This weekend, I drove out to Oasis winery in Virginia with some friends for a tasting, some cheese and crackers, the usual fru-fru bullshit.
The winery's a bit on the redneck-slash-industrial side -- no caverns here, or classical music. We sipped wine on your standard wooden deck to the dulcimer sounds of Coolio as two dogs growled at each other nearby. It was beautiful, however; about 85 degrees, and a view of vineyards sweeping up to the Blue Ridge mountain.
The trip, though, continued a pervasive trend that I've noticed with Virginia wineries. They can't make good red wine. Of any varietal. And what they can make, they can't sell for less than around $20 a bottle.
Oasis, for example, makes excellent champagne, of all things, two pretty good chardonnays, and a drinkable blush (95 percent Riesling, 5 percent Cab sauvignon). The Riesling alone was disgusting -- it tasted like tonic water, and shouldn't have been served. But the two reds, a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Merlot, were the most disappointing of all. Neither was very full-bodied or complex. They were almost indistinguishable, in fact; the winery had used 7 percent Cabernet Franc to cut both wines, and the Franc predominated in each. And Oasis wanted $20 for its Cab and $25 for the Merlot.
Let us pause for a diatribe. I suppose there are good Cabernet Francs made someplace, but I haven't tasted one worth the money Virginia wineries want to charge. It's a boring grape, in my experience -- completely non-complex (meaning none of those plum or blackberry undertones that wineries like to brag about) and a bit watery. Yet it seems endemic to Virginia, as if it's the only red that vineyards in the state can manage to grow.
Like every other Virginia winery I've ever visited, there were no Pinot Noirs or Zinfandels to taste at Oasis -- two of my favorite varietals.
So this is what I'm getting at: For reasons of soil or climate or vine age or something, is it simply impossible to make a decent red wine in Virginia? And is Cabernet Franc the only thing that grows with any success?
If you know a place in Virginia to find a good indigenous red, let me know. Or if you know why there are no good reds in Virginia, let me know that too.
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4 comments:
I like you you label wine and cheese tasting as "fru fru bullshit" but have intelligent-sounding arguments about what makes a wine good or bad; the sarcastic diatribing lends an additional air of full-bodiedness to this blog entry.
@tim: I like that you call my arguments "intelligent-sounding," rather than simply intelligent. As you suggest, I am totally full of shit and probably know as much about wine as the rednecks fighting dogs on the deck.
I was only allowing room that the wines you diss are good and you're wrong. Not because I'm generous to unknown wines. Like, if you did a book review of a book I'd not read, the most I could say about your book review is that it is "intelligent-sounding" because I don't know if you made stupid points about the book. In other words, I've paid you the highest compliment available for the situation.
Dear Mr. Wayne,
I have often walked among the vineyards of Virginia as I have walked among the fields of India and I see both truth and sadness in what you write. The truth is I haven't found a single drinkable vineyard in Virginia. The sadness is that I long for India. There's been a long undiscovered red wine in India and if possible would you consider, you know, visiting or trying the Indian reds on a visit to Goa with me, Vinayak, and a few of your friends.
Regards,
Vinayak Jha
PS
I knew the owner(s) of that vineyard in Virginia in New York and they were nothing to write home about.
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