a high stretch of Appalachian foothills halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. He knows that sometimes in the Mid-Atlantic, a late spring frost will stunt an entire crop before it’s even had the chance to get started. And that often, our wet summers make a hotbed for pests and disease. Of course, come autumn, hurricanes can wreak havoc on harvest, too.
