Wine Blogging Wednesday Hosts Singles Event, Awesome Pairings Occur

When Joe Roberts, aka 1 Wine Dude, floated the idea of single vineyard wines for the topic when he hosted Wine Blogging Wednesday #75, we immediately let him know that we were in.  When I first started drinking wine, terrior was something I knew noting about.  It’s still something I’d have a hard time explaining to anyone, but through a lot of tasting throughout Virginia, I’ve come to understand the idea of a sense of place in a bottle that can happen with single vineyard wines.  There are characteristics that can transcend vintage and winemaker variation, and I’m always excited to try one of these wines that is so closely tied to a given place.

One of our biggest problems was selecting a particular wine to open and highlight in this post.  When we started brainstorming about this, Linden, Delaplane, Tarara, Prince Michel, Chester Gap, and Glen Manor immediately came to mind.  There’s also Breaux who, especially for their club releases, does not just vineyard designate wines but parcels within the vineyard.  We were also reminded that Pearmund, Winery at La Grange, and Corcoran have/have made vineyard designate wines.  Others throughout the state would likely qualify if you talk to the wineries/winemakers.

In the end, however, we opted to open a bottle of the Three2One Cellars Tranquility red blend ($45*).  This wine was the result of a collaborative winemaking project undertaken by Jordan Harris (Tarara Winery), Ben Renshaw (8 Chains North), and Clyde Housel (Hiddencroft Vineyards).  Each winemaker buys fruit from the Tranquility vineyard in Purcellville (Loudoun County), VA. They all have different styles to their wines, but they decided to work together on this by each contributing 2 barrels of wine.  The final blend they arrived at was 77% cab sauv and 23% tannat.  Since this was the blend that these winemakers collectively felt best expressed what this vineyard had to offer, I thought it would be a perfect wine to use for this Wine Blogging Wednesday theme.

We were able to try this wine last year when we did a tasting with Jordan at Tarara.  At the, even with decanting, this was a really big wine that seemed like it needed a bit more time.  I figured that, even with the additional time in the bottle, the wine would benefit from decanting.  This was a late night at work for both of us, so we’d planned ahead and had a shredded flank steak and black beans in the slow cooker waiting for us when we got home.  It probably wasn’t an ideal pairing (check out my partner’s comment blow for more information), but you can do worse than a beef dish with a big red wine…

Anyway, to return to the wine, when I first opened it, I noted dark, dried fruit (mostly berries and fig) on the nose, but the wine was quite tight.  The wine definitely opened up with time in the decanter and swirling in the glass, and the fruit elements brightened up and became more prominent.  As the wine continued to open, I also started to attend more to earthy, spicy, and graphite notes.

There was a lot going on with this wine, and I really look forward to revisiting it at some point in the future when we open our other bottle.  If you, like us, managed to hold on to a bottle or two of this wine, know that it is definitely drinkable now.  At the same time, I think that this wine will still benefit from some more growing up time in the bottle.

Also, while there’s definitely an oak backbone to this wine, it wasn’t overwhelming, and there was still plenty of great acid to help provide balance and allow this wine to play well with food.  I’m relatively new to wines from this vineyard, so I don’t yet feel that I’m in a position to talk specifically about the “somewhereness” of this wine, but I’ll definitely be looking for that in the future (the way we recently did with two white wines from Honah Lee Vineyard).  For those of you with more experience drinking Tranquility wines, what do you think speaks to the terrior?

(* We were given this bottle as a sample as part of the launch event for this wine in 2011)

 

Large-breasted Bird Attacks Table, Subdued with Virginia Wine and Two Gallons of Gravy

I’m not big on the pre-Thanksgiving “here’s how to pair wines with your faux-harvest feast” posts.  Don’t get me wrong, other bloggers are welcome to do them if they want to – after all, those are their blogs.  That said, I think it’s an impossible meal to come up with pairing recommendations for.  There are just too many darn flavors in play!  That doesn’t mean that there’s not wine at our table, however.  It just means that we don’t expect it to be perfect with every bite.

For the first time since we’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving together, we weren’t cooking the meal.  Instead, we stayed with friends who offered to cook since we’ll be doing the honors when we return the favor when the visit Chez Snark for Christmas.  We still contributed some wine for the meal, however.

