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Greetings from the Holiday Inn, Reno, where Campbell and I caught a few hours sleep after a LONG travel day (the American flight system of hubs had us fly from NYC to Reno via Houston). In a little while, we will be heading out to the desert and Burning Man, which we trust will be the great experience we’ve been anticipating. Even though there may be some limited wi-fi out in the desert, I have left the laptop behind and will be switching off the grid for the week. See you all after Labor Day… Hopefully with lots of good stories to tell.

On a scorching hot Friday in August, I set off on a self-driving tour of Virginian vineyards that put over 200 miles on the clock and, in the latter half of the day, as I found myself stuck on Interstates and in inner-city rush-hour traffic, tested the limits of my tasting patience. However, the first and last stops were more than worth the effort, and the morning drive was delightful, taking me through the musically historical and eminently groovy town of Floyd and up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, off which Villa Appalaccia sits by just a few hundred yards, its 3500 foot elevation offering a stunning view of the surrounding mountains.

Villa Appalaccia: They take their Tuscan image seriously

The name Villa Appalaccia seems like something of a marketing man’s joke – an upscale play on the region’s rural roots – but the intent is deadly serious. Winegrower Stephen Haskill, a former biology professor from Chapel Hill, and winemaker Susanne Becker, his wife, are dedicated Tuscan experts (and homeowners) who were not far behind Barboursville in seeing the potential for Italian grapes in Virginia vineyards. The couple started planting in 1988, opened the vineyard in 1996, and since then have secured a healthy reputation for quality and experimentation. I was fortunate to have Steve pouring for me and he provided a wealth of information as he took me through a, frankly, stunning portfolio of wines.

The 2005 Pinot Grigio got us off to a great start. Stainless steel fermented, grown (as per all the Villa Appalaccia wines) in the couple’s vineyards that sit on a shale ledge of about 1600 foot elevation, it had a lovely clear hue, a highly aromatic nose that combined solid pear and apple fruit with evident minerality, an almost cleansing acidity that never quite dominated the fruit, and a vibrant finish. Steve claimed, with pride, it was more acidic and tannic than the wines he and Susanne had just been tasting in Tuscany, and it was certainly a cut above the very average Italian Pinot Grigios that show up at so many cocktail parties. At $15 a bottle, it was also very well priced. I snapped one up.

The Simpatico 2006 was a blend of Trebbiano, Malvasia Blanc and Pinot Grigio, that to my mind ended up impersonating a Gewürztraminer, in that it had flavors of citrus, ginger and lichi, plenty acidity, lots of fruit on the palate, and a creamy, soft finish. A lovely wine for those who like that style with their spicy foods; I prefer a Viognier.

Finally among the whites, the late harvest Vidal Blanc marketed as “Alba” defied the usual late harvest Vidal Blanc taste test. Maybe it was the addition of some Moscato that did it, perhaps the soil, but it had an unusual (and quite alluring) amount of mint sticking out amongst its sticky tropical fruits and 3% Residual Sugar. At $13 a bottle, you could definitely do worse.

Villa Appalaccia’s Pinot Grigio and Sangiovese are excellent examples of their love for Italian wines.

Villa Appalaccia makes good whites, but it excels at the reds. The Mercurio Sangiovese 2005 (vintage not listed on the bottle) is co-fermented along with Trebbiano and Malvasia, somewhat per the old-style Chianti, and it’s fascinating. With an opaque, almost cloudy texture reminiscent in color of a summer Sangria, it offers up a cornucopia of bright red berry flavors, a hint of orange peel, vibrant acidity but plenty earth, and even a touch of chocolate. (These notes come from the bottle brought home and subsequently enjoyed with a barbeque.) At $16, I thought it extremely well-priced.

The 2005 Primitivo was not your typical (Italian) American Zinfandel; it was much lighter in texture, with some Pinot Noir aromas to it, and zippy acidity. I called it ‘friendly’ and am sure it would have gone down just as well with the barbeque. My gut instinct though is that I can get better Primitivo all the way for Italy for less than Appalaccia’s $17 price tag.

Steve and Susanne’s flagship wine they call Toscanello, a blend of Cab Franc, Sangiovese and Primitivo that we can safely assume is their attempt at a Super-Tuscan. The Toscanello 2004, aged mostly in old oak, I found peppery and smoky on the nose, but quite light and even a little green on the palate. I was more impressed by the Toscanello 2002, from a generous vintage, which was still quite light in color, offered up some cedar-smoky aromas, and had the not-unattractive bitterness and chocolate that one often gets from Tuscan wines. Both retail for under $20.

