News
Subtitle: if you're unsure, come up with something fanciful.
Backstory: when we were building the winery this year, we had to decide how to orient the foursquare building on the hillside, and which side should host the main entrance. We thought and debated and realized we had no real idea or preference. So the fanciful notion arose, that we should site the door and orient the winery such that the entrance would capture the final rays of the setting solstice sun.
Greeting friends! Winter is upon us, and while our wine is snuggled safely in our new winery, fall has been quite the whirlwind, and winter looks to be pretty much the same. If you're pressed for time, here's our news in a nutshell: the wine from 2023 is really jam-packed with flavor, texture and aroma; we will be pouring tastes of our 2019, 2020 and 2021 vintages on Thursday January 25th at The City Foxes in Waynesboro VA; and we are offering that same 2019-2021 by mail order with free holiday shipping. But if you've got a minute to spare, please read on and thanks for your continued attention and support.
First Ferments Almost Finished
As you may know, we built ourselves a winery this year, and true to form, while the construction wasn't totally finalized it was "finished enough" to make wine. The wine we made is a barrel-fermented blend of 90% cabernet sauvignon and 10% petit verdot. The harvest timing was convenient, because a small quantity of PV was ready to pick a week ahead of the CS. So, we picked the PV on September 23rd and began fermentation. On September 30th we picked the cabernet and combined it with the already fermenting PV to kickstart the cabernet's transformation into wine. This sequence made for a lively and robust co-fermentation. Primary (alcoholic) fermentation is complete, but as is often the case with wines that are harvested later in the season, the cool temperatures have the secondary malolactic fermentation creeping along slowly and should wrap up by spring. The wine is thus far showing powerful tannins and cherry-infused aromatics. The cherry-quality is fairly typical of our cabernet at this early stage, however, the tannin and aromatics of this vintage have a real intensity, an almost physical presence. It will be very interesting to see how the vintage plays out as the aromas evolve and the structure of the wine softens with time.
A Vertical Tasting at the City Foxes
The "vertical" is a time-honored tradition of tasting wines from the same vineyard over successive vintages. Verticals are always a fun wine exploration, as we get to experience how the stylistic imprints of vintage weather are woven around the textural and aromatic elements that recur in grapes grown in the same plot of soil, year after year. We are super-stoked to be pouring tastes of our 2019, 2020 and 2021 vintages at The City Foxes in Waynesboro VA on Thursday January 25th from 6-8pm. The City Foxes is a beautifully appointed wine café featuring the work of regional artists and artisans, where you can grab bottles, have a seat and snack whilst you sip -- we're very proud to be on their shelves. And in case you didn't know it, Waynesboro is hip as heck nowadays, with a real focus on craft wine and beer, and definitely a fun place to spend the evening.
Free Shipping and a Vertical 2019,2020 and 2021
Speaking of the 2019-2021 vertical, we stealth-released our first "vertical" in early fall, and the wines are really singing right now (we "test" them regularly ourselves). This is a fascinating array of wines to taste because while they are clearly kin, they are also marked by the weather of the vintages that spawned them: mediterranean drought (2019), burgundian cold (2020), and mid-Atlantean ambivalence (2021). We are celebrating the holidays with free shipping through 12/31 on all orders over $100, just use the code WINTER23 at checkout. Please note we can ship to Virginia and DC only at this time. You can find the vertical 2019-2021 here and all other offerings here.
Curbside Pick-Up at Mount Alto
We will be at the vineyard from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon on Saturdays from December-March with the exception of Christmas weekend (to pick up on another day of the week, please call for an appointment). Click here for directions and general information. Please call or text us ahead of time at (804) 476-0883
Frost-Free in 2023
The nailbiter that is April in an eastern US vineyard is in the rearview mirror and we are pleased to report that we had no frosts after bud break! This is such monumentally good news after the carnage of the last few years. I think we all feel waves of relief crashing over our heads when we look down the full, uniformly developing rows. We've always tried to put on a brave face when things don't go our way, but it's nice to catch an occasional break. Sometimes, the hardest parts of farming are the things that hard work cannot overcome. Last year, the cabernet sauvignon took a huge hit with frost damage, but yielded a gorgeous wine, albeit a small amount. The year before, both petit verdot (PV) and cabernet suffered mid-level losses, and in 2019 we lost more than 75% of a new planting of PV. It takes time, but we finally resolved to replant the lost petit verdot in 2024 -- 4 years after swearing off the variety on our site. We haven't figured out a formula to guarantee safe passage thru the frost with the early budding PV, but we have learned a few tricks to delay bud-break, and just maybe this gentle spring has restored our bravado.
