Friday, February 09, 2007

In Vino Veritas Basketas. Charlottesville, Virginia is a lovely place to spend a winter's day. It's nestled in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge, and it's not only home to UVa, but it's also surrounded by farms and vineyards. And where there are vineyards, well, there are wineries! And where there are wineries, there are wine tastings! So yes, the BasketCases, who have been known on occasion to sample the fruit of the vine, spent a basketball-less afternoon enjoying some of the local offerings.

In our experience, Virginia wine is usually not very good, or overpriced, or both. However, we were pleasantly surprised today by a few unexpected finds. In particular, we'd like to give a BasketCases shout out to First Colony Winery, a small, unpretentious winery down a gravel road past some "manufactured housing" (what people used to call trailers), where we concluded the day's tour and tasted several enjoyable offerings, including a claret, which when paired with dark chocolate, rated a wow!

The Terps will be arriving in Charlottesville tomorrow, but we're pretty certain that they won't be sampling the local wines.

1 Comments:

At 10:28 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am glad you chose to go wine tasting while visiting Charlottesville. One out of every three visitors to the state visits a winery. The industry has grown from 6 in 1980 to 124 today. Most of the wineries are small with production around 2,500 cases per year.

With the great variety of winemakers and growing areas I think that your wine tasting experiences are bound to turn up some winners. They have been winning international awards and have risen to number 6 in the country for wine grape production.

I hope your next visit to a Virginia winery is filled with even more pleasant discoveries.

 

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