DC’s Holiday Wine Mall is taking place this coming weekend! A great opportunity to get all the wine gifts you need for the holidays!
Category: Events
Discover DC’s Wine Country: Loudoun County
Virginia Wine Bloggers Unite to Promote DC’s Wine Country – the Wines of Loudoun County
Virginia wine bloggers – Frank from DrinkWhatYouLike.com, Va Wine Diva & Grape Envy Guy from SwirlSipSnark.com, and Paul & Warren from VirginiaWineTime.com – along with the Virginia Wine Board and Loudoun County wineries will host the first ever TasteLive! event dedicated to showcasing the wines of Loudoun County, VA.
TasteLive! is the world’s premiere online wine and beer tasting community that leverages the increasingly powerful social media tools of Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, and other services to create a community that brings together consumers, bloggers, press, suppliers, and winemakers from across the world to taste and discuss wine virtually.
On Thursday, December 9, the wines of Loudoun County will take center stage in a TasteLive! virtual wine tasting dedicated to showcasing the wines of DC’s Wine Country – Loudoun County. Wine bloggers and wine enthusiasts throughout the US will come together online at 8pm Eastern Time to taste & tweet about the wines of Loudoun County. This event will serve as an introduction to Virginia wine for several participants and is a prelude to the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference which will be held in Charlottesville, VA in July.
Located just 25 miles from Washington, DC, Loudoun County – referred to as DC’s Wine Country – is home to 27 wineries and tasting rooms organized into four clusters sprinkled throughout bucolic countryside.
This tasting features wines from five different Loudoun County wineries, and winemakers from each will be joining in the virtual discussion. The five featured Loudoun wineries and wines are:
Notaviva Vineyards
2009 Ottantotto Viognier
Part of the Loudoun Heights cluster, Notaviva Vineyards is one of Loudoun’s newest wineries. Husband and wife team Stephen and Shannon Mackey were brought together by their love of music, which is expressed further through their wines. Notaviva is from the Italian nota – music note and viva – with life. In keeping with their love of music and wine, each Notaviva flagship wine is named after musical terms to represent the emotions they inspire.
Follow Notaviva on Twitter: @Notaviva
Tarara Winery
2009 Nevaeh White
Part of the Potomac wine cluster, Tarara Winery is a terroir-driven winery crafting artisanal, hand crafted wines to best showcase their vineyards through single vineyard blends capturing the essence of the unique sites and classic varietals around Virginia.
Follow Tarara on Twitter: @TararaWinery
Breaux Vineyards
2007 Cabernet Franc Reserve
Part of the Loudoun Heights cluster, Breaux Vineyards overlooks the beautiful valley between the Blue Ridge and Short Hill Mountains. The 404-acre Breaux estate has over 100 acres planted in 18 different grape varieties. Be sure to check out the Breaux Vineyards introduction video at VisitLoudoun.org.
Follow Breaux Vineyards on Twitter: @BreauxVineyards
8 Chains North
2008 Furnace Mountain Red Reserve
8 Chains North Winery, located in Waterford, Virginia, showcases handcrafted wines made from Loudoun County grapes. ‘At 8 Chains North we spend 8 intense months in our vineyards on the Potomac River and in the Short Hill Mountains of Loudoun County, allowing us to draw out the very best of every vintage.’
Follow 8 Chains North on Twitter: @8ChainsNorth
North Gate Vineyard
2008 Petit Verdot
North Gate Vineyard is situated in on approximately 26 acres in the northwest part of Loudoun County, Virginia. Nestled against the eastern base of the Short Hill mountains (foothills to the Blue Ridge), North Gate Vineyard produces high quality wine grapes for its own set of wines as well as other wineries in Virginia. Husband and wife team Mark and Vicki Fedor have been growing grapes since 2002 and have been part of the winemaking scene in Loudoun since 2003.
Follow North Gate on Twitter: @NorthGateWines
We’re sure many of you are fans of Loudoun County wine, these wineries, and even these specific wines, so we hope that you’ll join us for this tasting. A major benefit of a virtual wine tasting is that everyone can become a participant.
You can tweet along (or follow the tweet stream if you’re shy). You can do this by logging into the TasteLive! Platform or following the twitter stream for the hashtag #vawine through your favorite twitter platform (e.g., TweetDeck). If you don’t tweet, you can also follow the twitter stream by searching on the hashtag #vawine from the twitter home page since you do not need to have a twitter account to look at tweets.
Please join us; this would be a great time to gather your wine friends and celebrate the wines of Loudoun County. After all, how often do you have the opportunity to chat about wines with both the winemakers and some of your favorite bloggers all at the same time?
