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The Virginia 2010 Vintage


Jeff White

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Monday November 15, 2010

Hello,

Well, this year and vintage are quickly coming to a close and while my writings here may shorten I will try to keep them informative and maybe at times a little provocative and amusing.

After ten months of much loved and impassioned work, it is now so wonderful to still remain busy but also relaxed with little pressure to hurry and get things accomplished. Life slows, allowing mind and body time to regenerate before the passion and the drive renews in the coming New Year.

We seem to be enjoying a delayed autumn leaf show. After a beautiful early display, there was a lull and I thought at the time that this year's colors were mutted and hurt by the drought but all of a sudden in the last few days and after a few cold nights, the oaks are showcasing their coat of arms with Halloween oranges and burnt reds. A couple of posts before, I proclaimed that "NOW IS THE TIME TO VISIT", well the multitudes have come and are gone, it's tranquil and serene and...pssst, "now is the time". But delay not, for the curtain will soon fall as it won't be long before we experience our first killing hard-freeze and this beautiful surprise encore will come to an abrupt end. Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that everyone come quickly and visit my farm winery. But the mountains in Shenandoah National Park are quite beautiful right now and well worth a drive along it's skyline.

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Recently on a cold and frosty morning we pressed off our last lot of grapes and two days later the wine filled our last few remaining barrels. This year we produced a total of thirty barrels of red wine, representing a 33% increase over previous years. We're small but slowly growing as our newly planted vineyards begin to produce. In a couple more years, once all of our vineyards are in full production we will be making around one hundred barrels of red wine each year. Still on the small size but plenty for me and my crew to handle.

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During the winter Kelly and I like to get into DC once or twice a month and visit museums, galleries, the theatre and of course dine at area restaurants. We recently came to the city and participated in the Food for Tomorrow Symposium produced by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. With our very own Dave McIntyre moderating, I was one on a panel of five winemakers from Virginia, Maryland and New York talking about the innovative methods we are using to grow higher and higher quality wine in this most inhospitable wine growing region on the planet. My focus was on water and how by planting on steeper and steeper slopes and in rocky, less fertile soils I am trying to reduce the quantity of water available to my vines, thereby keeping them small and producing more flavorful and concentrated fruit. A reception followed with each of us providing two wines for the attendees to sample. This was also a chance for the guests and winemakers to interact and talk more in depth about our vineyards, wines, methods and visions.

Innovation in the wine industry is actually quite rare. Viticulture and enology are a centuries old art, practiced all around the globe and what might appear to be innovative is usually and simply a reapplication of learned techniques or technologies from one region to another.

Case in point:

I have two plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon in our Hodder Hill vineyard, a 1996 planting and a 2004 planting. This year, as the grapes were fermenting, I was tasting everyday and while thrilled by the depth and concentration of the 2004 lot, for some reason the 1996 lot was light in color, a little thin bodied and not too interesting. I could not understand it and it puzzled me for days. In my mind the 2004 Cab was definitely Hodder Hill quality but I felt the 1996 Cab would have to be declassified for this vintage. After much thinking and worrying an idea came to me that I thought might help improve the 1996 lot. What I decided to do was to incorporate a technique used in Valpolicella, Italy to make a wine called Ripasso. Meaning repassed; basically the Valpolicella winemakers take leftover pomace from making Amarone wine and add this to their fermenting Valpolicella wines to increase body, flavor, color, complexity and concentration. I realized that the 2004 lot of grapes had much more to give, just not to the 2004 lot of wine. So after pressing these grapes, we added these back to the 1996 lot still soaking in bins. The next morning when performing punch downs I once again tasted this lot and it had already changed for the better. Color and flavor had deepened and after four more days of soaking, this last lot was pressed off and is now destined to become part of our Hodder Hill blend. Innovative, well maybe for Virginia or Glen Manor, but more than likely simply showing the importance for winemakers to learn about and taste wines from all over the world of wine.

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Jeff

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Friday November 19, 2010

Hello,

Just a quick leaf update. Most have now fallen. Rain all day on Tuesday, followed by 3 days of moderate to high winds have brought the show to an end. There is still abundant beauty here in the mountains. It's just different. Now we need some snow.

Jeff

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Wednesday December 1, 2010

Hello,

Winter is slowly taking hold over autumn and the land. Our sky is cold and still. Deer hunting season has ended, silencing the guns through the mountains for another year. So with the exception of wintering blue jays, black crows, a few other resident tweety birds and the occasional rustlings of our tall and now golden warm season grasses, all is quiet.

