Author: Senlin Means

The inaugural Virginia Wine Expo seemed to be a success, if the thousands in attendance on the first of the two-day event were any measure. Held in the giant, multichambered, corporate heart of the Greater Richmond Convention Center, Expo doors opened to the public at 1pm, and by 2:30 it was so packed you couldn’t get down the aisles, let alone make it up to one of the winery booths to get a taste of wine. Mass tastings like that can make it easy to start to hate wine—the crowds, the novelty wine t-shirts, the overflowing spit buckets (or worse, no one spitting and the Mad Max-like highway conditions on the way home). But my Saturday at the Virginia Wine Expo earlier this month had the opposite effect: It reinforced exactly what it is I love about Virginia Wine.

Before the official kickoff, members of the trade were allowed in early to taste wine and listen to guest speakers, including the keynoter, Bruce Schoenfeld, the wine and spirits editor for Travel + Leisure magazine. Schoenfeld delivered his talk, subtitled “The Allure of Emerging Wine Regions,” to about a dozen of us through a sound system that had two settings, “faint” and “feedback.” Two years ago, he said, when he first came to Virginia to taste wine, a winery employee asked him, “How close are we?” How close, in other words, are we to being the next Napa Valley? Schoenfeld’s answer to this question and his message to the Virginia wine industry was, “Slow down. Don’t rush. Because believe it or not, this is the fun part.”

Schoenfeld has spent plenty of time in some of the world’s greatest wine regions, but it’s the developing areas that have given Schoenfeld his most interesting experiences, and the reason he cites describes my own love of Virginia wine: It is still a work in progress. Virginia is still figuring out what grapes to grow, what techniques to use in the winery, and how to make the rest of the world care. This process of learning, Schoenfeld argues, and the experimentation and variety that accompanies it, makes Virginia such a wonderful place to be a wine lover right now.

And that variety was on full display at the Wine Expo, all right. I tasted, in addition to the ever-present Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, such obscure varietals as Tannat, Touriga Nacional, Norton, Chambourcin, Rkatsiteli and one I had never heard of called Symphony. Not that obscurity for obscurity’s sake is a virtue, but Virginia wineries are having real successes with uncommon grapes like Cabernet Franc, Viognier, Petit Verdot and Petit Manseng.

I disliked a lot of the wine I tasted on the 16th in Richmond, but that, Schoenfeld pointed out, is O.K. “Every great wine region,” he said, “makes more bad wines than good ones.” The successes matter, not the failures, and Virginia’s successes have had a lot of press lately, thanks in part to good PR, and in part to the undeniable fact that the wines are rapidly improving.

But something can be said for a certain kind of failure. “Sometimes,” Schoenfeld said, “an inspired failure is more interesting than a guaranteed success.” It is relatively easy for places like California and Australia to churn out wines that are good in a homogeneous and facile way, but are these wines that engage your mind or teach you something new? If Virginia ever stops the kind of experimenting that produces unique wines like Horton Vineyards’ sparkling Viognier and Cooper Vineyards’ chocolate-infused Norton, or great wines like Barboursville’s Nebbiolo and Linden’s single-vineyard Chardonnay, and starts making the vinious version of soda pop, then I, for one, will stop drinking.

The building is hard to find. There’s no sign, and the wrong dirt road will put you in somebody’s front yard. Thirty years old, vacant for the last 10, its concrete floors are cracked and the concrete walls are streaked from floods. Built into a hill and looking abandoned, it’s got a dirt-covered roof. Grass and leaves surround it. But within this structure, Michael Shaps is busy starting something shiny and new. “I’ve always said I’d never own a winery in Virginia,” he says, “and here I am.”

Putting on a new label: Michael Shaps (right, with his business partner, Philip Stafford) has been a winemaker in Virginia since 1995, but never thought he’d be a winery owner here—until now.

