(Notes from my half-dozen winery visits in Virginia, August 2007. Essentially a reprint from my own web site (http://www.ijamming.net) where I also have some photos and links. Notes on each winery to follow in turn. Thanks to everyone for their advice on who to visit.)
Everywhere I travel these days seems to be wine country. I’m not complaining, of course – there’s nothing I love more on my sojourns than tasting local wines - but I know my high strike rate is a result not of choosing destinations for their vineyards, but because wine is a growth business enticing farmers and entrepreneurs the world over. Be it Greece, Mallorca, Ohio, the New York Finger Lakes, or now Virginia, in the south-western corner of which my wife and I just borrowed her a lake-side cabin for a week, what was once a risky niche business is fast becoming a profitable tourist attraction. Is wine the new golf?
Yet Virginia has a greater claim on the wine trade than most American states. The industry there dates back to 1607, when the first English settlers arrived; its problems date from its first vintage, harvested just a year later from the omnipresent indigenous grapes, and which the settlers described as “foxy,” a term that has endured to plague the American wine business ever since. Indeed, the Jamestown settlers were so disappointed by the fermented fruits of these American vines that they soon began importing European vinifera grapes, but when these struggled to acclimatize themselves, the farmers gave up; by the start of the 18th Century, native grapes once again ruled the land, “foxy” aromas and all.
Almost a hundred years later, no less a Virginia-based wine authority (and Statesman) than Thomas Jefferson revived the idea of making wine from European vinifera at his estate in Monticello, where he planted some 24 different European varietals. There is no evidence that he succeeded in producing as much as a single bottle, despite thirty years of trying: confessing that growing grapes was “like gambling,” Jefferson saw his vines continually torn up and replanted as they succumbed to various diseases. The man who declared that “wine for me is a necessity of life” instead ran up a $11,000 tab on imported wines during his four years at the White House (approximately $175,000 in modern currency). In defense of the American wine geek’s founding father, Jefferson eschewed hard liquor, proclaiming "No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as its common beverage." He had a point.
Fast forward almost 300 years, and it was at Monticello that Italian wine-producer Gianni Zonin purchased former Governor James Barbour’s old plantation, intent on reviving the nearly dormant Virginia wine business. His idea was initially ridiculed, but Zonin had the advantage of several extra centuries’ experience, and by grafting European vinifera onto local rootstocks, he made them more resistant to disease. Barboursville Vineyards was founded in 1976 and has gone on to become the flagship winery for the State; its 1999 Viognier, which made it up to a local Brooklyn store, woke me up to the potential for Virginia wines. So, too, around the same time, did a Syrah from Horton Cellars. Could Virginia, I wondered, be the new northern Rhône?
Not overnight, it can’t. In the wake of Barbourville’s success, Virginia’s enthusiastic immersion in the modern wine business is proving indicative of the new world at large, in that it too often mistakes quantity for quality. Virginia widely flaunts the fact that it has the fifth largest number of wineries of any American state – 119 and rapidly counting – but a quick look at these wineries’ websites reveals that most of them make far too many wines to make many good ones. Wine-tasting has, certainly, become something of a 21st Century non-cardiovascular sport (the new golf!), and if a winery needs to produce a blush wine and a couple of sweet fruit wines to make ends meet, along with the sale of not-so-local condiments and Chinese-manufactured table settings, it has my sympathy. But I’m wary of any winery that makes more than a dozen wines, all the more so if they come with either “cutesy” proprietal names or boast openly of their sweetness and/or blending with other fruits.
And it was for these reasons that we headed off on a hot mid-August Monday morning to a couple of small, family-owned wineries in the farthest corner of the State, staunchly ignoring the winery closest to our holiday destination: Chateau Morrisette, one of the biggest and most visited in the State. After all, would you trust a winery whose URL is http://www.thedogs.com?
I liked the proprietor and it actually wasn't too bad when I originally tried it, but bleh!