Author: cathy-harding

 When it comes to growing wine in Virginia, “you hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” says vineyard manager Fernando Franco. And this unusually hot and dry season has delivered both. Overall, harvest is early—by as much as three weeks—and, depending on where a vineyard is situated, that can be a good thing or a matter somewhat more stressful.

At Barboursville Vineyards in Orange County, where Franco manages 147 acres under vine, crews had already harvested the Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc by August 15. That day Franco pronounced the maturity and flavor of the fruit to be “excellent” and said the balance of brix (sugar content) and acidity was “really nice.”

But at Veritas Vineyards in Nelson County, winemaker Emily Pelton says that for now she’s “withholding judgment on this vintage.” If all had gone according to plan, this was going to be the year that Veritas increased production to 15,000 from 10,000 cases. And though she put an additional 25 acres at Ivy Creek Vineyards into production, she’s predicting that the drought-diminished yields will be about equal to last year. “How many times have winemakers said we want the dry weather and small berries, and here we have it and, oh my gosh, we have no product!” 

Between the effect of wind storms and heavy rains in early summer, cloud cover during bud break, and the absence of cool nights to balance July and August’s super-hot days, “in my 10 years,” says Pelton, “this is the craziest vintage I’ve ever worked.”

Meanwhile over at Sweeley Estate Winery, where this year’s crop will go straight to market rather than into Sweeley wines, winemaker Frantz Ventre confirms that harvest has been early at that Madison County establishment, too. And indeed, “the berries are much smaller than expected.” But he adds, the fruit from his 36 acres so far is “looking very nice.” 

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Speaking of Madison County, this just in from the Department of Scenic Wineries: DuCard Vineyards, beautifully situated in what’s known as Gibson Hollow some 40 miles from downtown Charlottesville in Etlan, recently celebrated its grand opening. The well-appointed tasting room is the first in Virginia to be fully solar-powered. Built adjacent to a stream and edged with umbrella tables on a wraparound deck, it was packed on August 7 with well-wishers glad-handing owner Scott Elliff and tasting the five DuCard wines. Among those was an inky Norton, two Viogniers, a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, and a Vidal Blanc dessert wine. A Norton-based port is also in the works. 

And, as long as we’re talking spectacular views, if a two-mile high, unobstructed, 270-degree view of the Southwest Mountains sounds appealing, the place to head to is Stone Mountain Vineyards, 25 miles northwest of Charlottesville in Dyke. Be warned: The drive up the mountain is not for the faint of heart or anyone without at least front-wheel drive, but once you get up there and step onto the deck, it’s breathtaking. Owner Chris Breiner confirms that way up there he too is dealing with an early harvest and lower-than-usual yields, but, he adds, “the chemistry is in balance.”

 It’s a dark moment indeed when “Virginia wine country” is cursed with a representative like hopped-up, anorexic goofball Michaele Salahi. The White House party crasher, who through her status-happy husband is connected to Oasis Winery in Fauquier County, “stars” in “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” a show that has about as much to do with reality as the hair extensions that sprout from Michaele’s scalp like capellini on steroids. Fortunately, a much worthier antidote, at least as far as the state wine industry is concerned, is coming soon to most major PBS markets.

I speak of Vintage, a feature-length documentary from Charlottesville-based Silverthorn Films. Bill Reifenberger’s and Ben Clore’s two-year labor of love will premier in October in Richmond, where the state’s biggest wine supporter, Governor Bob McDonnell, is expected to be on hand. Following that, it will air across the country on PBS stations and Virginia Film Festival Executive Director Jody Kielbasa confirms that he “hopes to show the movie during the festival.” Shot throughout the year in 2008 with a heavy focus on Charlottesville-area wineries, the film follows two threads: the creation of the 2008 vintage and the development of the Virginia wine industry as a whole.

Seems like in no time at all, Virginia wine has become ready for its close up. “There is a feeling amongst the wineries in our film that the Virginia wine industry is at a turning point. We have the quality now,” says Clore. Not only that—feel the pride, Charlottesville!—this area features some of the genuine stars in the statewide industry that now numbers more than 160 wineries. The movie opens with a solitary figure walking through a vineyard, snow at his feet, his body wrapped inside a heavy work jacket, pruning shears clutched behind his back. “In 1976,” his heavily accented voice intones, “it was a very dark landscape.” It is, of course, Gabriele Rausse, the father of the state’s modern wine industry, who traveled to Virginia’s dark landscape from Italy more than 30 years ago to do the impossible. He planted the first vines at Barboursville and has been a go-to figure for incoming winegrowers ever since.

Other local notables who show up in the film include legendary vineyard consultant Chris Hill, industry champion and winery owner David King, winemakers Luca Paschina (Barboursville), Kirsty Harmon (Blenheim), Stephen Barnard (Keswick), Jake Busching (Pollak) and more.
Neither Clore nor Reifenberger knew much about wine, other than enjoying it, when they started this project. But in time, says Reifenberger, they discovered many similarities between their industry and winemaking. “So many people are assuming risks,” he says, “and they bring passion that has to be balanced with reality.” Moreover, from the outside, there’s a sense of glamour to both winemaking and filmmaking, but, he says, “The greatest percentage of the time it’s hard work that makes it happen.”