Another winery opening in Albemarle County is hardly news, but this one is exciting for two reasons, one being the person behind it. Few Virginia winemakers are brand names (think Robert Mondavi in Napa), but Michael Shaps is definitely one of them. Since 1995, he has made wine here, first for Jefferson Vineyards and then King Family Vineyards, where the bottles displayed his name prominently on the label. Along the way he has consulted for almost every new winery that’s come along. He is, along with Gabriele Rausse and Thomas Jefferson, that rare local winemaker you might expect the average Charlottesville enthusiast to be able to name. But until now, he has never had a winery to call his own.

Inside the humble building near Keene, Shaps and his business partner, Philip Stafford, have founded Virginia Wineworks LLC, and are making and selling wine in a nontraditional way. Shaps and Stafford will produce wine conventionally under two labels (the more modestly priced Virginia Wineworks and, at the upper end, the Michael Shaps label). But in addition, Virginia Wineworks will function as a “custom crush” facility following in the footsteps of businesses like San Francisco’s Crush Pad. Custom crush is essentially DIY winemaking. Virginia Wine Works will sell you a barrel of wine made to your specifications, or let you use their equipment to make your own.

Commercially, custom crush is new to the local scene and Shaps says it’s about time. “The biggest problem in the wine industry,” he says, “is…the start-up cost.” With a custom crush facility, grape growers and itinerant winemakers can essentially rent a winery, thus avoiding the prohibitive expense. Shaps says he has avoided the “trap of spending millions of dollars” on “the Napa Style” where the winery functions as a “showplace.” “Nothing’s gonna be fancy,” he says. “Just wine, none of the sizzle.” This is in marked contrast to the way wineries so often arrive here: on the backs of private fortunes, announcing their presence with grand buildings, rows of vines, and a caravan of tourists. What Shaps calls “the anti-winery” is being sold almost entirely on the strength of his name and skill, not on the luxury of its amenities. True to its factory-esque title, Virginia Wineworks is just that, a place where Michael Shaps, and anyone else, can do the work of making wine.

“I don’t know how many people want to make their own wine,” Shaps says, but he’s hoping it’s more than a few. He envisions holding seminars and classes on winemaking. Beyond just providing an alternative to the chateau model of wineries that dominates here, Shaps’ new venture provides proof that the wine industry is truly taking hold, as it continues not just to grow, but to take on new shapes.

But first, you’ve got to find the place. “Whatever you do,” Shaps jokes, squinting into the sun, “don’t tell anyone where we’re at.”

Think of the connection between wine and money like that between manhood and penis size: Whether you buy into the myth, or stridently reject it, you still want to know how big it is. Men have always whipped out expensive bottles of wine in order to impress people. In a 1990 article in Wine Spectator, one Nelson Durante explained why, after selling a communications business for tens of millions of dollars, he spent $6,500 on one bottle of 1925 Brunello di Montalcino in a New York restaurant. “Every sip I took of the wine,” he said, “I remembered the bottom line of the contract.”

Even better, and bigger, was the lunch that Piers Morgan, onetime editor of England’s Daily Mirror, had with famous chef Marco Pierre White. The meal cost $460, while the wine bill came to $46,000, including one bottle of 1911 Chateau d’Yquem that measured a whopping 19,500 dollars long. White, who was doing the ordering, explained his display of manliness by pointing out that he was about to get married. Ah yes, one last fling before he gets the noose!

There is, naturally, an opposing school of thought that says that it’s not how expensive the wine is, but how expensive it isn’t. Some wine lovers brag about bargains the way others crow about blowing the average teacher’s salary on an afternoon’s indigestion. They love to sucker their friends into blind-tasting several wines and then shriek in delight when everyone’s favorite is revealed to be the lowest priced. Two-Buck Chuck, a ridiculously cheap wine that Trader Joe’s might as well just sell in juice boxes, won top prize last year at the 28th Annual International Eastern Wine Competition, causing the cheaper-is-better crowd to go (gr)ape shit. This kind of enophilic reverse snobbery was officially enshrined when the aforementioned Wine Spectator included the $11 Yellow Tail Reserve Shiraz as one of its Top 100 wines of 2007.