The most expensive wine is the Francesco 2002 Cabernet Franc Reserve, aged in French and American oak and from which, while I certainly caught the wood, was still chock full of tannins, with lots of spicy tobacco touches and deep dark fruits. A full-bodied wine in every sense, and perhaps not typical of your average east coast cab franc, I picked up a bottle, at $23, and look forward to a good occasion for which to open it.

The view from Villa Appalaccia, looking down from the 3500 elevation towards their 1600 foot ledge vineyards.

I passed up the dessert blackberry wine and was rewarded with two barrel samples from the 06 vintage: an Aglianico, that was purple in hue and color and aroma. You see, I have a thing about my Rhône wines in that I often describe them as smelling “purple” (hey, whatever gets you through the tasting!), and this was extremely similar. Steve agreed, saying he got a lot of Provencal herbs off this wine, as well as cassis, licorice, black plummy fruits, and spice. So far, they’ve planted but 1 acre of Aglianico, enough for 225 cases, and seem to be intrigued by the fact that their clusters are showing up much smaller than those of other VA wineries growing the grape. Indeed, Steve thinks they inadvertently latched on to a micro-climate with their land, which he says gets the most rainfall in Virginia. (Given the almost total lack of rain where we were staying 40 miles away for the week, this should not be considered a bad thing.) That micro-climate is not perfect though, Steve admitting that they have had problems with their Sangiovese vines in the past, and have started experiencing them again, which is why the ‘06 Mercurio has some 30% Monetepulciano in there. (Similar problems with the Vidal Blanc explains why it was recently pulled up to make way for the Aglianico.) Steve poured me a barrel sample of this 2006 Mercurio, which was much darker than the ‘05 (as you’d expect), much fuller too, but also much brighter. A little bitter right now, I nonetheless thought it was a damn fine wine, and I look forward to tasting it once it’s bottled. Indeed, when the weather cools down, I may yet get in and order more wine from Villa Appallacia. Or maybe go one step further and rent the couple’s villa in Tuscany. These are fine wine-makers who walk it like they talk it, and that’s a rare (and beautiful) thing on the modern tourist wine trail.

West Wind Farm is conveniently situated near the intersection of Interstates 81 and 77. Opened just two years ago by Paul and Brenda Hric and their nephew David Manley with help from David’s brother Jason, it is the result of modern economics: after watching other local struggling farmers sell out to housing developers, the family decided to replant much their own formerly arable acreage with grape vines and engage in the hot new business of wine-making rather than give up the ghost to another suburban development. As with many of the other wineries I visited, West Wind Farm has high elevation vineyards that help mitigate the power of the hot summer days, and cool, often foggy nights with good humidity; unfortunately, like many other wineries in this part of Virginia, West Wind was hit hard by late spring frosts this year, when temperatures dropped well below freezing in early May, and have already found themselves forced to tear up and replant many of their vines. Just as well that the majority of their production comes from sourced grapes, including a couple of contract growers. To its credit, West Wind has jumped into the wine game with a modern attitude, eschewing Chardonnay for Pinot Gris, skipping Cabernet Franc for a Cabernet Sauvignon, and planting small amounts of Viognier and Petit Verdot (that have yet to reach the production stage).

We were West Wind’s only guests this Monday afternoon, and David freely poured us generous measures in proper wine glasses without even hinting that he expected us to buy anything. It was a curious tasting: on one hand, David intimated that he and his family had little experience in wine-making or grape growing and were winging the whole affair; on the other, he seemed to know an awful lot about what he was pouring and what went into it. Let’s put it down to a necessary fast learning curve and get stuck into the wines…

The West Wind Farm Pinot Gris, made in attractive Alsatian style but with slight sweetness masking a lack of finesse.

The Galena Creek White 2005 is a dry Vidal Blanc as opposed to the usual sweet versions, with one-third fermented in French oak, the remainder in stainless steel. I found that oak surprisingly strong, and David agreed, but the wine had a surprisingly deep color for such a typically light grape, and offered up pleasant peach and apple flavors in an atypically full wine. The West Wind Farm Pinot Gris 2006 – the only 2006 wine on the list – comes partly from the winery’s own half-acre of said grape and, as per its spelling, is made not with the tart acidity of the Italian ‘Grigio,’ but in a fuller-bodied, riper, richer (they use the word “luscious”) Alsace style with a hint of residual sugar. We liked it enough to bring a bottle home with us. Opened a couple of nights later, it looked light and simple, but apple aromas escaped from the glass immediately, and the nose also gave up some pear, melon and minerality, all of which continued into the palate. The slight sweetness was, initially, like a Golden Delicious crunch at the back end. But as we stuck with the bottle, I realized that the wine was hollow – there was nothing more to it than those initial impressions, no real guts or finish or mouthfeel, other than the increasingly cloying sweetness. A nice attempt at something different but only half-way successful.