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As this year ends and our eyes look towards 2011, rough pruning, winter bottling and planning for our first ever barrel tasting in the spring are our top priorities. We began rough pruning our vines right after Thanksgiving and will finish by New Year's Day. Then on January 3rd, weather permitting, we will begin the task of fine pruning our vineyards. Rough pruning accomplishes a couple of good things. First it gets us back out in the vineyards where we long to be and immensely enjoy. It's usually sunny and cold but this task is a bit physical so we generate our own heat and welcome the cold temperatures. We walk a row quite fast cutting all the canes just below the second from the top trellis wire. Then we re-walk the same row pulling off the severed portion of the canes seemingly suspended in air but hanging from the wires by the vine's tendrils or our tying tape. The cut canes are discarded in the row middles where they'll be shredded early next year. This makes fine pruning much easier and quicker as there is less wood material to remove and the pieces are smaller and more manageable at a time when we're working hard and fast to complete pruning well before bud break. It's also mind comforting in January and February with spring fast approaching, to know that the vineyard is always more than half completed since all has been half or rough pruned.

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I racked our Petit Manseng dessert wine off it's lees and one third went into a new French oak barrel and the other two thirds went back into stainless-steel tank. This wine will eventually be blended back together and the barreled wine will add complex flavors and soft textures to the crisp aromatic wine aged in tank. For a while both wines will age sur lie or in contact with some fine lees composed of dead yeast cells and once every couple of weeks these lees will be stirred up into the wine to add body, depth, richness and roundness.

Our 2010 red wines have nearly completed malo-lactic fermentation thus quieting the bubbling sounds in our cellar from the fermentation airlocks in each barrel's bung hole. For the next month, once every couple of weeks I'll taste through the barrels, making notes and formulating possible blends that we will begin to assemble in January. After tasting I will also stir these lees up into the wine in each barrel. Recently Jim Law, of Linden Vineyards visited and tasted through the barrels with me. A number of lots stood out as superior and overall we were pleasantly surprised by the wine's restraint, given the extreme hot and dry vintage. Afterwards, I treated Jim to a lunch of braised bear roast with winter greens and a 2002 left-bank Bordeaux. Then we toured my new vineyards which he had not previously seen up close. It's a most gratifying feeling for me to receive approval and advice from someone I respect and admire. As I have said to him before, I consider Jim my father figure in the wine industry. Father, not with respect to age but to experience and guidance.

We are in the early planning stages for a spring barrel tasting here at Glen Manor. We will draw samples from the barrels aging our young 2010 red wines to offer a glimpse of these wines to our customers and the local wine trade. Other than this tasting, we do not hold events here on our farm so this will be special. For everyone's enjoyment this tasting will be by reservation only with a limited number of guests allowed in our cellar at any one time during the day.

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The following is a bit of holiday farm nostalgia:

Every year around the holidays I find myself filled with deep rooted emotions centering on our farm and the way things were and will never be again. I'm saddened but also warmed by memories of departed family members and their bygone farming ways.

For the first forty-five years of my life, every Thanksgiving for me was spent with my extended family on our farm. As a child growing up in Fairfax County, I could easily connect with the song, "Over the River and Through the Woods", for it truly was my grandmother's house in the country where we would go. This was before interstate 66. Back then the roads leading out into the country were routes 29/211 and 55, a single lane road meandering through farmlands, over rolling hills and narrow bridges across streams and through once sleepy little villages: Manassas, Gainesville, Haymarket, The Plains, Marshall, Markham, Linden and Front Royal. The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a surprise blizzard struck and my brothers and I had to sleep through the night in the back of our family's station-wagon, only reaching The Plains by mid morning where we and hundreds of other stranded motorists were fed breakfast at the local volunteer fire department. After being re-routed through Warrenton, we reached the farm mid afternoon Thanksgiving Day. And it was here I would see those I miss dearly today, relatives of mine who lived on and worked our farm. But what fascinates me is something I only learned about a few years back, that Thanksgiving in the traditional manner was not celebrated by my family on our farm until I was about ten years old. For our farming family, Thanksgiving Day was Butchering Day, the day our family and friends worked together to butcher and process our hogs. My grandparents were devoutly religious and had survived life through the Great Depression of the 1930s. They gave thanks every day for what they had, especially on Sunday, a day of rest except for feeding and milking the livestock and gathering eggs or in other words, taking care of animals dependent on them. For my grandparents, Thanksgiving Day was simply treated much like any other workday on the farm.