We wine taste throughout the year, and every now and then, we run across a bottle that seems like it might work for Thanksgiving.  We’ll usually pick the bottle up and mark it as one we have plans for.  This year, we ran across two such wines.  These were joined by a bottle contributed by our friends.

The wine they opened was a 2010 Jefferson Vineyards viognier.  We brought a 2009 Hiddencroft Vineyards traminette and a 2008 Hillsborough Vineyards Serefina, a viognier/tannat blend.  These were joined on the table by our feast of roasted turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, roasted butternut squash, roasted broccoli, cornbread dressing, roasted cranberries, canned cranberry jelly (it’s not Thanksgiving to us without that can), and homemade wheat bread.

The viognier was dominated by the floral notes on the nose (mostly honeysuckle), but some tropical fruit flavors came out on the palate.  There was a hint of sweetness, but there was also some nice acid.  It went well with the turkey and okay with other things from the table.

Traminette has worked well for us as a Thanksgiving wine over the past few years, but I think this was our least successful wine pairing.  There was a lot of rose on the nose and palate with a little touch of sweetness.  There were some hints of spice, and this is what I normally look for in any traminette, but I think this wine may have been a bit past its prime as it was rather flat with only the rose flavors.

 

My favorite of the evening was the Serefina – and not just because it was pink and, therefore, added some nice variety to the table.  It offered a floral strawberry nose and had plenty of cranberry and strawberry flavors on the palate that played well with the largest array of foods we had.

In the end, however, this is not a meal where we focus on the food and wine pairing hits and misses.  It’s a meal where we focus on being thankful for all we have – including some amazing Virginia wine.  We hope, in that regard, that your Thanksgiving was as successful as ours.

 

20 Reasons My Wine Region’s Better Than Yours: VA Wine Diva

A while back, Jordan Harris, winemaker at Tarara challenged us, and other Virginia wine bloggers, to list our top 20 Virginia wines.  He was curious not because e wanted to see how many Tarara wines made the list, but because he was interested to see what characteristics seem to be appealing to people.  It took a bit of work to find a date that at least some of us could agree on – never mind the work to narrow the field down to 20 wines – but we’re finally ready to go.  FYI, I limited myself to 2 wines per winery for this list so that I didn’t fall into the trap of just listing a ton of wines from the wineries we’ve visited more frequently.  Please note that the wines are in alphabetical order by winery rather than rank order, so don’t read anything into their placement on the list.  With no further ado, here’s my top 20 VA wine list (of course it might be different if I wrote it tomorrow).  [Grape Envy Guy has his own list.]