The Galena Creek Red is a relatively inexpensive ($14) blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Chambourcin, of which I primarily caught the middle grape, in all its spicy, tobacco, fruity and peppery glory. I was shocked then to learn that Merlot made up some 80% of the wine, and can only conclude that my impressions say something either about the weakness of the sourced Merlot or the power of the sourced Cab Franc. Still, it was much more interesting than it had a right to be, more so than the West Wind Farm Chambourcin 2005, which had some peppery complexity but a simple finish and seemed a little overpriced at $15. I found the West Wind Farm Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, at $18, better value. David opened a fresh bottle for us (nice touch), and though it failed to give up much by way of immediate aroma, it was silky without being drowned in vanilla like the Davis Cab Franc, and some tannins showed up along with black berries at the back of the palate. I ending up buying a bottle, which I’ll give a year or two in cellar to see where it goes. Certainly it got me off to a fine start with the bigger and bolder red wines of Virginia.

David then poured me some West Wind Farm Heritage Reserve 2005 ($29), the new Meritage wine, which was not listed on the tasting sheet. (“We normally charge to taste this one,” he said; I guess they normally don’t get visitors taking so many notes and asking so many questions.) This too was impressive and while I caught the bitter tannins up front and the oak at the back (the Heritage saw 20 months in oak, the Cab Sauvignon just 12 months), I also got oodles of fruit. In short, I was highly impressed, and left the place wondering just who was making wine this good given the family’s professed lack of experience. (Their back rooms are filled with barrels and tanks, so certainly, much of the wine is being made and/or stored on premises.)

The tasting room at West Wind Farm; the vineyards are just outside.

West Wind also makes a couple of lightly sweetened, low alcohol dessert wines: a red Galena Creek Blackberry (made with Merlot), and a white Galena Creek Peach (with Vidal). I’m sure you can imagine what they taste like. While West Wind have yet to find their feet, or even to produce much wine from their own grapes, I like their thinking, warmed to the tasting room, and greatly enjoyed the hospitality. I also appreciated that they sold bars of 84% pure cacao chocolate at the counter, a useful pick-me-up after wine tasting in 90-plus Farenheit temperatures on a Monday afternoon when you really don’t want another cup of coffee sloshing about on the drive home.

In the far south-west corner of Virginia, just a couple of miles off of I-81 in the gorgeously-named town of Rural Retreat, up a hillside and with a beautiful near 360-degree view, sits the relatively new Davis Valley Winery. One of the joys of visiting wineries, particularly lesser-known places on off days like this hot August Monday, is the ability to meet and talk with the wine-maker, and for most of the time we were at Davis, we were proprietor Rusty Cox’s only guests. Despite mutual problems with our accents (his was the strongest Virginia twang I heard all week; my English trill seemed to catch him equally off guard), we bonded over our common language: the liquid he sells for a living.

Located in the town of Rural Retreat, Davis Valley is ideally situated for a picnic stop off I-81.

Davis Valley is a model of the modest winery: it makes less than ten wines, pours them for free (albeit in cheap plastic cups), sells them at a sensible price, and best of all, only grows what makes sense given the terroir. (Or, if not yet the terroir, given Davis’ status as the only winery in the area, at least the climate.) All vintage wines poured, as was the case with most from the other Virginia wineries we visited, hailed from 2005, a solid year in Virginia and therefore a good one with which to sample the State’s wine-making potential.

The Davis Valley whites included a dry Chardonnay, which was lightly oaked, passable, pleasant enough, and purchasable if I wasn’t so bored with seeing the grape at every tasting room I ever visit. There was also a semi-dry Chardonnel, a new hybrid made by Michigan State and Cornell from a cross between Seyval Blanc and Chardonnay. Given that both these grapes fare well in the kind of difficult east coast climate where hybrids are otherwise so necessary, it’s hard to justify Chardonnel’s existence, especially as I found its aromas and attack positively nasty. On a brighter note, Cox poured a perfectly agreeable dessert Vidal Blanc – a hybrid that has become so engrained on the east coast I tend to view it as borderline vinifera – that offered up all the appropriate tropical fruit aromas and textures under the name ‘Sweet Virginia.’ In retrospect, I should probably have picked up a bottle.

Winemaker Rusty Cox pours the fruits of his labor.