My grandmother chose this day because she also taught at the local school and was off on Thanksgiving and the day after, affording her the time required for this complicated and involved process. While the men slaughtered, scalded, scraped, hung up, gutted, washed and quartered a half dozen or so animals, the women were busy cutting up the meat, packaging it and making sausage, scrapple and pudding and rendering fat into lard. Shoulders, hams and bacon were piled high on benches in the meat house and covered with sugar, black pepper and saltpeter to cure before later being hung up to age. Back then my grandparents still had an old wringer type washing machine and would remove the wringer and place the sausage grinder on top of the washing machine, using the wringer motor to power it. The hog's cleaned intestines were used to hold the sausage until years later when my grandmother made sausage sacks out of old feed bags. Once stuffed, these sacks of sausage would also hang in the meat house to cure.

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I have wonderful and vivid sensory memories of all this as a child. Many people busily moving about in a bit of a frantic pace, black smoke and white steam plumes rising high into the crisp autumn air, the warmth from the fires, squeals of the condemned, the crack of the rifle, orders and directions given out by the men and women in charge, bubbling boiling hot water, popping of embers in the fire pits, eating crunchy cracklings left over from the rendered fat and venturing into the dark meat house to see and smell the hams hanging from the rafters. There's even now an aroma I find in some older Italian red wines which I associate with my memories of these curing meats. Our family did enjoy a much anticipated special meal this day but the main course wasn't turkey; it was the liver from that day's work along with a host of home grown vegetable dishes and pitchers and pitchers of tea and ice cold milk from one of their cows. I well remember this annual event and also remember traditional Thanksgiving celebrations with turkey and all it's trimmings. What I did not realize was that these celebrations did not commence on our farm until after my grandparents grew too old and weary to raise and butcher hogs every year.

The people, the ways, the days and the child are long gone now but every year during the holidays I find myself wandering back to those innocent and carefree times in my life and give thanks for how they helped shape the way I find myself in this world of today.

My best to all,

Jeff

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Jeff,

I hope you and your family had a good Thanksgiving. I was able to enjoy mine with my 90 year old grandmother and it seems she still always has new stories to tell. I can't imagine the relief it must be to have all the grapes in doors slowly percolating away and being somewhat removed from the daily swings of nature for a brief period of time. Your first barrel tasting had me thinking, are you going to be releasing any new wines during that time, similar to what Linden does?

Stay warm,

-Troy

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Jeff,

I hope you and your family had a good Thanksgiving. I was able to enjoy mine with my 90 year old grandmother and it seems she still always has new stories to tell. I can't imagine the relief it must be to have all the grapes in doors slowly percolating away and being somewhat removed from the daily swings of nature for a brief period of time. Your first barrel tasting had me thinking, are you going to be releasing any new wines during that time, similar to what Linden does?

Stay warm,

-Troy

Hi Troy,

Average price for a Thanksgiving Day Turkey, $10. Average price for a pairing American Pinot, $30. Stories as told by grandma, priceless!

Yes, at our barrel tasting we will have a couple of new releases plus one pre-release offer.

Jeff

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Wednesday December 15, 2010

Hello,

"Tis the season..."

I love how our years end on a collective joyous and compassionate note. This is the time of the year when all at once our entire world's thoughts and deeds are for others: close and distant family, friends and lovers, supervisors and subordinates and especially for children and those less fortunate. Whether it's food or clothing drives, Toys for Tots, the Salvation Army bells and kettles or simply people baking batch after batch of cookies and candies, and searching for that perfect gift, everyone's thoughts turn outwards and away from one's self. Now, I know it can be hectic and frustrating at times, what with millions of people all at once out and about and with the same but competing purpose and goal. But for me, living quietly and almost solitarily on a farm, interacting with only two or three different people in any given day, venturing out now onto hustling and bustling city streets with all the merry sounds and sights is most humanly and spiritually uplifting. This by far is the grandest time of the year.

On Friday the tenth we had our first of the season snowfall. It was just a dusting but oh so beautiful. Our stonewall fences looked like rows of holiday bourbon balls stacked on parchment paper sprinkled with confectioners' sugar. What snow did fall though, stuck to everything for it has been very cold lately, freezing the grass covered ground rock solid and making walking feel as if you're constantly pounding hard concrete under foot. It was nine o'clock in the morning and I was up above Hodder Hill finishing sawing some fire logs when I first noticed the snow coming over the 3400 foot high National Park Mountains fives miles away to our south. A slow moving snowy whiteout enveloped the mountaintops and then moved down into the valleys below, arriving over our farm about twenty minutes later. After another twenty minutes it passed and we were left speckled with a quarter inch of icy white beauty. Right now and with the exception of the north side of those distant high mountain peaks, the snow is gone. But it's windy and frigid, so maybe there's still a chance for more and deeper snow before year's end.

