Virginia Wines (3) (11/10/2014)

This past weekend we spent a day tasting some Virginia wines.  We traveled to a Blue/Green resort in the Gordonsville area (near Charlottesville) and on the way we visited some wineries and bought some wines to drink that evening.  We drank wines from wines from the Rockbridge winery, Ox-eye winery (and no we did not visit either of these two wineries), Grayhaven winery and Cooper Vineyards.  It is a pity that we visited the Weston Farm Vineyards website too late, otherwise we would have noticed their announcement that Google maps cannot find them (we searched for 15 minutes and gave up).

This does not even make a dent in all the wineries in Virginia.  My understanding is that Virginia is the third or so wine producing state in the U.S, and the latest winery map touts that there are 250+ wineries in the state.  As I mentioned before, 10 years ago I was skeptical about Virginia's ability to make red wine, but they have come a long way.  I actually like a lot of the reds they produce at this time (granted I am a red kind of guy).

As with anything, I believe that education is essential in life, and that is also important when drinking wine.  I read the wine spectator and a nice assortment of books on  wines and wine making although in no way am I a wine expert of a wine snob.  The only wine I can pick out of a line up of blind taste testing is the Merlot by Boogle, but that is also because my father-in-law brings it over very frequently when he comes over for dinner.  But yes education is important even in this period of anti-intellectualism.  Why drink the same bud-dry or a cheap box wine, when with a little education and adventure you can drink something better or more interesting for about the same price?

Today's post is not a winery review, I will do one again in the near future.  In the past I reviewed the wineries and wines I have visited and tasted from the Tidewater (click here) and the wines from northern Virginia (click here).  But below are some of the Virginia wines that we still have in our collection.  It is a pity that Virginia wines are so expensive, compared with their counterparts for California or even from France, Spain or Italy; otherwise I would definitively want to drink more Virginia wines and visit more wineries.  Now I have to limit it to two or three wineries every year, and limited consumption; Virginia wines are not for the people that live on a budget, that is for sure.

The Virginia wines we still have in our collection (some date from 2006 and one from 2004)