If there’s an equivalent to Vidal amongst red wines – a hybrid grape that’s become such an enjoyable fixture on the east coast landscape it’s actually possible to forget that it’s a hybrid to begin with – it would have to be Chambourcin. (An explanation for these two grapes’ quality may lie in the fact that they were both created not at Cornell or elsewhere in America but in France.) The Davis Valley Chambourcin 2005 comported itself admirably, a honest-to-goodness peppery juicy red wine with just a hint (2%RS) of sweetness, and a steal at $11. But just as the Vidal was undone by the Chardonnel, so the Chambourcin was canceled out by the 2005 Corot Noir, a brand new attempt by Cornell to make a sturdy Pinot Noir clone for the east coast. I tasted it twice and couldn’t get past the ugly attack on the front end that screamed “hybrid” in all its wild skunk madness, and could hardly agree with Rusty’s insistence that it served as a “light Pinot” – especially as, by his own admission, the alcohol content hovered around 14%.

The same high alcohol was true of his Cabernet Franc which, much as in New York State, and much to my own delight as a fan of the grape, is fast becoming the flagship red wine in Virginia. (Rusty did not list it on his tasting sheet, as he was only able to bottle 2-300 gallons in 2005 and, I soon discovered, does not trust the taste buds of the casual visitor to discern quality over sweetness, but the moment I asked about it, out came a bottle. Such is the way of the modern Virginia tasting room.) This Cab Franc, Rusty assured me as he poured, was judiciously oaked – not like the North Carolina example from a brand new high-end winery that he’d himself visited the previous weekend which, he said, had been like “biting into an oak board.” It tasted just fine in the plastic cup and so we took a bottle of his Davis Valley Cabernet Franc Virginia 2005 home with us (for $19) and tried it that night alongside what should have been a suitable dinner. While I wasn’t hit up front by any oak boards, the wine was nonetheless dominated by a vanilla component that masked all the tobacco-pencil-smoky-peppery-vegetal flavors I would normally expect from this most food-friendly of red wine grapes. Chilling the wine didn’t help any; bringing it back towards Virgina’s summer temperatures was no solution either. I came back it to it the next night and it was no different. Damn. I so wanted to like this bottle.

Rusty’s final pour was of a sweet red Steuben, a hybrid grape I’ve never knowingly tasted in wine before. Picked at normal harvest time, its light red color belying its naturally high sugar content, it apparently tastes in the glass just as it does in the vineyard – of pink grapefruit. Given that I often start my day with said fruit, I had no reason not be charmed by its simple honesty. (Ironically, Steuben is one of the parents responsible for the awful Corot Noir.) Rusty told us that next year he would blend it with the sweet Vidal to make a truly pink dessert wine – and poured us a sample by blending wine from his two open bottles! (Some of the finest pink Champagne is made in much the same manner.) I think he will have a hit on his hands…

The vineyards at Davis Valley are still relatively young – the oldest date I noted was 2001.

…And there’s good reason for this. There are two types of visitor to his winery, says Rusty: 1) the wine-lover, like myself, who may come from afar, who usually gravitates towards the red wines, and who certainly prefers the dry ones; and 2) the confirmed beer drinker, who may well be local, but whose palate is so conditioned that a dry wine will only shock his taste buds and so who inherently gravitates towards sweet wines. I had never thought of it in such starkly simple terms but, as we were leaving, an elderly couple came in to the tasting room. When Rusty asked what they’d like to try, the woman described herself as favorable towards Chardonnay while the husband proclaimed, in so many words: “I’m a beer drinker at heart. I only like sweet wines.” Touché.

Rusty’s words served as useful warning for the rest of our wine-tasting experience, and I paid close attention to the “sweetness” factor of other wineries before visiting. While he understandably tips his hat (and his Vidal, his Chambourcin and his Steuben) to the beer drinker with the sweet tongue, he’s a straight-ahead guy making unpretentious wines at a fair price. It was a pleasure to visit with him.

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 wine business in the State dates back to 1607 when the first English settlers arrived; they described their first vintage, harvested just a year later from the omnipresent indigenous grapes, 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 in the hot summers and cold winters, the farmers gave up; by the start of the 18th Century, native grapes once again ruled the land, “foxy” aromas and all.

Virginia is a vast State, now producing wine in almost all corners. The bulk of it comes from Central Virginia, with notable wines from Barboursville and Horton just north of Charlottesville, and from northern Virginia, where the traffic from Route 66 out of Washington, DC ensures a constant flood of visitors.

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 Virginia wine business. His idea was initially ridiculed, but Zonin had the advantage of the 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?

We were in the South-Western corner of the State, home to barely 10% of the State’s 120-odd wineries. An enthusiasm for the motor vehicle is an essential part of the tasting experience.

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.

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 thedogs.com?