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Rough pruning is nearing completion. We finished our older vines and are more than halfway through our young plantings. Once complete we will start constructing some cattle fences on the farm next week.

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Last week I was visited by Dr Tony Wolf, Virginia's chief Viticulturalist to discuss a research trial that will be conducted in my Sauvignon Blanc vineyard during the next three years. His research centers on vineyard covercrop's impact on grapevine vigor and nutritional requirements. In 2001 I first established covercrops in Hodder Hill and now, more and more new vineyards in Virginia are being established with covercrops under vines to help wick away excess moisture. But these covercrop plants also compete with grapevines for vital nutrients in the soils, so each year fertilizer amendments must be added. Dr Wolf's study will try to determine A: which or what blend of covercrop plant specie is most beneficial in balancing grapevine growth and B: how and when best to make nutrient amendments so that the vines receive the added nutrients and very little is taken up by these covercrops.

I received test results from Virginia Tech on some 2010 red wine barrel samples that I had sent for various analyses. I run most of the tests in my lab but also occasionally want confirmation from a professional laboratory service. As I thought, malo-lactic fermentation is finished in some barrels and is near completion in others. Probably by the first of next year all will be complete. I also had residual sugar and alcohol levels tested. Again as I thought, all are completely dry and all have alcohol levels in the 14% range. Now don't let my 14+% alcohols scare you. These are big red wines with an appropriate balance of complex and concentrated flavors, supple tannins, moderate acidity and not too high alcohols to my tastes. There has been much discussion and debate about the ever increasing alcohol levels in red wines coming mostly out of California, but these are wines with 15% to 16% alcohols. You may read on the label that the wine is 14.5% and it tastes too high in alcohol for your liking but in reality this wine probably has a much higher percentage of alcohol than stated. Federal law allows for wines over 14% alcohol by volume to have the stated percentage on the wine label be plus or minus 1% different than the wine inside the bottle. So if a particular bottle of wine has a printed alcohol level of 14.1%, the wine's actual alcohol level may legally be as high as 15.1%. I could be wrong but those alcohol hot wines you are not enjoying have much higher alcohol levels than what you think and read.

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Kelly and I recently were in town for a wine pouring at The Principle Gallery in Alexandria and for a vintner's dinner at the Lyons Hall in Arlington. Both occasions were fun and enjoyable, meeting and talking with many interesting and interested people. At the Lyons Hall vintner's dinner, organized by Sommelier Alison Christ, I teamed with Master Champagne maker Claude Thibaut, of Thibaut Janisson, and with Chefs Liam LaCivita, Andy Bennett and Rob Valencia for five creative and delicious food courses, each accompanied by our wines. On both trips Kelly and I combined pleasure with pleasure by venturing on into DC to among other things, have lunch at Black Salt, (yum, yum), pick up wine at MacArthur's and tour the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.

I hope everyone has a blessed and joyous holiday season!

Until my final post on the last day of 2010,

Jeff

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Until my final post on the last day of 2010,

There are many different reasons I enjoy this site, but I must admit across the last year I have always looked forward to these semi-monthly posts...they will be missed next year. Thank you Jeff (and a Happy Holidays to you and yours) for providing such an interesting look into your vineyard/life.

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Friday December 31, 2010

Hello,

Wow! Where did this year go? It honestly seems like it was just the other day that I conjured up the notion to write this thread. Thank you, Don Rockwell, for your friendship, for allowing me this opportunity and for your encouragement to share what we Virginia winegrowers face and try to accomplish each year. Also, thank you to all those interested and who chose to follow a year in the life of a simple but passionate farmer of Glen Manor Vineyards. I've enjoyed writing about this vintage and am now firmly and squarely looking towards the challenges and rewards of our upcoming 2011 vintage.

The Virginia 2010 vintage can best be described as hot, dry, fast and early. Like all Virginia vintages, 2010 was unlike all Virginia vintages. This vintage variability aspect of Virginia winegrowing makes farming wine here frustratingly thrilling. Record keeping of past vintages and understanding how natural conditions influence wine style are vital to consistently produce wine of great interest and appeal.

