Making wine is incredibly scientific and complicated, yet its marketing still emphasizes the pastoral. The country estate, the family dog, the dirty hands and worn Barbour jacket; it’s farming as reimagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The truth is that today’s winemakers might just as easily wear lab coats as Carhartts. The head-on collision between nature […]
He hadn’t received this much applause from a UVA crowd in 34 years, and hadn’t had this much attention “since the police in the Bahamas weren’t real thrilled about me trying to bring marijuana into their country.” In those 34 years, he went from being a basketball star to being practically homeless, from being a […]
A 46-year-old Thomas Jefferson seemed different when he returned to America after five years in France, stepping off the boat wearing “silk suits, ruffles, and an unusual topaz ring.” In Paris, living, as Patrick Henry put it, “in splendor and dissipation,” our man TJ really came into his own. Reading John Hailman’s 2006 book, Thomas […]
The eight judges arrived at Keswick Hall at 9am on a beautiful day last week and, except for lunch and two small breaks, didn’t stop tasting wine until around 3:40pm. This year’s Monticello Wine Cup competition featured 95 wines—soon to adorn tasting rooms and be bragged about in newsletters—from the Monticello AVA (the American Viticultural […]
Can you picture a time when our town didn’t have a wine bar on every corner?
Grapevines are everywhere Chris Hill goes. The first thing he says, standing tall and white-haired beneath the great terraced slopes of Delfosse Vineyards, wearing a Virginia Tech hat and aviator sunglasses, is “Are you familiar with how a grapevine grows, Toby?” Not really, and so at 9am on a chilly February morning, one of Virginia’s […]
People often ask me how they can learn about wine. They usually do so nervously and with some self-deprecation, as if they believe there’s a secret door behind which we wine experts meet to sniff corks and wave monogrammed hankies at each other. That belief is, of course, entirely correct. “Filthy peasants,” I think, as […]
A little before 6pm Friday night, walking up Third Street Downtown, I see a man who looks a lot like Morrissey getting out of a Hyundai Santa Fe.
More features: Salvia 101 What is it? It might be legal, but there’s still a stigmaA high school newspaper censors a student journalists attempt to write about salvia use In the name of God, leave salvia alone!The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead weighs in I am still unable to comprehend that the drug has taken hold. […]