Updated!!!
I could quote Seinfeld and tell you this is a blog about nothing, but that doesn’t help, and it is about something. It’s about my exploration of new-to-me Virginia wines.
It was 2007 when I really started paying attention to and getting interested in wine, and I started checking out Virginia wine. That meant visiting a few cheap places and being a bit disgusted by them. It was not a good thing.
Over the past 10 or so years, however, the Virginia wine business has exploded and it feels like there are signs for wineries and wine tours off nearly every highway when you get outside the city. This is a good thing, and the collaboration and competition has helped wine makers improve the quality of their wine and unlock Virginia’s real potential. What is most exciting to me is how we see winemakers bringing out authentic representations of Virginia soil and climate and try to figure out our sense of terroir. Now we have winegrowers experimenting to see which crops are best in climate change and what can we do HERE that is better and different from mass-marketed wine. These are exciting times.
In the very first post here I described the fact that I got myself into a habit of visiting the same two or three wineries all the time for a few years. They made good wine, and I enjoyed the visits. But for the past few years I have been pushing myself to check out other places, and since the fall of 2017 I have been to ten new-to-me wineries (as of mid-Oct 2018). In 2021 I retired from an insane job, got a new one, and relocated to Central Virginia. A new geography of wine to explore! The list continues, and the exploration will go on, and I will chart each visit here. Some places I have fallen in LOVE with, and at a few, I’ve even joined the club, if the wine was good and the club had a good value to it.
While I am more Central Va than Northern Va, I won’t change the name. So much to explore, and my hope is that folks who read this will share their thoughts in the comments, especially if they visit places I have written about, so that we can compare notes.
So sit back and enjoy the writing (I promise it will get better over time) (except when I’ve drunk the whole bottle!) and pictures, and share your thoughts as we journey through Northern Virginia wine together.
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