The hard sell
Twenty years after Governor Gerald Baliles declared October to be Virginia Wine Month, the industry seems to be drowning in marketing.
Virginia's so-called Champagne
Americans just don’t understand sparkling wine. First there’s the annoying habit of always calling it “Champagne,” and second the unforgivable sin of only drinking it on special occasions. Sparkling wine should be drunk anytime or all the time. It’s perfect with food, it’s beautiful in the glass, and it automatically raises your status by, like, […]
The man from Champagne
Making sparkling wine is a complex and difficult process, more so in many ways than making still wine.
Farther along
A year has passed since my article “From the ground up” appeared in C-VILLE’s annual food issue.
Once upon a vine
Chef Craig Hartman stands in front of a row of large double doors that are opened to the outside and through which rows of grapevines are visible,
Shallow ground
Journey Through Hallowed Ground, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving and celebrating historical land and sites from Pennsylvania through Virginia, including a lot of Albemarle County, had a nice little present for the Albemarle Board of Supervisors at the September 3 meeting. The group presented the supes with a special JTHG commemorative bottle of Chardonnay […]
Everything you know is wrong
In my continuing quest to help my readers become obnoxious wine know- it-alls, thereby hastening my own obsolescence, I hereby present some common vinous misconceptions.
Blind faith
Bottle Shock is a new movie about the so-called Judgment of Paris, a 1976 blind tasting that pitted then unknown California wines against the best of Gaul.
Going postal
I was recently in the Post Office mailing some wine-related mail, when the postal worker behind the counter stopped me and said, “Hey, you might be able to help me.” After looking him in the eye and finding no discernable signs of psychosis, I smiled and asked what he needed. “How do you guys,” he […]
One hundred pilgrims
Friday, 7:30am. As I walk to the gas station to buy toothpaste, I get a taste of what it is that brought me here. Everywhere I look there are pine trees, tall, deep green and swaying gently in the wind. Outside my hotel window and lining every road, they move like some verdant choir, under […]