Cool and Dry
The largess of this spring has known no bounds: we have had modest temperatures and almost no rain or even dew to speak of. The lack of dew is especially unusual, as the canopy is generally like a wet sponge at daybreak, only drying out by mid-morning. Dew-less nights and rain-less days mean less disease pressure, and a relaxed growing pace. As always, May and June feature an endless cycle of vine tending. We touch every vine multiple times per week: plucking, bending, and tucking the vines into shape. This activity is enhanced by the cool dry weather, our bodies work better, our moods are lighter, and the work goes faster. The downside to dry is that some of our youngest vines are already showing drought stress, so we may have to drop their fruit for the long term health of the vine. Economically speaking, this will not be a huge hit since young vines have low yields, but it tests our discipline and ability to delay gratification. Each new planting has been done with a specific objective, be it a new root-stock, a new clone, or a new patch of soil that intrigues us. When we have to drop the fruit, it means we need to wait another year to satisfy our curiosity, another year to literally taste what our partnership with the earth has wrought. But the farmer's priority must always be to place appropriate demands on the vines (young and old), balancing the crop load with the strain of the season and the available water.
The Wines!
Once again we are very excited to grace the shelves of a handful of select retail partners in the Richmond area -- Belmont Butchery and the the Barrel Thief have our 2020 release, Manteo-Nason. Our 2020 is also on the wine-list at Hopkins Ordinary, a B&B and microbrewery in Sperryville VA, and as always available via mail order from our online store. We feel like our retail partners are friends with superb taste, and we pinch ourselves knowing that they want to work with us. As always thanks for your support!
The sun is low in the sky, the ground is damp, and the vines are sleeping. Winter in the vineyard is the only time we ask the question “what would we like to do today?”, rather than “what absolutely must be done by day's end?”. Lest you fear that this lack of a deadline has caused us to grow soft, the pruning must be done by spring, and we have a winery to build. Many years in planning, we spent the winter months in design finalization and digging the foundation.
Now, we hope to put a roof over our heads before the spring frenzy of bud break. Once we have a rainproof space, we'll construct and plaster the straw bale walls (in our spare time) during the warm, and dry (hopefully) summer in order to ferment the 2023 vintage on Mount Alto soil. We’re building this project largely by ourselves, so please wish us luck!
Speaking of non-concrete deadlines, the 2020 Manteo-Nason blend has been, shall we say, relaxed (or maybe uptight?). In our first vintages, we released the wines in December and January about 2 years after harvest, but this wine asked for our collective patience. It’s a cabernet sauvignon heavy wine, and cabernet from our vineyard is ordinarily quite slow to show itself as wine, and the 2020 vintage was even slower than usual. But recently it has begun to coalesce into something… delicious. A release email will come out next week; first to previous buyers and then to the mailing list in general. If you’re not on the mailing list and you’d like to be, you can sign up here.
July was hot and very dry, and the color change, véraison, began somewhat early. August stumbled in soaking wet (and maybe a wee-bit tipsy). It’s late August now, and the vines have turned all their fruit a vivid purple. This month-long process of turning color, was a long and drawn-out affair this year.
A half a foot of rain and counting for August, a record for our vineyard — but we’re certainly feeling in a rain-barrel half full mood. We’ve been here before: when the grapes ripen in drips and drabs you can certainly get high quality flavor, aromas and textures, but you lose control. Some grapes ripen much earlier than the rest, then become very fragile, and when that happens we need to harvest in multiple batches (a challenge when we are so small), or harvest everything based on the status of the most vulnerable berries in the bunch. This means that the weather decides for us — nothing more, nothing less. But doesn’t the weather always decide? We have good experiences with the weather forcing our hand, it only requires a willingness and ability to drop everything and harvest when the conditions dictate.
The crop looks beautiful. This last week of August has shifted abruptly to hot and dry, with a 10 day forecast of more of the same. The vineyard is a kaleidoscope of berry sizes, with small clusters, large clusters, clusters with berries no bigger than a wild blueberry, and clusters with a mixture of small and large berries. Some vines that suffered frost damage have hardly any clusters at all, but if I had to guess I would say we'll have a strong yield this year (I often guess wrong). Honestly, if it's diversity that you crave, and we most certainly do, this vintage’s fruit is resplendent.