1. Boxwood Winery ’09 Rosé:  We’ve been bad bloggers.  We’ve only visited the Boxwood tasting room once, and we’ve never made it out for a reservation only tour at the winery itself.  Because of that, we haven’t talked a lot about Boxwood.  That said, this rosé was one I kept thinking about after trying it at the Drink Local Wine conference last spring.
2. Breaux Vineyards ’01 Nebbiolo:  When I got to try this library wine as part of a blogger event in advance of the Drink Local Wine conference, I knew it was something special.  Grape Envy Guy had thought he hated this grape until he tried this wine as well.  This is one of the wines that’s convinced us to do a better job of aging some of the bottles we bring home.
3. Chrysalis Vineyards ’09 Albariño:  This is the only vintage of the albariño we’ve ever had, so I can’t talk about this one in comparison to other vintage years, but it was enjoyable enough that we’ve started to seek out other albariños to try (albeit from outside of VA).  Let’s hope some more people start experimenting with this grape soon.
4. Chrysalis Vineyards ’03 Norton:  Norton can be a really brash young wine, but it starts to mellow with a bit of maturity.  This is another with that’s convinced us to do a better job of cellaring a number of our wines.
5. Delaplane Cellars ’08 Honah Lee Viognier:  Again, this is the only vintage of this wine we’ve ever tried, but it’s been a big hit with both us and visiting family.  I’m really excited for another visit to Delaplane so we can see what Jim Dolphin’s been up to.  It’s been too long.
6. Glen Manor Vineyards ’07 Hodder Hill:  Jeff White and Glen Manor definitely have a place in the Treehouse of Virginia Wine Awesomeness.  Given that, it was hard to decide which wine(s) of his to include in this list.  In the end, however, I came back to 2 of the reds we tried on our first visit to his winery.  Yum!
7. Glen Manor Vineyards ’07 Petit Verdot:  Yum, part deux.
8. Gray Ghost Vineyards Adieu:  I’m not a huge dessert wine person.  That said, the Adieu is one I return to again and again as a solid winner.  I’ve never had an edition that I didn’t like, so I just list it here in the general sense.  Finally, if you’ve not yet tried this wine with pumpkin pie, you are so missing out.
9. Hiddencroft Vineyards ’07 Petit Verdot:  We like to try before we buy.  That said, sometimes we like what we taste enough to take a risk and buy a wine not available for tasting.  Such was the case with this petit verdot after really enjoying the reds we were able to try.  Clyde did not exaggerate; it was quite a wine.
10. Hume Vineyards ’09 Chambourcin:  Come on, as much as I love chambourcin, you had to know that there’s be one on my list.  Hume’s is the one I recommend most often these days.  When a winemaker enjoys a grape, it tends to show in the wines s/he makes with that grape.  Such is the case with this wine.  (Thanks for enjoying an underdog grape, Stephane.)
11. Jefferson Vineyards ’07 Meritage (preferably the one bottled as a magnum):  The first time I tried this wine was at a snowy Winemaker Wednesday tasting at the Frenchman’s Cellar in Culpeper.  Jeffrey, the store owner, and Andy, the winemaker, had both the ’06 and the ’07 open.  The ’06 was good, but the ’07 was special.  I liked it just as much when I tasted it at Jefferson months later.  When we took part in a special VA vs. the world tasting Andy organized, we then got to try the wine bottled in magnums.  This wine was aged in separate, larger barrels.  Get some – trust me.
12. Linden Vineyards ’07 Avenius Chardonnay:  I’ve typically been a Hardscrabble chard fan.  I still am, but now that I’ve had the opportunity to try the more mineral-drive Avenius chard, I recognize it as more my style.  I was able to taste the ’07 and ’08 side by side at Linden, and the ’07 just stood out a bit more as far as those mineral characteristics.
13. Linden Vineyards ’04 Boisseau Red:  This was a library wine that was part of a Linden cellar tasting we participated in.  Again, age can do something special to a wine.  When we went back upstairs, I got a glass of this wine to enjoy since we couldn’t buy a bottle.  Again, this is what we’re trying to do a better job at aging some of the wines we buy.
14. Lovingston Winery Petit Manseng (both the ’08 and ’09):  I think that people need to start paying attention to VA petit manseng.  It works dry, lightly sweet, and as a dessert wine.  The Lovingston offering is one I keep coming back to.  (I’m already chomping at the bit for the April release of the ’10).  Both bottlings we’ve had have been outstanding.  If you get that chance to try this wine, do.
15. Lovingston Winery ’06 Reserve Merlot:  This is a special wine.  It stood out during both our first and second visits to the winery.  It also stood out as a special wine during our evening wine and food fest following a day of wine tasting with other bloggers on the Eastern Shore.
16. Pollak Vineyards ’08 Merlot:  I’m a Pollak fan; I don’t think this is a secret.  It did, however, make it hard to figure out which Pollak wine(s) would make this list.  In the end, this merlot that I so enjoyed a glass of at the winery and a bottle of at home (come on – it must be a good wine if I need to remind myself to actually sip it)
17. Pollak Vineyards Viognier (both the ’08 and and ’09):  This is another wine where I couldn’t pick a vintage year.  I’ve enjoyed both of these, but, if push came to shove, I’d probably give a slight edge to the ’09, but that might just be because it’s a more recent memory.
18. Rappahannock Cellars ’07 norton port-style dessert wine:  Any wine that gets described as an orgasm in a glass has to be on this list – that is all.
19. Thibaut-Jannison Winery nv Virginia Fizz:  I knew a T-J bubbly would be part of this list.  Prior to our recent VA bubbly comparative tasting, I would have put the flagship brut on this list, but given that I ranked the Fizz first there, I had to give it the nod here.  That said, I still love the T-J brut, so it gets a massive honorable mention.
20. Veritas Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc Reserve (both the ’08 and the ’09):  While the ’10 isn’t rocking my world as much as the two previous editions have, the Veritas sauv blanc, still had to make my list.  If I had to pick one year, I might give a tiny edge to the ’08 (see notes on the ’09 here), but we’re relying on my memory at this point…  In the right years, however, this reserve (the non-reserve is, literally, a different wine), is a special wine.