Not immodestly, he also points out that in both industries, “the people are fun to hang out with.”

But after decades of struggling to tame the wilderness that is Virginia terroir and to unleash the secrets of making good, sometimes great, wines from the fruit that grows in the dirt around here, success is bittersweet: “These guys had to fight for two decades for respectability,” Clore says, “and now the door is open for anyone to come in and make wines of any quality.”

Indeed, anyone.

“These wines are all fragments of my memory.” Winemaker Riaan Rossouw is sitting with his wife, Rachel O’Neill, and a reporter upstairs at the Ivy Inn just before the dinner hour. The table, draped in white linens, is appointed with two elegant decanters, six wine glasses, three water glasses, and two red wine bottles each wrapped in a label-obscuring paper bag. There’s a platter of cheese and bread, too. He is describing how a “different Virginia is captured in this bottle,” an old-vine Virginia, if you will, that Rossouw is releasing after four years of bottle aging.

Rossouw has been the winemaker at Lovingston Winery since 2005, following five years at Oakencroft. But his new wines—these two whose bottles are protectively enveloped so that biases or expectations about varietals won’t impede the act of tasting them—these are being released under his own label exclusively. The name? Simply r.

“My work as a winemaker is based on eyes, ears, mouth and passion,” he says. Rossouw speaks at length about roots, too. Raised in South Africa of French and German parents and with a winemaking lineage he traces to his great-grandfather and beyond, Rossouw believes a winemaker should “embrace tradition but never close the door on what’s next.”

As well as anything, that sums up Rossouw’s inspiration to make wine in Virginia—a place that’s about as “what’s next” and New World as you can get, enologically speaking. But in creating his two Bordeaux-style reds, Rossouw added to his challenges. His 2006 Cabernet Franc derives from the fruit of 26-year-old vines—elderly by Virginia standards. Many winemakers might avoid such vines, because, as he says, “as a vineyard gets older, they all have, if you will, their sporting injuries.” But for Rossouw, that fact is balanced by another idea: “I don’t believe a vineyard stands still.” The resulting wine has the unmistakably briar-like, foresty aroma of Cab Franc. But in the mouth, it surprises with elegance, soft tannins and a hint of a raspberry aftertaste, so much so that without seeing the label one might wonder if it’s Cab Franc, after all. “Nose-to-mouth: That’s what intrigues me about old vineyards,” he says. “It’s a beautiful twist; the thinking man’s wine.”

Rossouw’s other wine now coming to market—and the production for both so far is tiny at 65 cases total—is called Grand Vin. It combines the same Cabernet Franc grapes with a touch of Merlot. A dark purple compared to the Cabernet Franc’s garnet hue, it is more acidic, in a pleasing way, and speaks of cherries.

The Merlot, which Rossouw terms “very young fruit,” grew at Lovingston. Indeed, the Puckett family that owns Lovingston and has employed Rossouw since 2005 has been highly supportive of this venture. “They have really embraced it and allowed me to learn outside of just winemaking,” he says, referring to the many other aspects that make wine a business and not just a pastime, from marketing to labeling and distribution.

Speaking of labels, r sports a streamlined look, with the single lower-case letter presented in Minion Pro typeface above the vintage and the words Monticello AVA. Rossouw and O’Neill, who designed the label, hope to convey a modern sensibility that nonetheless embraces traditional elegance. “Inside, it is kind of old and outside it is very new,” he says, “very beautiful.”

Priced at about $24, r is now for sale at Whole Foods, Rio Hill Wine & Gourmet, Wine Warehouse and the Inn Shops at Boar’s Head, and is being served at Basic Necessities in Nellysford and L’étoile.

There are six American Viticultural Areas in Virginia. If Rachel Martin has her way, there will soon be seven, which will bring the total AVAs in the nation to 198. Martin is the executive vice president of Boxwood Winery in Middleburg. Her parents, Rita and John Kent Cooke (of Washington Redskins fame), started it six years ago. Almost from the beginning, Martin wanted to designate the Bordeaux-style red wines that are the boutique winery’s sole focus as “estate grown,” but she couldn’t do that legally without an AVA designation.

Through its Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the federal treasury controls the designation of specific wine-growing regions. But it’s not a question of interested parties gerrymandering an area and saying, voila, now we have an AVA. There are geographic, geologic and historic standards at work. To apply for the Middleburg AVA—which, if approved, will include 13 wineries besides Boxwood in and around Purcellville, Middleburg and Delaplaine—Martin worked with soil and geology experts. She had to submit historical and name evidence, too.

Though it was a two-year process, Martin says it’s worth it. She’ll be able to get the term “estate bottled” on her labels, of course, but “the grand idea, the real motor behind it is to make Virginia more recognized,” she says.

Felicia Warburg Rogan, a Virginia wine pioneer now retired from Oakencroft Vineyard and Winery, took up the mantle of a Monticello AVA more than two decades ago. She agrees with Martin. “It’s a fabulous marketing tool,” she says. “The more the better. It brings attention to wineries in different viticultural areas.”