We while away the time securing the layer of netting that stands between our abundant wildlife and our (your) wine. We mow. We tidy up the common spaces and tweak the electric fence. We walk the rows tasting berries. Right now the acid is what strikes us on first chew, but like a stealthily spicy dish, the tannins accumulate and catch our attention as we chew our 10th, 15th, or 20th berry of the day. We inventory the harvest equipment, evaluate cleanliness, and speculate about harvest date (again, we’ll likely guess wrong).
But mostly we conserve energy, as the harvest is going to require speed and endurance. We have put in so much good work this vintage that we feel confident that all the vines have been given the opportunity to produce beautiful fruit, so we can relax and gather ourselves for a long couple days of harvest.
We began final pruning on the Petit Verdot during the first week of April. Petit Verdot is the most sensitive to spring warming and therefore begins to break bud right on the cusp of the last frost. We delay because pruning stimulates the vine to open its buds, but once the vines begin we need to finalize our cuts to focus the vine's limited energy. April generally witnesses winter's last gasp, so we watch and worry as the weather forecast projects phantoms of reprieve and disaster on a weekly basis. In 2020, a Mother’s Day frost took the entire crop from our mature Petit Verdot planting and killed about 3/4 of a block of one-year-old vines, so we're painfully aware that our Petit Verdot exists on the knife’s edge in our microclimate. Fortunately, each successive year of age in the vines causes them to delay bud break by a day or two, and so our oldest PV planting (on their 7th leaf now) started to break bud in mid-April, and thus was able to recover from this year's last hard frost on April 18th. The Cabernet Sauvignon gets rolling about a week after PV, and so it bounced back from this year's frost damage as well — there are losses to this year's yield, but they are tolerable losses. We made it through the frost season and so looks like we will be granted the opportunity to make wine once again.
In early spring we took stock of our wine-producing history: 7 different wines spanning 4 vintages from 2018 to 2021. There is considerable variation amongst vintages due to the vagaries of weather, but some consistent themes are emerging including aromas of cherry, anise, lavender, and blackberry, and a delicate yet persistent tannic backbone. It is the tannins that are immediately captivating (to me), and they appear to be increasing in amount and fineness in each successive vintage — whether due to vine-age, weather variation, or a steady evolution of vineyard practices we simply do not know, but perhaps in another decade we’ll have some answers. We are just on the edge of beginning to take appointments for visitors, so in a short while we’ll be able to share these with you and you can taste them for yourself. In the meantime, we are on the shelf at Belmont Butchery, the Barrel Thief and Common House in Richmond, and they’d love to have you drop by and pick up some wine.
The newest block of vines in the Mount Alto compound is celebrating its one-year anniversary. The “Sammy Smith” block is planted on some land that David acquired and cleared a few years back. The goal was to find the least fertile piece of ground possible: goal achieved. Pictured below, the soil is largely composed of fractured rock, and thus, we opted to meet low vigor soil with a high vigor Cabernet clone that is reputed to deliver “high-quality wine when yields are controlled”. Experience tells us that excess yields are not a problem in this type of soil. The vines that we have planted on a similar soil yield less than half the industry standard, so we thought we’ll amend the vines with compost and see what happens — only 4 more years to wait to taste the results. The vines that grow in these low vigor soils are so relaxed and balanced, that we often just breeze by them without needing to thin the shoots during spring's first flush. In this new block, we are two years in and some of these vines have needed no mowing at all, though to be honest, smoothing their “rock mulch” can be back-breaking labor.
We grow rocks. And we’re damn good at it. Pictured just before bud-break in early April, this Cabernet Sauvignon is planted on Manteo silt loam, a shallow soil characterized by abundant fragments of schist and slate.
This winter we began to cut timber beams from a stand of red cedar trees that grew on the northwest corner of our property. This fall we will begin our most ambitious construction project to date: a wine production space. Past performance indicates that this will be a slow process, but we are patient people. In addition to being sized and shaped to be “just-so” for our fermentation needs, the building will be formed largely of materials sourced on the farm, timber-framed and straw-bale walls sitting atop an earthen foundation.