Enter a recent study by some economists at the California Institute of Technology, where 21 volunteers tasted five samples of wine knowing nothing about them but the price. In actuality, the five samples only represented three different wines—one $90 wine was repeated with a fake $10 price tag, and a wine that cost $5 was thrown in again with the incorrect price of $45. The tasters consistently said that they liked the wines with the higher prices better, and brain scans conducted as they drank showed their pleasure increased as they drank wines they thought were more expensive.

So, what does this prove? Well, it shows that we absolutely do judge a wine by its price tag. Those with more money than restraint can continue to spend knowing that their efforts to impress will pay off, and the Two-Buck Chuck junkies can continue to feel smug about pulling the wool over the eyes of the rich.

But we would all do well to notice one thing: The study was conducted by economists researching how wine is marketed. One thing I know for certain is that whenever marketing gets smarter, the rest of us get a little more stupid. Still, there might be a bright side. With the Euro getting stiffer and stiffer against the increasingly limp dollar, and the price of European wine rising, we can all rest easy knowing that, as every spam e-mail tells us, our new, bigger-priced bottles will guarantee more pleasure!

I will admit from the outset that I don’t understand the modern way of appreciating wine. It is now almost universally accepted that today’s wine drinker must be able to catalogue at great length the myriad of tastes and smells that he finds in the glass. Perhaps you’ve heard your friend, “the wine guy,” say something like, “There’s a kind of bing cherry element there…with some overtones of crushed gravel and sweaty beef.” And you think, What the hell is a “bing cherry”?  “But on the mid-palate,” he continues, “…a smidge of Fig Newton and—what is that?—crayfish. No! Prawn, beer-battered prawn…” and on like this, and you have no choice but to nod sagely and take another sip while you glance around to see if there’s an oncoming truck to leap under.

This is what I call “The Fruit Salad Method” of tasting wine, after the great British wine critic Hugh Johnson. “Riesling tastes like Riesling,” he once told a lecture audience, “more than it tastes like lemons and apples.” This was turned, the next day, into a London Times story proclaiming that the famous wine writer had declared, “Wine tastes like wine.”

I have worked at a wine shop for more than two years now. I spend most days there tasting wine, talking about wine, listening to other people talk about wine and selling wine. I am routinely asked what a certain wine tastes like and am expected to provide an intelligent answer. “I don’t know,” I usually reply. Sometimes, for a change of pace, I say, “Despair.”

I don’t know how to talk about wine in terms of numerical scores or fruit salad recipes. I rarely taste all of those strange ingredients in the wine, and I don’t see how it would increase my enjoyment if I did. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the palates of those who can divide a mouthful into 100 parts; it’s just that wine means something else to me. It’s bigger than just what’s in the glass.

When I think about wine, I think of elaborate meals my friends and I have put together; outrageous affairs with grandiose, Belle Époque pretensions, obscenely rich food, and overpriced, battered, dusty bottles we have hoarded and dreamed about.

Or simple dinners after a hard day’s work, where my girlfriend cooks, I provide the wine, and both of us feel that the other contributed the better half.

Or local winemakers coming into the wine shop with red-stained hands and opening up an unlabeled bottle of their latest effort, not to try and sell it to us, but to share their craft.

Or cold smelly wineries, rows of vines in the sun, heavy sensuous bunches of ripe grapes…

(I could go on, but I’m getting tears in my 1961 Chateau Margaux.)

Look, wine tastes like wine. But wine covers a lot of ground, from local celebrity winemakers, to the migrant workers who pick the grapes. From wine bars, to private dinners. From development, to tourism, to health, to drunkenness, to history, to the ever-expanding and important local wine industry that is threatening to make bing cherry-loving snobs of us all.

Wine tastes like wine, and I am going to tell you what I know about it.

Cheers.