I want to mention a few wineries which struck me as notable ommisions from this list.  One is Tarara Winery.  Jordan had suggested that Tarara be exempt from this since he suggested the idea, but that’s not why there are none of his wines on this list.  Rather, Tarara is a winery I don’t feel I know well yet.  I hope to rectify this in the near future, but for now I don’t feel that I know enough about their wines to include them.  Likewise, Keswick Vineyards is absent from my list.  I need to spend more time drinking Keswick wines and taste through more of what they offer to get a sense of this winery.  If I were to write this list in another year, they might well be on there.  Finally, I want to mention Chester Gap Cellars.  A couple of Bernd’s wines came close to making this list, but again, I feel like I need to get to know them better to firmly cement their placement.

So, if you had to list your top 20 VA wines, which ones would make the cut?  If you’ve got a blog, link to your list in the comments.  If you don’t, just comment with at least some of your favorites.

 

Off The Beaten Path

I love it when we find a winery, new or old, that isn’t getting talked about often but it doing some interesting things with grapes.  One winery in Loudoun County that I hear little about from other people but that I’m a fan of is Hiddencroft Vineyards.  None of the wineries in Loudoun are that far from at least a few others, but this one is about 15 minutes away from their nearest winery neighbor, so it could be easy to overlook them when planning a day of wine tasting.

We’re not your average wine trip planners, however, and we like to include one or two small places in our tasting trips whenever possible.  When some friends asked us to plan a few days of wine tasting in Loudoun during the holidays, I knew I wanted to make a return visit to Hiddencroft.  Thankfully our friends were happy to check out a new to them winery.

As was the case with our previous visit, we were greeted warmly and then enjoyed an interesting conversation about Virginia wine throughout the tasting with the couple who own the winery.  They were tasting 11 different wines on the day we visited, and this resulted in difficult decisions when it came time to decide which bottles to take home with us.

The tasting began with 3 white wines.  The ’09 vidal ($20) had a light grapefruit nose and some subtle floral notes on the finish.  It was fine, but vidal is rarely a favorite of mine.  The ’09 chard ($25) was definitely an oak aged with with apple adn vanilla on the nose and butter, butterscotch, and vanilla on the palate with a hint of fruity crispness behind that.  It wasn’t my thing, but I wasn’t drinking a table that had been run through a blender either.  The ’09 traminette ($18) was my favorite of the whites.  This may surprise you since this wine has 2.5% residual sugar, and I usually steer away from the sweeter whites.  I am, however, a big fan of traminette, and it’s become a stable at our Thanksgiving table.  This one offered a light rose petal nose with some ginger and spice elements joining the floral on the palate.

We then moved on to 5 red wines.  We started with a pair of chambourcins: the ’07 vintner’s reserve ($22) and the ’08 ($22).  The ’07 has 20% petit verdot and offered an earthy raspberry nose which was joined by some cinnamon and black pepper on the palate.  The ’08 had a slightly darker nose (black raspberry), and instead of spice on the palate, there was some earthy tobacco.  We the moved on to a pair of cab francs: the ’05/’07 vintage blend ($18) and the ’08 ($23).  The vintage blend offered a bright cherry nose and some black pepper and soft cherry on the palate.  It’s a typical VA cab franc even if it won’t set the world on fire.  The ’08 offered a black pepper nose with a hint of the greenness I’ve come to enjoy from this grape.  On the palate, these elements were joined by tobacco, coffee, and lots of dark fruit.  This was a very rich wine.  The final red was the Dutchman’s Creek Blend ($23), a blend of petit verdot, tannat, cab sauv, and cab franc.  This is a wine that calls out for venison with its earthy tobacco nose and dried fruit flavors.

