Name: Row Ten
Variety: 55% Viognier and 45% Chardonnay
Region: Roanoke
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Price: $15.00
Review: It smelled like rotten vegetables, green beans and grass. When I tasted it, it was sweet at first with some citrus. Then there was some vegetable again with a heated finish from the alcohol.
Name: Viognier
Variety: Viognier
Region: Roanoke
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Price: $16.00
Their review: Bright fruit aroma; pair with anything with a pineapple glaze
Review:It smelled very strongly of pineapple juice, and slightly rotted peach. However, when actually tasting it, there was very little of anything what so ever. It was very simple maybe a slight peach taste at the finish.
Name: Rheingold
Variety: Chardonnay
Region: Roanoke
Country: USA
Year: 2005
Price: $24.00
Their Review: Reserve chardonnay, French Burgundian style, always a favorite
Review: It smelled like rotted vegetables again, also some nail polish maybe a little gasoline. She said it would taste yeasty despite the fact that their was no yeast present. I did not taste the yeast. It was bitter green peppers. There was no hint of the alcohol; it was very smooth.
Name: Rose
Variety: ???
Region: Roanoke
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Price: $11.00
Their Review: Aromas of strawberries
Review: It smelled like rose petals and fish. Reminded me of being at a fish market in Italy where everything is still done the old fashioned way and smelling the salty fishy air along with someone freshly showered with rose smelling soap. Maybe too detailed but it came to mind. All it tasted like was water, rot and slightly of peach.
Name: Late Harvest Viognier
Variety: Viognier
Region: Roanoke
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Price: $20.00
Their Review: Just sweet enough to love on its own
Review: This one we bought. It is a dessert wine, picked right before the frost. It smelled like flowers honey suckle and cherry blossom. It tasted like honey and pears and apples.
On the winery tour it self we learned quite a bit about the winery itself. It was established in 1994. The land was originally a peach and apple orchard. The land was purchased in 1992 and it took two years to get it ready. The first vintage was in 1998. They make wine with natural fermentation in the French style. Every winter the vines get pruned all the way down to the ground. The vineyard is at a 2,000 ft elevation, and is very similar to Sonoma Valley in terrior. Red wine grapes do particularly well here. They harvest in the end of September and the beginning of October. They can wait a little longer than most because of the warm air that comes off the mountains around them and keeps their temperatures higher than average. All the harvesting is done by hand, by the people who care for the vines all year around. These people also live on the property.
During harvest they pick the grapes, sort them into bins. They then slide them down a make shift slide, down to the roof of the winery building itself. The grapes are then poured into holes in the roof of the winery itself which was designed so that people could walk on top of it. These holes lead to de-stemmers inside the building. The grapes are then put into bins; the reds stay for 5 to 8 days and the whites for a much shorter time period. They are all mashed by hand. The reason they do this by hand is too reduce the number of seeds which are crushed in the mashing process. They believe that the oils released by the mashing are the cause of red wine headaches. Then they all go right into oak to ferment. The oak barrels are 60 gallons each and must be topped off completely so that no oxygen can get in and turn the wine into vinegar. The left over mash is squeezed separately.
In 2001 they built the cave they store the barrels of fermenting wine in. It took 6 months to build. It remains 55 degrees naturally year around. It maintains its 80% humidity as well. It smells strongly of vinegar due to the wine spilled onto the floor. The barrels are rotated ever so often, they are in two rows, one on top of the other. The barrels are made of both French and American oak, they wait 36 months until they use them and they toast their barrels themselves. The kegs are used to top off the barrels. Each barrel has a card on it giving the date of harvest and what the winemaker has done to it so far.
A company used to come in and bottle the wine for them. However that was inconvenient because of the variable nature of wine-making so they purchased their own bottling machine. All the bottles they use come from France, and they use cork because their winemaker and owner Debra Vascik studied in France. The winery can produce around 25,000 bottles per year. It is designed to be small enough that two people could run it if need be. They made 13 different varietals. The grapes grow best when they think they are dying. The best season is one with a long hot dry summer. White grapes are much more temperamental, one very wet season will ruin those grapes. They are an estate winery and never have purchased other grapes. However they have sold their grapes and continue to offer to do so.
Their owners James and Debra Vascik wanted to bring some good red wines to VA. There were around 55 wineries in VA at the time they built the winery and now there are around 120, but red wine is under represented. They picked this place especially because of the decomposing granite, which the red wine grapes prefer. As for distribution, for the first few years they only sold their wine in small wine shops. Then the laws in Virginia changed and they had to hire a distributor and could no longer distribute their own wine. Now they are in Kroger and other major food stores as well as the smaller wine shops. Another law that changed through the course of the winery's history is the state by state distribution law. When they started they could not ship their wines to other states; it was a felony. However now the can due to the state by state agreements, with two exceptions, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
There is a warehouse next to the winery in which the bottled wine is stored. This is artificially temperature controlled. The tasting room is also very new, built in 2003. It used to be a picnic table. There is a Buddha on the concrete wall in between the winery and the storage room. They uncovered it when they were constructing the winery. Someone told the owner James Vascik that it would be bad luck to throw it away, so he kept it.
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