Dish the dirt: Your Friday wine downs just got better. On select dates throughout the spring and summer, local growers will be at Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards for Featured Farmers Friday, a pop-up mini farmer’s market paired with a farm-to-table dining option. It’s an opportunity to get some quality time with area farmers such as You’re In Luck Farm’s Hannah Velie, whose locally sourced pure ingredient care products prioritize sustainability, fair trade, and animal welfare.
Friday 5/14, Free, noon. Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards, 5022 Plank Rd., North Garden. pippinhillfarm.com
Access to healthy foods and safe production are on the table for discussion at Food and Justice in Virginia.
Table manners: Agriculture in Virginia has a legacy of harm, particularly to Black and Indigenous farmers, and equitable access to nutritious, affordable, and sustainable food has been overlooked for a long time. UVA partners with Morven Farm for Food and Justice in Virginia, a discussion that addresses safety and equity in our current food systems. Moderated by Associate Professor of Politics Paul Freedman, the event, part of the university’s MLK Celebration, features Shantell Bingham of the Charlottesville Food Justice Network and Cultivate Charlottesville, along with other social justice and sustainability advocates from the area.
Born into a winemaking family in France, Damien Blanchon received his formal training in the craft there before moving to Virginia in 2006. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith
One morning last April, Afton Mountain Vineyards winemaker Damien Blanchon stood under a canopy in the rain, his yellow rain slicker a bright spot on the gray day. Smoke streamed out from the firepit he tended. The night’s meal, a freshly butchered pig, dripped fat onto the coals.
Blanchon’s on friendly terms with Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin—the celebrity livestock farmer, author, and speaker—and earlier the winemaker had driven to Swoope, Virginia, to pick out one of his pal’s celebrated pastured pigs. Salatin’s son, Daniel, normally does the butchering but couldn’t get around to it, so Blanchon, equipped with the necessary tools, got busy with the carving. An hour later, he and the pig were on their way back to the winery.
Big on biodiversity, Blanchon recently introduced goats to the property at Afton Mountain. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith
Rainwater dripped from the edge of the canopy. Blanchon, who has a scruffy beard and intense blue eyes, peered at the smoke. After pressing grapes later this year, he said, he will deliver pomace—the skins left over after the crush—to Salatin to use as feed. It’s a sustainable, natural cycle that Salatin has preached for years, and which Blanchon also believes is the way forward.
“When I look at this little place, we are trying to do things the right way for the environment,” says Blanchon, who’s overseen Afton Mountain’s 25 acres of vines for nearly a decade. “In the long term, I’m trying to have a beneficial impact.”
Blanchon applies no insecticides to the vines, and only sparingly uses fungicides. “The vines are smart,” he says. It’s his shorthand way of expressing his respect for the plants, and the deep knowledge he has gained during more than two decades of tending grapes.
Blanchon’s winemaking education began when he was a child, on his uncle’s vineyard and small winery in Beaujolais. His formal schooling in viticulture and enology began when he was a teenager and led to work at wineries in France. He arrived in the U.S. in 2006, after answering an ad for a winemaker at Old House Vineyards in Culpeper. When he called, Mattieu Finot picked up. Now the winemaker at King Family Vineyards, Finot was consulting at Old House at the time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Blanchon brought with him the organic practices that he uses to this day. He brews huge quantities of herbal teas and sprays them on the vines, which, he says, bolsters their natural immune systems. It takes years for this to happen, but Blanchon believes using the method will keep the vines healthy and productive for 40 to 60 years—instead of the 20 years he says much larger commercial vineyards plan for.
“Looks like it’s working, because last year it was very rainy and we did only 10 [fungicide] sprays compared to an average of 25 to 30 sprays for [many other] wineries,” he says. “All around the vines, I plant some wild flowers that bring in insects that are beneficial for us, like the bees. Last year it was very humid and dewy in the morning, so you could see the spider webs easily, they were everywhere, and thanks to the spiders, we didn’t have a fruit fly problem. I was like, ‘Well, that makes sense.’”