Our tasting ended with 3 fruit wines.  The first was Grandma’s Love Potion ($24 for 500ml), a blueberry wine with 10% chambourcin and 4% residual sugar.  The blueberries aren’t local, but the wine was a lot more than your typical fruit wine.  The blueberry flavors were rather in the background, and I noted clove, cardamom, and soft, sweet berries.  A blackberry wine made form their own berries came next ($23).  This wine also has some chambourcin blended in and 4% residual sugar.  It was all blackberry and went quite well with chocolate.  It’s not my thing, but it was fun to try.  The last wine was their Vitus Rubus ($26), a raspberry chambourcin wine with 4% residual sugar (also made with local berries).  You definitely noted the raspberries – a generally fun wine.

If you haven’t made it out for a visit yet, try to stop by.  These small wineries where you get to talk with owners who truly love what they’re doing are one of the best parts of wine touring in Virginia.

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Virginia’s Answer to Gamay?

A few months back, I wrote about chambourcin as a red wine for white wine drinkers.  Gamay was a very common choice by other bloggers who participated in that edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday.  I didn’t really link the two wines except for being relatively light on the tannin front, however.  The following month, I tried a few fuller-bodied gamays for the next edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, but I wasn’t thinking about Virginia wines since, to the best of my knowledge, no one is growing gamay in VA.  The other night, we opened a bottle of wine that had me thinking about VA wine, chambourcin, and gamay all at the same time.

The wine was the ’07 vintner’s reserve chambourcin (80% chambourcin/20% petit verdot) from Hiddencroft Vineyards.  We’d been really impressed by what they were doing with this grape when we visited this winter, but I’d forgotten the details of this wine in the intervening months.

On the nose I got cherry, raspberry, aromatic spices, and a hint of black licorice.  I love a good nose on a wine and will frequently spend a really long time smelling the wine before I ever take a sip.  This was definitely a wine I wanted to spend a long time savoring before I ever tasted it.

Once the glass finally made it to my mouth, I found a medium-bodied wine with lots of spice up front (mostly cinnamon) followed by dark fruits (black cherry and plum) with a hint of licorice on the finish.  There was also a bit of leathery earthiness that I really enjoyed as well.

At the end of the day, chambourcin isn’t gamay, but at least in this instance, there are some similarities to the fuller-bodied gamays like those from the Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent crus. If you’re a gamay fan, check out this wine and let me know what you think.  I, for one, found a wine I wish I had more of…oh well, I guess we’ll have to go back for another visit.

 

Red Wine for White Wine Drinkers (WBW #67)

This Wine Blogging Wednesday is a first for us, but when I read the theme on Joe Robert’s 1 Wine Dude blog, I couldn’t resist taking part.  After all, while I drink both red and white wines regularly, I tend to gravitate towards the reds, so I like it when those I hang out with also drink red wines.  Given this, I’ve worked hard to turn many people over the the (literal) dark side of wine.

Most people who tell me they don’t like red wine tend to fall into at least 1 of 3 categories.  The first group are people who prefer sweet (or at least off-dry) white wines and don’t like red wines because they’re nearly always dry.  The second group of people say that they don’t like “dry” red wines, but they really mean that they don’t like tannic red wines.  The third group complains about the earthy flavors that they associate with some red wines since they prefer the lighter and (often) fruitier flavors of white wines.  The chambourcin grape and some local Virginia wines are my way to deal with all three issues.

The Old House Vineyards an Samhradh is the best way I’ve found to deal with the first issue.  This is a lightly sweet blend of chambourcin and vidal blanc.  It has some light fruit and floral flavors along with some of the spicy characteristics found so frequently in chambourcin wines.  In many ways, this is a heavier rosé, and it really can start to get sweet white wine drinkers used to some of the richer flavors associated with red wines.

Chambourcin wines as a whole are my way of dealing with the second issue (dislike of tannins).  Chambourcin tends to have a lighter tannin structure (particularly if it’s not aged in new oak).  Some of the lighter-bodied, yet dry, chambourcin wines available throughout Virginia are a good transition wine from white to red if sweetness is not an issue.  The Mediterranean Cellars Chambourcin is a good example of this type of wine.  It’s got some light fruit flavors with a bit of pepper coming through.  This is also a wine that works well chilled, which can be a good way to ease someone used to drinking chilled whites into the wonderful world of reds.