Bubbles!
To help celebrate the news from earlier this week we are having some bubbles from Afton Mountain Vineyards. Yum!
Virginia Wine Time Wins Award!
Hurray for Virginia Wine Time!! Paul and I just learned that we will be awarded a Certificate of Accomplishment from Virginia’s First Lady, Maureen McDonnell. We will receive this official recognition at an award’s luncheon on December 2, 2010.
We’ll take this opportunity to pat ourselves on the back. Our mission has always been to promote the Virginia wine industry, and our original philosophy was that every winery makes at least one good bottle of wine. Five years later, we can report that many Virginia wineries produce more that one good bottle of wine, and several wineries now craft excellent wines across the board.
We’ve had a blast visiting at least 113 wineries, and along the way we’ve met passionate winemakers, vineyard managers, bloggers, and tasters. This award acknowledges that our efforts have been productive, and we plan to keep sipping and writing away!
Planning to visit Virginia wineries any time soon? Please mention that the award-winning Virginia Wine Time sent you!
Taste Live Event
Last night we participated in the TasteLive event showcasing wines from the Monticello Wine Trail. There were bloggers and wine writers as well as winery representatives all on the TasteLive system. We tasted the wines and tweeted our thoughts and impressions of the wines. Below you’ll see the wines we tasted and the tweets associated with each wine. Read the tweets from the bottom up since they appear oldest to newest in the timeline.
The 2007 SP Rose from Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard
The 2009 Viognier from Keswick Vineyards
The 2009 Chardonnay Reserve from Jefferson Vineyards
The 2009 Gewurztraminer from Afton Mountain Vineyards
The 2009 Seven Oaks Merlot from Blenheim Vineyards
The 2008 Wooloomooloo from Mountfair Vineyards
Besides a few glitches on the website (losing some of our tweets, having to refresh the browser to have the next hashtag added to our tweets, and the clunky layout) we had a great time and enjoyed all the wines. We really enjoyed sharing our impressions with others from across the country. It was great how so many people were finding the same characteristics in the wines. We hope this experience exposed many people to Virginia wine. It has always been our goal to promote Virginia wine. We would recommend any and all of these wonderful Virginia wines.
A big THANKS to Virginia Wine and Dezel for putting this event together!
The Eastern Shore Party Continues
My last post detailed the results of the Eastern Shore winery tastings. Our delightful afternoon found us sipping and chatting with winemakers at Bloxom Vineyards, Holly Gorve Vineyards, and Chatham Vineyards. Our meet-up continued after our winery visits, though, and we all stayed at the Green Valley Farm Bed and Breakfast. We all brought bottles of wine to enjoy with a delicious meal prepared by the sipswirlsnark team; we also got to appreciate our comfy accommodations provided for us by our hostess, Chantal Deel.
As dusk set it, we continued to all get better acquainted, and what better way to socialize than with favorite Virginia wines. Before we knew it, the sipsters had the kitchen knives flying away with their preparations for the evening’s meal. Their menu started with their own olive tapenade and a spread made from edamame. As they donned their favorite chef’s hats and took charge in the kitchen, we sipped on glasses of Pollak Vineyard’s Durant White and the 2007 Glen Manor Sauvignon Blanc. We fed the horses that live on the grounds and watched as the stars began to twinkle. It was a classic autumn evening—cool and crisp!
Before long we were dining on grilled flank steak, stir-fried green beans, and sliced eggplant sauteed with parmesan cheese, and favorite red wines were compared at the dinner table. The gold stars for the evening seemed to be the Linden Vineyards’ 2007 Hardscrabble Red and the 2006 Merlot from Lovingston Vineyards. (I seemed to take an extra pour of Chrysalis’ 2005 Norton Locksley Reserve; sometimes it’s okay to be the oddball.) Dinner ended with a decadent chocolate tart, and then it was off to bed.
Chantal made breakfast for us all in the morning, and it was quite a spread that she prepared. Eggs, sausage and biscuits with gravy, bagels, bacon, fruit with yogurt—it seemed endless. There is no doubt that Chantal runs a cozy inn with well-appointed bedrooms, an outdoor fireplace to complement the patio, and gardens that feature brilliant flowers and fragrant herbs. Horses live on the property, and visitors can expect to see deer, geese and turkeys frequenting the grounds.
Be sure to visit wineries on the Eastern Shore and plan to stay at Green Valley Bed and Breakfast. Mention that Virginia Wine Time sent you.
