I’ve never had a Norton that I would buy, never even had one that I thought was very good. Hey, Norton, what gives?

Washington DC wine writer Dave McIntyre blogged about his article in the Washington Post about a book about the Norton grape called The Wild Vine by Todd Kilman. Kilman apparently paints Norton as an underdog story, repeatedly getting stamped out just as it gains traction in the wine world. McIntyre paints a favorable picture of the book, writing…

But in the hands of Kliman, the author as vintner, [Norton] makes a fascinating story, complex and with a haunting finish.

Makes it sound like a good read. I’m always fascinated by wine books. It’s a testament to the authors that they can make something so apparently innocuous and boring (A grape) and write book after book about it. Most of the books are interesting, even. McIntyre “highly recommends” this one.

Wisteria Farm & Vineyard is a small operation where our tasting room pourer was also the owner and winemaker. That’s the kind of operation I like. I was a fan of the whites and took home a bottle of Traminette and a bottle of Pinot Gris. The Pinot Gris was made as a rose, strange until you remember that Pinot Gris is pretty red for a white grape. Also learned an interesting tidbit that Viognier is relatively new to Virginia. For some reason, I was under the impresssion that Viognier had some deep rooted history in the state. Good to know.

After the tasting, the kids ran around the farm and chased sheep around in circles.

Philosophically speaking, Narmada Winery was about as far from Wisteria as one could get. Narmada is the Napa to Wistera’s Sonoma, big in every way. Inside Narmada you’ll find a large, open tasting room, a semi-public barrel room with big imposing fermentation tanks, a woman playing the harp, and a long polished tasting bar. It is a big operation, top flight all around.

The wines didn’t agree with me. I stopped writing notes after the first few because I got tired of writing the word “oak” over and over. It was like I’d take a sip of wine, then our pourer would smack me in the grill with a tree branch. However, I was in the minority among my tasting group peers. All three of them liked the wines, and The Wife declared that they were among the best Virginia wines she’d ever tasted.

Fair enough. I’m sensitive to oak and don’t like it to be featured in a wine. Many, many people don’t mind it or even prefer those sorts of notes in their glass.

Our final winery stop was Gadino Cellars. They had a good fire going to warm us from the downright miserable weather. Wines were good but were up on the high end of the price band. My favorite was the reserve Merlot (gasp, Merlot!) but at $33 it was a no-go.

All three are recommended if you’re in an “in the area” sort of thing. Wisteria is a bit of a hike from other wineries, which the owner said is both a good and bad.

The interesting thing about this note…

Very light straw color. Cold steely nose. Spritzy and zesty palette. 74.

…was that it doesn’t sound negative at all. The score wasn’t even all that bad either (74) but somehow it all came together to inspire me to take the picture to the right. Editors note: This wine was actually from Virginia. Don’t know how it snuck into the Maryland wine post.

Elsewhere, the local wine fun continued.

Great up front. Pale straw color. Floral aromas, especially honeysuckle. Great palette with lots of steel acidity and even some rocky, gravelly mouth feel. The finish just fell apart though. Violent and unpleasant, I kept trying and hoping for improvement until I eventually gave up on it. 70.

Awarding a 70 sounds downright benevolent after that note. The funny thing is that this was a wine I’d sampled in the tasting room and liked enough to buy and bring home. Two months later, things were clearly different.

On to the good stuff, Elk Run had two of my favorites for this year:

2007 Elk Run Viognier. Nice. Springy apple and peach. Lots of acidity. 82.

Like I always say, I am nothing if not brief.

Still the leader in the clubhouse in Maryland is the 2007 Elk Run Gewurztraminer Cold Friday Vineyard

The first sniff gave me the same sort of I-don’t-know that I get in a lot of Maryland wines. I don’t quite know what it is (Old Bay?) but MD wines, both red and white, but it’s a little sulfuric, sharp… not particularly unpleasant but just distinct. The mystery aroma blew off after a few minutes. Past that, there was apple and beach, mostly round, full aromas. The wine had a Juicy Fruit, honeyed taste initially, very layered. Good acidity. The whole thing was almost a little wild. A nice, dry, light caramel finish followed. The wine changed for the better over several hours, giving out more fruit and maturing into complexity. On open, the wine was more of a New World style and after some time it developed a hint of minerality and Old World Characteristics, like something Alsacian. 88.

