Monday, October 7, 2013

October 6-12 is Regional Wine Week -- Support Your Local Grape!

Dave McIntyre, in his WineLine blog, posted about October 6-12 being Regional Wine Week. It's the sixth annual celebration of wine made throughout the country and not just on the West Coast, according to McIntyre, who actually started the recognition as part of the drinklocalwine.com blog and along with Jeff Siegel, The Wine Crumudgeon. The focus was to encourage wine writers, bloggers and tweeters to focus on their local wine, wherever that happened to be.

Since you can click the links and read his fine write up of the history of the celebration (and you should!), I'll spare you that, but suffice it to say that drinking wine, as well as touring and supporting wineries in our home region (Virginia) is something we spend a lot of time doing, and something that's really been a part of our oenophile education.

We all know about the Great Wine Regions of the World in France, Italy, California and the like -- the Bordeaux, Burgundies, Venetos, Piedemontes, Napas, etc. -- but the fact of the matter is that here in the U.S., all 50 states now produce wine. And while the wine made in these states may not necessarily resemble that made in the so-called Great Wine Regions of the World, that's kinda the point. 

The French term terroir basically refers to all of the conditions -- soil composition, climate, temperature, sunlight, amount of daylight, rain, pests, local winemaking traditions -- that conspire to influence the grapes that become your wine. Terroir, then, is in theory what makes great wine regions great, and by definition means that the wine made where you are should be different from them (though I submit it may be great in its own right).

A Virginia red Meritage style wine shouldn't necessarily taste like a Bordeaux (though I've had some that are breathtakingly similar due to certain similarities in terroir) or a California Cab or Merlot, even though they all have the same grape varieties in them. And some grapes do better in some places than others. For example, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot are primarily blending grapes in Bordeaux (Cab Sauv and Merlot are the stars) but in Virginia they can stand on their own or lead a Bordeaux style blend. It's all about the terroir.

In Virginia, Patti and I have watched the wine industry grow from a novelty (at least in our eyes) to one of the up and coming wine regions in the United States. When we were first dating back (gulp!) a dozen or more years ago, we'd occasionally go out to the country and visit wineries because it was a nice date thing to do. The country was pretty, especially in the fall, and the wineries were in the mountains in beautiful settings and the wine was, well, wine. To our uneducated palates, some of it tasted good, some just so-so, and every now and again you'd find something outstanding. With some cheese, charcuterie and a beautiful setting, you could have a great time and, usually, end up buying a bottle or two. It was fun, but we were still much more enamored with France, Italy and California (though at the time we could usually only afford the Trader Joe's versions of the Great Wines of the World).

Fast forward to a few years later. We were older, our palates were a bit more educated and quite frankly, a lot of the Virginia wineries had more run time to learn their craft, plus a lot more wineries and a lot more (friendly) competition. We got a little more serious about spending time out in Loudoun County, down by Charlottesville and out toward the Shenandoah and really discovering which wines we liked, which wineries we liked and, finally, joining a few of the wine clubs. But it was a great education -- by going out and tasting more wine at these wineries, we learned more about the variety of different tastes and smells that wine could bring. We learned more about the process, talked to winemakers, attended programs...it was a great way to learn about wine. If we'd have just focused on wine from the more notable wine regions in the world (which we rarely/never visit), we probably would've shortchanged ourselves and our wine educations.

Virginia wine has definitely come a long way, and I'm sure the various ways in which it has will be the subject of many blog posts here at Adventures in Gastonomy. It's gotten a lot of press in recent years, including a great 2011 write-up in Wine Enthusiast. And while I won't say that every Virginia wine is great, I will say that we've had some bottles (most notably Barboursville's Octagon, anything by Boxwood, everything at Linden. what I can afford from RdV and several others that I'm probably forgetting) that are up there with anything we've had, and plenty that's pretty darn good. We have some winemakers we really like, including Sebastien Marquet at Doukenie, Doug Fabbioli and Nate Walsh at Sunset Hills, among many others. We also can pick Virginia wine out of a lineup in a blind tasting pretty easily, have attended Virginia Wine Expo in Richmond the past two years (and probably will again in February), and have joined enough wine clubs that our basement "cellar" boasts somewhere in the low three figures in Virginia wines. In short, we support our local grape. And you should too.

This isn't to say that we don't adore wines from The Great Wine Regions of the World, or that I'm not drooling at the prospect of possibly going to Burgundy next year or that some of our most prized bottles aren't the ones we brought back from the Southern Rhone and the Santa Ynez Valley. But by supporting our local wineries we've had some great weekend outings, learned a great deal about wine and had a lot of great bottles. And more importantly, we didn't have to get on a plane to do it! You owe it to yourself to check out what's in your backyard. Maybe there's some good terroir there just waiting for you to discover!


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