A few hours later, in the glass-walled pavilion overlooking the vineyards, Blanchon prepares platters of sliced pork. He lays them out on a table with whole roasted potatoes and a simple salad of arugula with vinaigrette. He’s serving dinner for a group of journalists and friends of Afton Mountain’s owners Elizabeth and Tony Smith. The meal is the culmination of a long day for Blanchon, who also led a cellar tour and wine tasting.
The Smiths—whose son, Hunter Smith, is the founder and owner of Charlottesville’s Champion Brewing Company—purchased the winery a decade ago. Since then they’ve doubled the vineyard size, in part to protect the sculpted mountain views. Ask the couple what’s next for their vast acreage, and Elizabeth Smith muses over morels, explaining that their plan is not to exceed the 5,000-case capacity of their current wine operation, but instead explore more ways to farm sustainably. The owners and winemaker are in sync.
“With the freedom the Smiths give me, I’m going full tilt,” says Blanchon, enjoying a glass of his own blended red wine with dinner. “We started [the new approach] about three years ago. Now our first spray was only teas and decoction with nettle leaf and horsetail grass to start. I also use chamomile, oak bark tea, and milfoil grass later in the season.” (Decoction is essentially a reduction by boiling of the elixir he describes.)
“We try to respect the environment, our little environment around here—we are the only vineyard but we have animals, the lake, so we try to really reduce the heavy spray,” he says.
Goats are Blanchon’s latest addition to the farm. They’re like natural lawn mowers that tidy up—and, um, fertilize—the 135 acres that aren’t covered with vines. He’s also talked with the owners of some neighboring cows about taking over the herd when they retire next year. “Why not butcher and sell them here—maybe sell grass-fed beef to the wine-club members?” he asks.
“The thing I hate is having a recipe, dong the exact same thing I did last year,” says Blanchon, pouring more red for himself and a guest. “The weather is always different, the grapes come in different. As a winemaker, I love the adaptations you have to make.
“I have the chance to be in charge of a small area,” he says. “What can I do—even if nobody knows, but for me, what can I do—to have a beneficial impact? When I leave, or when I retire, I’ll know I’ve done whatever I could to make this place environmentally friendly. And I really believe it affects the quality of the wine.”
An Italian immigrant, Gabriele Rausse is one of Central Virginia’s most prominent and influential winemakers. Photo: Ashley Twiggs
Wine without borders
Damien Blanchon, a native of France, is one of many immigrants now working in area wineries, bringing not only diversity to the industry, but also skills, practices, and knowledge that improve the quality of the commonwealth’s wines. We raise a glass to the men and women who give our local wine its multicultural flavor.—N.B.
Gabriele Rausse, Italy, owner, Gabriele Rausse Winery and Director of Gardens and Grounds, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
Fernando Franco, El Salvador, viticulturist, Barboursville Vineyards, Barboursville
Luca Paschina, Italy, general manager and winemaker, Barboursville Vineyards
Andy Bilenkij, Australia, winemaker, Pollak Vineyards, Greenwood
Francoise Seillier-Moiseiwitsch, Belgium, vineyard manager
and co-owner, and Julian
Moiseiwitsch, Northern Ireland, co-owner, Revalation Vineyards, Madison
Jorge Raposo, Portugal, owner and winemaker, Brent Manor Vineyards, Faber
Stephen Barnard, South Africa, winemaker, Keswick Vineyards, Keswick
Julien Durantie, France, winemaker, DuCard Vineyards, Etlan
Matthieu Finot, France, winemaker, King Family Vineyards, Crozet
Claude Thibaut, France, winemaker, Thibaut-Janisson, produced and bottled at Veritas Vineyards, Afton
Prime 109, the Downtown Mall steakhouse that’s the brainchild of the team behind Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria, is slated to open later this month. Image: Signe Clayton
Prime 109, the much-anticipated local-farm-centered steakhouse located in the former Bank of America building on the Downtown Mall, opens this month after nearly two years of planning and design.
