“Wine is one of the fastest-growing segments of agriculture,” said Todd Haymore, Virginia’s secretary of agriculture and forestry. “We can’t be California, but we can be the East Coast capital for wine and wine tourism.”

Therein lies a challenge for Virginia and other fledgling wine districts. Many wineries can sell their entire production in their tasting rooms. But some wine purists bristle at the tourist trade, saying it draws rowdy fun-seekers or weekenders, and not many serious oenophiles. The worry is that, in catering to this tourist market, quality suffers, making it hard to gain national and international recognition.

Virginia “is an emerging region, so the overall quality is not as good as the overall quality of the top California wineries, but it is improving all the time,” said Steven Spurrier, the wine merchant who organized the “Judgment of Paris” in 1976, an influential blind tasting that shocked the world when two California wines beat their French competitors. “The growth is driven by the wineries’ passion for what they do and by the demand of the wines they produce.”

Mr. Paschina pours his energy into Barboursville, now one of the largest wineries in the state, selling more than 38,000 cases a year. The winery, with its restaurant and inn, generates $6 million in revenue a year. Mr. Paschina concentrates on grape varieties that thrive in Virginia’s red clay soil, and he adapts to the region’s unpredictable growing seasons, which can offer heat waves, hail and heavy rainstorms. If a vintage isn’t good, Mr. Paschina will not make certain wines, rather than put out an inferior product.

All his exacting work has a purpose. If Virginia wine doesn’t connote excellence and refinement, Barboursville is a harder sell among serious connoisseurs in New York and London.

DRESSED in his usual uniform of jeans, button-down shirt, vest and Merrell boots, Mr. Paschina, 51, surveyed the acres at Barboursville, in the rolling foothills of the Southwest Mountains near Charlottesville. He pointed to a promising part of the vineyard, indicating where he planned to replace some cabernet sauvignon vines with cabernet franc, one of the main grapes in Octagon, Barboursville’s high-end wine that sells for nearly $50 a bottle for the 2008 vintage. He turned to a recently cleared parcel of land, describing efforts to grow fiano, a grape usually associated with southern Italy. If he succeeds, he hopes to use the grape in a premium white blend, with viognier and vermentino.

It has taken time to understand this terroir — the unique, indefinable combination of land, soil and climate that characterizes a vineyard. When Mr. Paschina took over, the vineyard consisted mainly of merlot, cabernet sauvignon, riesling and pinot noir grapes, popular varieties in the United States at the time. But they didn’t all necessarily grow well in Virginia. Riesling and pinot noir, for example, favor cooler climates, not the hot, sticky summers of Virginia.