Eighty eight! Take that, more-well-known wine regions!

If you’re into more local stuff, go check out drinkocalwine.com and click through to some of the posts Dave McIntyre has called out this week. Happy local drinking!

The ’06 Viognier Reserve is a spectacular wine. What’s really strange is that it’s an all-stainless steel wine, yet I really got the flavors of tropical fruit… on a Danish.

Side note, when I started this blog, I pictured it to be very similar to the stuff that Swirl, Sip, Snark is putting out. I’d visit wineries every weekend, introduce myself, chat with the owner and winemaker. Write up glowing (but fair) reviews in my blog which would become the bellwether for Virginia’s burgeoning wine industry. I’d sit on panels and say interesting things about the late weather in 2007 and its effect on the Cab Franc harvest in Charlottesville. The audience would nod, because they don’t know any better. Wine samples and invites to events would pour through my mailbox causing my UPS delivery person to crumble under the weight of my awesomeness.

Things didn’t quite bounce that way, evidently. I still like visiting wineries, but I realized a few things since I started:

1) Virginia is far, and anything involving travel on 495/66 should be forgotten. You may as well take a flight from BWI to Dulles and rent a car.
2) Most wineries are the same. There hasn’t been a lot of impetus to get off the couch and drive down there to taste.

Snark that!

A true Meritage (blend) of Bordeaux varietals create this full, big bodied wine with a smooth, velvety finish.

Prince Michel is a Charlottesville winery with whom I am not familiar, this was my first wine of theirs. The wine is 48% Merlot, and that is apparent with its middle-of-the-road feel. This is big and bold without being too dominant. The 22 months of aging in oak comes through big time. My note…

Glassy ruby red. Big oak nose with some grassy aromas hidden in there. Lots of oak on the palette along with dark fruit and cherry. Big and bold, then departs quickly on the finish.

Link to product page.

I’m way behind on this one, but news came from across the Atlantic some weeks ago that the British wine trade was impressed by Virginia wines, specifically White Hall Vineyards’ Cuvee des Champs, during the 2009 London International Wine Fair. Dezel from Myvinespot.com has some details and a video reaction from the fair. The Washington Post wrote a nice piece on the lavish praise being pumped toward Virginia.

“That is really impressive,” said Cristina Proietti, who works in sales for British wine seller Majestic, as she swirled a red, the Cuvee des Champs of White Hall Vineyards, in her glass. After several rounds of sipping, spitting and considering the wine from the Blue Ridge, she declared it “more approachable than a Bordeaux.”

Nice to hear the Virginia wines are geting some recognition on an International stage. A lot of the chatter centered around the Virginia’s Viognier’s, a topic I brushed past recently. The versatile white grape is really doing well in Virginia and appears ready to be paired against top Viogniers domestically and perhaps even internationally.

Creative Commons licensed image from Flickr user law_keven

Virginia turned out 7,000 tons of grapes in 2008, a 25% bump over 2007′s number. Acreage, though, only went up three percent. More gapes from the same amount of land? Better harvest? Fewer deer munching on Merlot hanging on the vine? No word on how this affected pricing. My guess is: not at all… especially since demand is up and now that Virginia is an international star, it’s off to the moon!

Link to terse blurb on Biz Journals.

April 26, 2009, 1 – 6 pm Highlandtown Wine Festival, Baltimore, MD. $20 in advance gets you goats, bocce, and some of the best homebrew wines this side of Italy. I’ll be there working and pouring some wines.
Info

April 25-26, 2009, 12 – 6 pm Great Grapes! Wine, Arts and Food Reston Town Center, Reston, VA
Info

April 2-3, 2009, 12 – 6 pm Great Grapes! Wine, Arts and Food Anne Arundel Fairgrounds, Annapolis, MD
Info

May 16-17, 2009, 12 – 6pm Wine in the Woods
Symphony Woods, Columbia, Howard Co.
Info

Worth going to if the weather is nice. Bring chairs and be prepared to relax and listen to some tunes. You can read my writeup on last year’s Wine In The Woods Festival.