As may be clear by this point, chambourcin also lets me deal with the third issue – a dislike of earthy flavors in red wines.  Chambourcin wines tend to have rich, dark fruit flavors with spice added in for good measure.  There doesn’t tend to be tons of earthyness, and this flavor profile along with a lack of strong tannins can really work for newbie red wine drinkers.  Over time, I try to move people who previously had an exclusive relationship with white wines through different variations of chambourcin ending with a fuller-bodied version like the Wicked Bottom from Old House Vineyards or the Hiddencroft Chambourcin Reserve.

Now, chambourcin grows well in Virginia, and I’m a fan of this grape.  Many people, however, pass over it given that it’s not a vinifera grape.  If this grape isn’t for you, it would be hard to use it to turn a white wine drinker over to the dark side, but the ideas here can all be useful with other grapes as well.  Experiment and have fun – after all, wine should be fun (especially when you’re scheming to convert a friend 🙂 ).

 

Was it worth it?

One of my favorite aspects of wine tasting is that you can try before you buy.  Even though I know I typically like chambourcin and petit verdot, I don’t love every wine made from these grapes.  Since I don’t have an unlimited budget, trying first is the best way to make sure I take home wine I’ll like.  Now we occasionally have bottles where we open them after and wonder what we were thinking (we’ll try to blog about those experiences when they happen as well), but by trying first, this doesn’t happen too often.

Every once in a while, however, we take a risk and buy a wine we can’t try.  There are a small handful of wineries in VA where we’ll buy anything they produce, but this list is small.  Not long ago, however, we deviated from our standard practice and bought 2 bottles of petit verdot from Hiddencroft Vineyards.  We were very impressed with the reds we tasted there, and decided to take the risk of picking up a few bottles of this wine even though there was no longer enough to tallow for tastings.  So, was it worth it?

I think so.

The wine had a deep, dark purple color that I associate with petit verdot.  As I like to do, I savored the nose for some time and really enjoyed the leather and spice notes.  For those that follow us (really me) on twitter, this is the wine that inspired my “leather and spice make everything nice” tweet.  There was also a hint of chocolate on the nose that showed up after the wine had been open for a while.  When I actually started to drink the wine, I got a lot of those spice notes along with some hints of the leather/earthiness.  There were some dark fruit elements as well, but they were very much in the background in this wine.

We’re going to hang onto our second bottle for a year or two as this wine still tastes a bit young, but it makes me really excited to future offerings from Hiddencroft.  As a final note, there was no year anywhere on this bottle.  I think it was an ’08 wine, but I have no way of knowing for sure.  My one plea to all VA winemakers is to put vintage years on wines (assuming they aren’t made from wine from multiple years).

 

Hide and Seek

Added to the list of wineries we hadn’t heard much about was Hiddencroft Vineyards. Touted as the northernmost winery in Virginia, it’s really a hidden gem. We rolled up in the Winery Assault Vehicle to find a closed, locked tasting room. Before I could even utter an expletive, the owner was coming out of the house to let us in and set us up.

We got to try five of the wines on the tasting sheet, and one that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. The ’08 traminette was good, but kind of boring. The other four, however, were winners. The vidal blanc was very dry, crisp, and fruity. The chambourcin reserve has a HUGE nose, with great fruit and spice notes. The cab franc is a smooth, peppery, nice example of the grape, and the cab franc reserve was awesome. Blended with petit verdot, it’s a big drinkable red. How much did we enjoy the wines here? Hiddencroft didn’t have enough petit verdot left to taste, but we went ahead and bought a couple of bottles. We never do that!

As for the one that wasn’t on the list? You’ll just have to wait and see. It’s going to be good, though!

The one gripe I have with Hiddencroft Vineyards is that their tasting notes give no indication of what winery they’re from, save for a pretty picture of the tasting room/winery building. For those of us who tend to visit a lot of wineries, throw us a bone- put your name on the tasting notes!

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