Virginia Wine News
Eat, drink and celebrate Virginia’s Wine Month
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Virginia wines continue to impress. Honors and accolades cite the quality of the wine -- 67 state wines won medals in the International Eastern Wine Competition, which featured entries from 16 countries and 34 U.S. states this year. Many of the state's 148 wineries offer their wares, including award winners, at wine festivals or in tasting rooms. When wine month in Virginia starts tomorrow, festivals, tasting rooms and special wine events will take place just about everywhere from the Eastern Shore to the Blue Ridge Mountains and all points in between...
Jack Berninger Richmond Times Dispatch — Sep 30, 2009
A Mixed Case
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Even connoisseurs may not know what to expect from a Virginia wine with a proprietary name such as Hardscrabble. After all, wine buyers in the United States, and most of the rest of the world, have shown a clear preference for varietals — wines labeled by grape variety. But as comforted as consumers may be to find a familiar variety such as Chardonnay prominently on the label, many Virginia winemakers are gambling on upscale blends. Since they are not entitled to varietal names and, therefore, require hard-to-decipher labels that can be a drag on sales, why the gamble, especially in these difficult economic times?
Jim Raper Virginia Business Magazine — Sep 28, 2009
4 Wine Country Contenders
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(Budget Travel) -- Perhaps they're not the first place you think of when it comes to wineries, but these four regions offer character and great wine, without the hoopla.
Charlottesville, Virginia
Virginia's premier wine country, dotted with working farms and over 1,000 acres of grape vines, spreads out around the city of Charlottesville in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains...
Thomas Berger, Beth Collins and Alison Rohrs Budget Travel — Sep 01, 2009
Judgement of Paris
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On a beautiful Saturday afternoon at the end of May in the town of Paris, Virginia—an hour’s easy drive from DC—a telling event took place. It had been inspired by a 1976 winetasting in Paris, France, that did the unthinkable: It compared some of the top names in French wine with new and little-known wines from California. The results shook the wine world...
Wayne Nelson Washingtonian.com — Sep 01, 2009
End of Summer Road Trips
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Check out this clip from NBC Today Show - tips for visiting VA wineries in central VA (fast forward to 2:30 minutes into the video).
NBC Today Show NBC Today Show — Aug 25, 2009
Glass Acts
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/08/18/ST2009081802401.html
The "Judgment of Paris" transformed the world of wine, marking California on the map in big, bold letters that could not be ignored. That May 1976 tasting galvanized an upstart American wine industry that had struggled in the decades since Prohibition and helped overcome a consumer perception here and abroad that American wines were inferior to their French counterparts.
We invited six area wine professionals -- three retailers, three sommeliers -- to blind-taste a dozen chardonnays and a dozen red Bordeaux-style wines, telling them only that we were pitting the United States vs. France in a sort of oenological grudge match. Then we slipped in five Virginia wines and one from Maryland without telling anyone...
Dave McIntyre The Washington Post — Aug 19, 2009
2009 Virginia Wine Lover Magazine Wine Classic
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The competition, which was sponsored and produced by Virginia Wine Lover Magazine, was open to all Virginia wine makers and saw entries from nearly two dozen of the state’s wineries and vineyards that included more than one hundred varietals and encompassed virtually every grape grown in the commonwealth.
The invited panel of judges was comprised of authoritative members of the food and wine community, who are ardent supporters of the state’s burgeoning industry. They evaluated each entrant on its relative merits as it pertained to its specified category by using a double blind tasting process and utilizing a modified version of the Davis 20-Point system. Judging took place in late June at the Riverstone Chop House in Suffolk, Virginia and was privately conducted.
Winners have been categorized according to Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze levels and include multiple winners for each category—an alphabetical listing of all winners for each medal level.
Meredith Hemenway — Aug 03, 2009
Virginia 1, California 0
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The August 2009 issue of Decanter, the leading U.K. consumer wine magazine, has just been delivered. Columnist Michael Broadbent, author of the great Vintage Wine Book with his tasting notes dating back 50 years, wrote his monthly column with the controversial title “State’s Evidence: Virginia 1, California 0″.
Michael Broadbent Decanter Magazine — Aug 01, 2009
“State’s Evidence: Virginia 1, California 0″ says Decanter’s Broadbent
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The August 2009 issue of Decanter, the leading U.K. consumer wine magazine, has just been delivered. Columnist Michael Broadbent, author of the great Vintage Wine Book with his tasting notes dating back 50 years, wrote his monthly column with the controversial title “State’s Evidence: Virginia 1, California 0″
Richard Leahy www.richardleahy.com — Jul 16, 2009
Virginia Makes Wines Yes, and London Likes Them
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True, Virginia wines barely existed in the 1980s, but today the state has more than 150 wineries.
Mary Jordon "Washington Post Foreign Service " — May 27, 2009