May 30-31, 2009, 12 – 6pm Chesapeake Bay Wine Festival
Terrapin Nature Area, Stevensville, Queen Anne’s Co.
Info

May 30, 2009, 11 – 6pm Vintage Virginia Festival
Bull Run Regional Park, 7700 Bull Run Drive, Centreville, VA 20101
Info

June 13-14, 2009, 12 – 6 pm Great Grapes! Wine, Arts and Food Festival
Oregon Ridge Park, Cockeysville, Baltimore Co.
Info

Any that I missed? Let me know in the comments. Virginia Wine Events and Maryland Wine are good sources for planning your trips to wine festivals.

To see how one would vault into the elite club, it’s best to examine the club members in the first place. What does it take to be there?

Produce good wines

Sorry to be obvious about things, but that is what gets attention. It begins and ends with the wines. My experience with Virginia wines is that there are some quality spikes but across the board, the quality just isn’t on par with New York. But Virginia doesn’t need a broad swath of awesome wine. Virginia needs three or four wineries to take a common varietal like Cabernet and just knock it out of the park for three straight years.

Stay boutique

Nothing promotes the image of plonk more than mass production. There are plenty of good wines that get rolled off in 100,000 case lots, but they don’t drive reputation. Small production winners drive a reputation for quality. Whispers and friendly tips about “this hard to find gem” get your winery on the map.

Get a score from a big gun

There’s tons of talk about how the wine recommendation engine is changing. Social media rules, old journalism drools. It’s great to see people getting their wine information from lots of different sources. In the future, the hope is that wineries are viewed on their merit, not their reputation.

But that isn’t now. Now, Virginia needs a score.

Parker hasn’t ever marked up a Virginia wine over 88 points, and that happened back in 2002: both White Hall Vineyards Petit Verdot and Chehalem Petit Verdot scored 88. The last time Wine Spectator ran a feature on East Coast wines, nothing out of VA cracked 86. That isn’t going to get it done. I don’t know if Tanzer has even reviewed a VA wine. Anyone?

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get a more recent score out of these guys. Anyone have Parker’s direct line?

Others are cocked and ready to step up and be a big wine producing state. States like Texas and Idaho (No, Udaho!) are starting to get whispers around the wine world regarding their increasing quality. It’s good to see quality wine coming out of uncommon areas and it will be fun to find out who is the next one to make the leap.

I stoped by before opening today and perused the bar menu, a range of appetizers in the $6-$9 range, as well as cheese plates (three cheeses $11); dinners reportedly hover around $16-25.

Grape Leaves Online reports that Church Street Cellars in Vienna, Virginia has Enomatic machines to facilitate your wine tasting needs. If you haven’t used an Enomatic machine before, you’re in for a good time. An Enomatic is a big box with 5-10 wine bottles inside it, each with its own button and price. You pay for credit on a card, then slide the card into a machine and press a button corresponding to your choice. Your card is charged per the price of the taste and one ounce of wine goes into your glass and you drink up. Rinse, and repeat.

Last time I was in New Orleans, I spoke with the owner of WINO about the machines, many of which he had just set up in his store. He said that it wasn’t easy getting them past the liquor licensing board given that people are serving themselves and the good government magistrates were concerned that people would drink too much. We both shared our wonder that this was happening in New Orleans where public belligerence isn’t illegal, it is required. So kudos to the VA liquor board for allowing this to happen.

…located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on 117 acres, with a fully stocked 7 acre lake and a 3500sqft house.

It’s all salivating in a romantic, quit-my-job-and-start-a-winery sort of way, which is the angle they’re shooting for I suppose.

Realtor listing, with a ton of pictures, is here.

I’ve never even heard of the winery, anyone tried the juice?