Taste Live
As part of Virginia Wine Month and with the support of The Virginia Wine Board, we’ll be participating in the TasteLive event focused on Virginia Wines on Monday, October 25th. Wine writers and bloggers from across the country will be participating in this tasting. We’ll be tasting wines and tweeting our impressions on the TasteLive website. Our tweets will also show up on our Twitter feed. We will be tasting six wines from wineries on the Monticello Wine Trail in the Charlottesville area. The wines we’ll be tasting are:
The 2007 SP Rose from Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard
The 2009 Gewurztraminer from Afton Mountain Vineyards
The 2009 Chardonnay Reserve from Jefferson Vineyards
The 2009 Viognier from Keswick Vineyards
The 2009 Seven Oaks Merlot from Blenheim Vineyards
The 2008 Wooloomooloo from Mountfair Vineyards
We are excited to participate in this unique tasting experience. We haven’t been part of the TasteLive website before so we are curious to see how the whole thing works and how it will be received. Be following our Twitter feed on Monday evening between 8:00 and 9:30 Eastern time.
P. S. Have you seen the article this week in the Washington Post about Virginia Wine? Check it out!
Dinner Wine
Its Regional Wine Week at DrinkLocalWine.com so we are posting as much about Virginia wine as we can. Regional Wine Week is a perfect compliment to Virginia Wine Month. Our Saturday dinner wine was the 2007 Cabernet Franc from Rappahannock Cellars. We had this wine with herbed chicken and seasoned wild rice. It paired beautifully with the meal.
On the nose we noticed some earth, cherry, currents, and pepper. In the mouth we noted mixed berries, pepper, and a velvety finish. This one is unfiltered. We found some sediment at the bottom of our glasses but that’s not a bad thing. One thing we did notice was this one got better the longer it was open. After a while the fruit characteristics really came forward. We ended up wanted more once the bottle was empty.
Special Reserve Petit Verdot
For dinner last night we had filet mignon with sauteed mushrooms and roasted vegetables. Warren selected the 2005 Special Reserve Petit Verdot from Ingleside Vineyards. Knowing we wanted to savor this one with our meal, Warren chose to decant it for about an hour before serving.
Right away we noticed the dark color and how it was almost impossible to see through in the glass. We noted dark plum, anise, earthiness, and a lengthy finish. We thought this one could have lived longer on the rack but enjoyed it just the same with our food. It was a perfect pairing.
We are certainly using Virginia Wine Month to open some of best Virginia wines on our racks. What Virginia wine have you uncorked so far this month?
Yorktown Wine Festival
October is Virginia Wine Month, and Virginia Wine Time kicked things off with a trip to Yorktown to participate in the Yorktown Wine Festival. The Yorktown Wine Festival was held this past Saturday, and at least twenty-one wineries poured their latest releases for festival goers.
I visited almost all the booths and I must say the stand out wines of the festival were from Montedomaine. Montdomaine has been around since the 1980s but they don’t have a tasting room and only pour their wines at festivals. This is the first festival where we’ve seen Montdomaine and we really enjoyed their wines. They poured three wines, and I sampled their 2009 Chardonnay, the 2008 Viognier, and the 2008 Merlot. All three were consistently well-crafted.. It was too difficult to pick a gold start winner. I’d give gold stars to all three. Nice job, Montdomaine!
Of course I sampled many other wines. Here is a list of the wines I thought stood out at the festival.
San Soucy-Cabernet Franc
Grayhaven-2008 Sojourn Petit Verdot
Saude Creek-2008 Meritage
Montdomaine:
2009 Chardonnay
2008 Viognier
2008 Merlot
Democracy Vineyards-Revolution
Vault Field-Chardonnay (the white wines and the rose here were all consistently good)
Athena-Meritage
DelFosse-2008 Chardonnay and the Merlot
The Yorktown Wine Festival was unique in that festival goers were treated to the scenic beauty of the York River shore line with its sandy beaches and rhythmic splashing of tidal waves. On a perfect clear and crisp fall day the setting was perfect for wine, food, and music. There was even an opportunity to visit historic sites; after all, Yorktown was the site where Cornwallis surrendered to end the American Revolution in 1781.
The advantage to attending small wine festivals such as the Yorktown Wine Festival is that tasters can sample the wares from more distant or remote wineries. The Yorktown Wine Festival featured such distant wineries as San Soucy, Davis Valley, and Rebec. Think about attending one of the smaller wine festivals soon. For a list of upcoming wine festivals, be sure to visit the Virginia Wine website.
Here are some other photos from the festival.