A 6x6 timber cut from Mount Alto red cedar will form the basic infrastructure for our new winery. Photo by MAV partner Camila Burda (@burdac on instagram).
For us, wine is an agent of wonder and joy. Many would say that a wine’s greatest potential for sowing the seeds of joy occurs when paired with a meal. We agree and think that one of the really great parts of growing wine is the diversity of flavors, aromas, and textures that emerge from a given vintage. Greater yet is that we get to go through the process of trying different foods with our wines to see which foods fall in love with which wines, and vice-versa. Adding to this joy, we now get to share these wines and their significant other dishes with our family, friends, and fellow wine enthusiasts. If you still have a bottle of our 2018 Mount Alto, it has a bonafide suitor.
My Greens are Wilted, My Heart is Full
While, generally speaking, red meats are thought to be the ultimate companion of red wines, there is a whole lot more than just meat on the dinner table, and often enough there is no meat at all. So, imagine my delight when the first dish that truly grabbed me by the taste buds as a pairing with our 2018 vintage was a (not so) humble salad, clamoring for a sip to accompany every fork full. This salad was prepared for us by an old friend who had yet to taste the vintage, but who has a knack for such things, and while the proteins of the evening were memorable, it was this beautiful wilted spinach salad with beets, goat cheese, and roasted red peppers that really sang in harmony with the wine.
Ingredients
spinach, barely wilted
crumbly goat cheese
roasted red peppers (the kind that comes in a jar, packed in olive oil is perfect)
your favorite beets, roasted ahead of time
balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper
walnuts (optional)
Preparation
Preheat a sauté pan for a few minutes on low heat. Assemble all ingredients in a bowl, even the dressing, reserving half the goat cheese for later. Heat control is the key: very low heat and very briefly. Throw that all in your (not too hot) pan, and keep it moving. Might be as fast as 30 seconds, 1 minute tops. Plate and sprinkle top with the rest of the goat cheese to serve.
Did I mention not too hot? My friend urges me, “You want the goat cheese in the pan to go gooey but not completely melt, and when you plate it, if the greens are steaming, it's waaaaayyyyy too hot”.
Hope you enjoy, the recipe, and the wine. Let us know what wonderful pairings you find.
This is not a spinach salad. But lamb is also a wonderful pairing, and a bit more photogenic than wilted spinach.
Greetings friends! We are proud to announce the release of our 2nd vintage, the 2019 "Manteo-Nason-Tatum". Click here for purchase and delivery information.
The summer of 2019 seems so long ago now, but a wonderful thing about wine is that, like tree rings, it can provide a sensorial record of the season that transpired. A frost-free April gave us an uneventful bud-break. A warm and rainy May saw us busy in the vines, pruning and thinning the shoots to let the air and sunshine in. In mid-June, the rains stopped -- pretty much for good. July sweltered, August baked and September see-sawed between hot and unseasonably warm -- all with hardly a thunderstorm to show for our troubles. The deer were thirsty and pummeled the ripening Cabernet Sauvignon, and the bear feasted on the Petit Verdot. Yields were down significantly (nearly 30% loss in the Cabernet), but what remained was superbly ripe.
This vintage is a blend of 55% Petit Verdot and 45% Cabernet Sauvignon. The grapes were sourced from two vineyards on the east side of Mount Alto: the rocky Manteo-Nason soils of Mount Alto Vineyards, and the more clay-blessed Tatum silt loam on the hilltop O’Brien Family Vineyard. The Cabernet provides intense aromatics and fine tannins, while the Petit Verdot brings richness and concentration. This wine is an absolute pleasure to drink now but it has the makings of a wine that will continue to improve with age.
We really appreciate your support of our project, and we are excited to share this wine with you. Because of the limited quantity in this release, purchases are limited to 3 bottles per customer, at a cost of $32 per bottle (plus tax). Click here for purchase and delivery information.
All the best,
Mount Alto Vineyards
It has been a long while since we last wrote, and to be honest, we’ve felt a need for silence over much of the last year. I think maybe it’s just super hard to talk when you have a lump in your throat, you know? But there really is so much to catch up on.
Thank You. Sincerely.