The restaurant is the brainchild of the Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria team of Ian Redshaw, Loren Mendosa, Andrew Cole, Shelly Robb, and Mitchell Beerens, and it will showcase the cooking of Bill Scatena, formerly of Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards, as chef de cuisine.
What’s the number?
Prime 109 takes its name from steakhouse slang for prime rib. When a steakhouse orders “prime 109” from a butcher, the butcher knows to send over roast-ready prime rib of beef. Ian Redshaw, executive chef at Prime 109, is especially excited for the restaurant’s namesake item, a Virginia-raised, 109-day dry-aged 109 steak.
Sharing center stage with Prime 109’s locally grown and produced food will be the interior Beaux-Arts décor of its 100-year-old neoclassical building, an architectural gem from a bygone era.
Redshaw, Prime 109’s executive chef, says the intent behind the restaurant is to feature the bounty of central Virginia’s food while operating in the most sustainable way possible.
“Creating a sustainable cooking community is really hard in Charlottesville because a lot of people outsource everything,” says Redshaw. “We’re trying to keep everything local as much as possible, from our beef all the way down the line, so it’s really to walk the walk of a local restaurant. With Virginia being such a great place to [raise] livestock, it fits hand in hand. Through the community we can vertically integrate everything we have. It creates a language everyone understands—we can tell a farmer ‘I need to talk to you about a cow we need 24 months from now’—and they like that!”
Redshaw adds that we here in Charlottesville are fortunate to have such amazing food grown and sold right in our proverbial (and sometimes literal) backyards.
“We’re trying to feature the bounty of the Shenandoah Valley. It’s such a big bread basket that people forget about it—but it’s some of the best vegetables and livestock around.”
Redshaw reassures Lampo fans currently fretting about the team redirecting its focus to this much larger venture: “Because of our management structure, it’ll just run as Lampo has run; you’ll see the familiar faces, Mitch and Loren will be there. A lot of the partners are pulling double duty to make sure it’s the same experience for our customers.” Cole will be Prime 109’s wine director and Beerens its pastry chef.
Prime 109’s options run the gamut from, well, steak, naturally, to a meatless Bolognese that Redshaw says is particularly delicious.
And, of course, there’s the steak so exciting, they named the entire restaurant after it, the prime 109, which Redshaw says is local pastured beef meticulously dry-aged and cooked to the customer’s liking.
He says they have a dry-aging facility at Seven Hills Food Co. in Lynchburg, a wholesaler of premium pastured Virginia family-farm-raised beef, whose mission is to connect local meat producers with local meat consumers.
“We have a lot of stuff going on in-house, but they do the majority of the processing there [at Seven Hills]—we’re bringing the beef in to them, and we teamed up with them as the livestock producer to help us out in this way.”
Sharing center stage with the locally grown and produced food will be the interior Beaux-Arts décor of the 100-year-old neoclassical building, an architectural gem from a bygone era. Two rows of Corinthian columns, which repeat the design and grandeur of the columns that front the building’s façade, grace the cavernous open space inside of the building, and support gilded coffered ceilings that invite your gaze. Banquettes flanking either side of the restaurant—decorated by local design company Jaid—are showcased by burnished maple floors reclaimed from a mid-19th-century building.
Just past the main dining area on the left is a butchering area and the main production part of the kitchen, where diners can sit at the chef’s table in front of the custom-built, wood-fired grill created by Corry Blanc of Blanc Creatives. Directly across from this is the bar, which will be headed up by Abraham Hawkins, formerly of the C&O.
The polished Carrara white tile flooring leads to a marble staircase that ascends to the mezzanine-level private dining space, which seats 40, overlooks the restaurant below, and lends an up-close look at the space’s gorgeous architectural flourishes.
Redshaw is thrilled to see the Prime 109 team’s dream of a truly local restaurant come to fruition.
“It’s been a huge undertaking with local artisans to bring everything in—from beef producers to blacksmiths to all of our plates are handmade in North Carolina. This collaboration with all local and regional artisans lets us show off what Virginia and the region has to offer.”