Over at Jefferson Vineyards, General Manager Chad Zakaib says at the moment not many people take note of the Virginia AVAs. But, “as we grow, AVAs will be more and more valuable because over time we should be able to identify traits typical of wines from a particular AVA.”

In other words, just as the venerable designation Chablis gives you some idea of what that particular patch of French land lends to the taste of the Chardonnay grape, so might the Monticello or the Middleburg AVA in time suggest the qualities you can expect from wine grown in those places.

The Tax and Trade Bureau will soon post Martin’s application for 60 days of public comment.

Mountfair’s bursts of red

Speaking of artisanal wineries that specialize in Bordeaux-style red blends, Mountfair Vineyards in White Hall takes an unusual approach to releasing its wines—popping out a new one every three months. Owners Fritz Repich and Chris Yordy host quarterly release parties, and at the most recent, a couple of weeks back, several dozen people gathered to enjoy spectacular views, balmy evening air and Engagement 2008, Repich’s Merlot blend. With its focus on building the case club, Mountfair welcomes many repeat customers and familiar faces to these affairs. Last month, NoVa-based country rockers Stealing the Dead played inside the “cold box” of the winery, while Yordy’s daughter served fried chicken to the hungry.

Darlene Fitts, a therapist from Bowie, Maryland, was on hand with her husband. She linked up with Mountfair, she said, when she met Repich at a Virginia wine festival (Maryland has such restrictive rules for the wine industry, that many folks in those D.C. suburbs venture across the border to taste and buy wine). “He was so nice and engaging,” she said, “and I liked the wine, so every year I went back.”

300 heavy drinkers headed our way

Chalk up another victory for statewide wine marketing: The 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference will be in Charlottesville, July 22-24. Why did the highly opinionated enophiles select our charming city? “The state has 150 wineries and produces a large number of varietals. Equally importantly, Charlottesville is a very cool city with a major university and a fantastic downtown walking mall.”

When Justin Sarafin talks about being in charge of “dependencies,” he’s not referring to the unfortunate habits of social misfits. Monticello’s assistant curator is talking about the work and storage spaces beneath the great house—many of which have been refurbished and opened to the public for the first time in the past month. Among these, wine enthusiasts, is Thomas Jefferson’s wine cellar, about which we can joke with Sarafin that the other meaning of “dependency” might equally apply. Go ahead and chuckle; Sarafin seems, at the culmination of a restoration project that has taken nine years of his professional life, like a guy who can take a joke. 

The cellar itself, which used to be visible only from behind a cell-like iron grate, is now accessible, the better to appreciate the four-bottle, wooden dumbwaiter system that eased the passage of Jefferson’s revered French (red) and German (white) wines from the cellar to the dining room above.

Sarafin, who trained in art history and architectural history at UVA, had his interpretive work cut out for him when it came to how Jefferson binned his bottles, which at their peak numbered 980 (at his death in 1826, Virginia’s leading wine lover had 586 bottles stored). Architectural and archaeological evidence—they dug a 5’x5′ area in the cellar in the research phase—did not point to a permanent, built-in binning system. But the prescriptive literature of the 19th century called for bottles to be stored on their sides, so Sarafin believes Jefferson would have taken that approach, too. Moreover, the cellar was not intended for aging wine, because, as Sarafin says, “at the provisioning stage, Jefferson gets the wine at the right age.” In other words, he bought stuff that had already been aged sufficiently to drink—the procurement of which about more below. “There had to be a more improvised ‘plantation solution,’” Sarafin says. “Given the small space in that room, we decided it had to be a vertical type of binning solution.” Hence, the tall, wooden racks now on display. Those racks, by the way, feature both the square-shouldered glass bottles that would have contained Madeira and other fortified wines (more to the English taste) and the sloping bottles of the French wine for which Jefferson developed a connoisseur’s appreciation—the blends of the great Bordeaux houses like Chateau Margaux, Chateau Latour, Chateau Lafite and Chateau Haut-Brion.

So much is already known about Jefferson’s love of wine and his heartbreak at being unable to grow decent wine at home. There is little new to report on that score, but there is one point about Jefferson’s buying habits that takes on renewed relevance in light of a present-day political debate about consumers’ rights. Jefferson’s correspondence shows his penchant for buying wine directly from the winery at hand. “Jefferson’s thinking behind having it bottled there is that it ensures the first quality of the wine,” says Sarafin. “He had tasted lighter French and German wines on site. He wants them, and he wants them not compromised.” Currently wending its way through Congress, H.R. 5034 would severely restrict consumers’ ability to do exactly what our wine-loving Founding Father did, namely, to order wine directly from a winery and have it shipped to our homes. There’s a rebuttal that’s worth a call to your Virginia Congressmen who support the bill. We’re looking at you, Glenn Nye and Gerry Connolly.

We’ll leave this discussion with one more sip of wine wisdom from the third president, this time on the subject of pricing: “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” he wrote in 1818. In other words, do the country a favor and splurge a little on the good stuff. Order it directly from the winery. And tell them Tom sent you.