Some cold white winter weather arrived right around Christmas time. About a week before, we received two inches and then snow showers blew through on Christmas day. Terrifically high winds with blowing stinging snow followed the day after Christmas, postponing our plans to torch two large woodpiles on the farm. Currently the ground is bare of snow except again, for north facing slopes above elevations of around twenty-five hundred feet.

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We finished rough pruning our vineyards and in January will start again fine pruning our youngest plantings. Last week, we began constructing a fence separating our meadow of warm season grasses from the grounds immediately surrounding the winery. Next year, cattle will be allowed to graze these grasses for short intervals during the summer months to thin the stand, thereby opening more avenues of travel for young quail and encouraging a variety of other food source plants to germinate and grow. To dig fence post holes we use a tractor mounted and operated auger but because the ground is frozen down about eight inches, we first must break through this top frozen layer using digging bars powered by human muscle. Posts are in and braced and we are nearly finished attaching the woven wire.

A friend who possesses a palate that I trust and respect came over to taste through my 2010 red wines with me. We methodically tasted through the thirty barrels; tasting a wine, quietly writing our impressions and then talking about the wine before repeating the process with the next barrel. I now have a number of barrels chosen for a Hodder Hill base blend and several more barrels identified as potential blending components, with the actual blending trials set to begin in January. While cellaring, wine evaporates through the wooden barrel staves, about a gallon's worth per barrel every couple of months. This lost wine is poetically referred to as the angel's share. After our taste through I stirred each barrel and then topped or filled them with additional 2010 red wine, used just for this purpose and stored in small glass and stainless steel containers. I also tasted through and topped our barreled 2009 red wines.

To be a good neighbor, Glen Manor Vineyards participates in the Virginia Department of Transportation Adopt a Highway program. Two or three times during the year we pick up litter along a two mile stretch of the state road near our farm entrance and each time fill over a dozen large trash bags. But I now have concerns about some of my neighbors. Apparently, they consume highly processed fast-food and corn sweetened soft drinks, smoke cigarettes and worst of all drink thin tasteless beer and all this while operating a motor vehicle. A few of my more thoughtful neighbors have been trying to help though. Once the "Adopt a Highway" signs were in place they started consolidating their litter tosses at my winery entrance instead of spreading them out along the side of the road. Sometimes, I just want to give 'em a hug .

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I recently went to our local butcher and picked up a grass fed beef that Kelly, my parents and I will enjoy over the next year. The steer was raised by the cattleman who leases our farm pastures. The meat is flavorful and tender and at three and a half dollars per pound, quite a deal. It's also very important to me to support a local farmer and butcher and know where and how my food is raised.

Just as with Thanksgiving, I have spent the vast majority of Christmas celebrations with my extended family here on our farm. One of my fondest childhood Christmas memories is going out on the farm with my grandfather and father to get a tree. We would simply walk out the farm house door and go cut down a cedar tree growing somewhere on the property. One year when I was still quite little, there was snow on the ground and I got to ride the tree back down the hill as my father slid it home. Each year I looked forward to homemade oyster stew and wassail on Christmas Eve night, being the center of attention the next morning and to the holiday feast my grandmother would prepare. This year wasn't too different. Thankfully I'm no longer the center of the universe and Kelly and my mother prepared a scrumptious Christmas day dinner of goose, country ham, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, sauerkraut, stewed tomatoes, oyster stuffing, green peas, corn pudding, pickles, olives and cranberry salad, followed later by homemade Christmas cookies and candies. One of my first cousins was also home on the farm for the holidays. I caught up with her as she was ice skating on our pond. She reminded me that I was the one who got her interested in this activity, with a pair of ice skates she received from me on Christmas day, a long time ago.

Well, that's it, a Virginia wine farming year as it happened to me. I am privileged to live in these Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and honored to be able to work land my great-grandparents pioneered one hundred ten years ago. My life's purpose as a vigneron is simple; grow wine that is expressive of this land, reflective of the year in which the grapes ripened and that captivates your interest until the last drop leaves the bottle.

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Thank you and have a safe happy time tonight and a wonderful New Year!

Jeff

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Jeff,

I'm not sure how to say thank you enough for this vibrant slice of history. I want everyone to know that I'm nominating this chronicle for a James Beard Journalism Award in the "Profile" category: "Recognizes a dramatic presentation that brings to life the world of a chef, restaurateur, grower, producer, or other figure or group of significance to food or drink, published in any medium."