This fall we released our first wine, the 2018 “Manteo-Nason” red blend, and you all received it with such warmth and enthusiasm that we were a bit taken aback. Thank you. We are proud of that wine, and think it’s great tasting, but we love that the majority of folks who took a chance on it had no idea how it tasted. You all saw people who were farming their hearts out, and you took a chance that the wine would taste good — or you just wanted to support our dreams, hard work, and ambition. Either way, you made our decade and inspired us to press forward with redoubled enthusiasm.
When It Damn Well Feels Like It
The 2019 vintage has been in a bottle for a few months now, and we think it’s a stunner — an aromatic, rich, concentrated and endlessly structured wine, emblematic of the uninterrupted dry and warm weather that stretched from July through October. But here’s the catch: it needs time to age.
The Here and Now
So far, 2021 has been a leisurely stroll, with a late bud break, no hard frosts, and cool dry weather punctuated by the occasional 3-day heat wave and/or thunderstorm. The vines have caught up from their slow start, and have surged into June. Bloom started out scary, with rainy weather forecasted, but we snagged a handful of dry, bright and warm days right when it was most needed. All told, it looks like the vines will set an ample crop. From June through early July our team will up the intensity of our labors, touching every vine many times, tending the canopy, and keeping the new clusters bathed in light and air. This is the time for focus.
Inside the canopy: this year’s crop getting a little sunbath at the beginning stages of bloom.
In the Meantime
There are big plantings, and there are big ideas, and there are small plantings when you have … big ideas. We did all three this year.
The big planting of Cabernet Sauvignon planned for this spring went off without a hitch. The Sammy Smith Vineyard is now a reality: 2/3 of an acre of rocky, tractor clenching slopes just a 50 yard walk through the woods from our original vineyard site. This site really is something else, and while literally only a stone’s throw away, it is more geologically diverse than our existing blocks, and has some wicked winds blowing through it. Just the kind of place we wanted to explore the big idea that seized us in 2018: focus on understanding the potential of Cabernet Sauvignon with a diversity of clones on a range of unique but related hillside soils: we’ll pour you a sip in 2026.
The small planting we made this year was Petit Manseng. We love some of the Petit Manseng wines coming out of Virginia and wanted to see how it responds to our site. So in a few years, we will see how it deals with the late frosts and early heat waves, and we’ll fiddle around with some experimental wines. With a little luck and a lot of intention, we’ll have something interesting to share.
Impermanence, Acceptance, and Forever (and that’s a mighty long time)
Whether it’s a new big planting, a new small planting, or tasting the first wine from a recent planting, putting new vines in the ground is a heady and humbling experience. On an uncultivated plot of land, the journey from concept to commercial red wine release is a 7-year process (at minimum), so patience is a must. Planting is also an acceptance of the impermanence of our existence, in that the grapes and wine from this plot will most certainly outlive us if we farm them right — they’ve already outlived some of our family, and friends (both 2 and 4 legged). We’ve only got one go at this, and we’re going to make the most of it. Thanks for sharing this journey with us.
About 18 months ago, we cleared an acre of land on David's half (now the Sammy Smith Vineyard) of our 18 acre compound. We found barbed-wire on the perimeter and surmised that this land was once used for grazing. Over the last 50-100 years, it has been left to re-wild. Over time, we have learned that we can minimize soil disturbance and compaction if we forego "grading", and simply knock down trees and use a "box-leveler" to drag the loose soil and rock to achieve a rough level. After a few years of random foot traffic and lawn mowing, this somewhat lumpy surface slowly transforms to level.
Free-hand drawing of free-hand soil profile restoration.
Filling Holes
The majority of trees on this steep, rocky plot were roughly arm-sized in thickness. However, there were three large oaks that left sizeable craters when they were cleared. The craters were not deep, as they are over the part of ground where natural bedrock resides just a couple feet below the soil surface, but they’re too big for our standard laissez-faire approach. Left un-filled they will collect water, causing damp, muddy conditions and small patches of vines with ultra-vigorous growth. We could erase the craters by levelling the surface of the vineyard, but we would then be churning the soil over a large part of the block in order to improve the surface level for 20 or 30 vines. The alternative is to amend these root holes by hand, with our best approximation of the natural structure that we find in the rest of the slope: a mixture of small rock fragments, quartz boulderlings, loamy soil and flat chunks of slate and schist. Done by hand it’s somewhat time consuming, but not overly strenuous, and in the end we create a better environment for our vines by mimicking the soil found throughout the new vineyard site.