Note to self: deadline for receipt of submission, January 7, 2011. Entry fee $100. Money well spent, IMO - I have absolutely no idea if this has a chance of winning, but it needs to be nominated, and so it shall be.

Cheers, and thanks again, Jeff!

Rocks

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Jeff, I can't adequately express what a delight it's been to follow your journal all year long. Instead of merely exposing the inner mechanics of winemaking, you've drawn us a captivating glimpse of the considerations and intricacies that play in the mind of the winemaker each step along the path from sun and soil to bottle. I, for one, have never been more intrigued by life along the Blue Ridge...or by a Virginia wine.

Thank you for sharing a bit of yourself with us this year. I'm sure that memories of this blog will be rekindled for years to come whenever we pull a Glen Manor cork.

All the best and Happy New Year,

Dave

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Welp, that's the third and FINAL TIME the James Beard Awards committee gets $100 of my money. Fuck 'em.

At least they had the good sense to nominate the Post Food section for the third time! Yay team!

And kudos to Tim Carman on his nomination for the City Paper column.

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Okay, I cannot find fault with the judges. You play in their game, you have to be prepared to lose. I do think though that maybe we were in the wrong category. But I really never had any thoughts of actually being nominated. It would have been as if I made a little cell phone film of my farming way of life and expected to beat Spielberg for an Academy Award. I wrote this piece not for glory or award but for fun and exercise for me and education for you. Thanks Don! It was a pleasure.

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I'm only up to post #28 but have a couple questions.

How did the different root stock experiment turn out?  Did any of them noticeably reduce vigor?

Did any Bobwhite ever show up (on their own), or did you ever stock your farm with them?

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A huge thanks to Jeff for doing this!!

I'm only on post #11, but I'm loving this.

Thanks for mentioning it on twitter today.

Would it be bad form to ask you to do one of these for this year?!?!

Bart, believe it or not, this is available as a hardcover book - currently, there are only three copies in existence, and it is *stunning*.

I nominated this thread for a James Beard Award, and believe it should have either won or been a finalist, but it didn't and wasn't.

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How/where can I get one?  Are they for sale?

I was planning on printing the whole thing out as a tutorial for my own grapes, but I'd rather have a real book.

 

Hello,

I'm currently enjoying winter in the Catskills for a few days.  Highlight, check out www.tableonten.com .  I have too much to do on the farm to write another vintage thread.  The rootstock trial was compromised by half of the experiment arriving with a virus from the nursery.  The vines are producing but any differences cannot be solely attributed to the different rootstocks.  To date no quail have appeared but many other kinds of wildlife now reside in or near these grasses.

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Hey folks. Just an update from my question above about how to get the book.

As it turns out DR member Troy McHenry took the words and photos from this thread and turned them into an amazing hardcover book via the Blurb publishing site.

I ordered a copy and it's very cool. It's not cheap but it's cool! I probably should have thought to post something on here in the hopes of getting a bulk buy discount, before buying a single copy myself, but I'm not that smart.

For one hardcover copy (with wrap around cover printing, no dust jacket) it cost me just shy of 120 bucks. Coincidently, it's 120 pages long and is 12" X 12" (much larger than I was expecting).

I think it's well worth the money and if anyone else is interested, here the link to the Blurb site for the book. I have no idea if they give volume discounts.

http://www.blurb.com/b/2045465-the-virginia-2010-vintage-a-year-through-the-eyes

It also says you can get the iPad/eBook version for free. (seems hard to believe though).

If you want to see any photos of the actual book, let me know and I'll post them.

And Jeff (White), if you're reading this, expect me to show up one day for an autograph!

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Bart, right now there are only four copies in existence: yours, mine, Troy's, and Jeff's - I know this book is crazy expensive, but it's worth every penny. It is *stunning* - one of my personal treasures.

It's definitely something along the size of a coffee-table book, with pictures to match.

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Bart, right now there are only four copies in existence: yours, mine, Troy's, and Jeff's - I know this book is crazy expensive, but it's worth every penny. It is *stunning* - one of my personal treasures.

It's definitely something along the size of a coffee-table book, with pictures to match.

Make that at least 5.  I had been debating this for awhile and after making a trip just before my daughter was born to Glen Manor - decided to pull the trigger.  I am very excited to get my hands on this.

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I'll second JPW's post on the Glenn Manor Instagram account.

If you have any sort of interest in wine, how it's made, or all the things that go into making it, you should subscribe to this account. You can learn a lot and see some really great photos.

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