Wine festival.

Went to a wine festival over the weekend, the 28th (!) annual Virginia Winegrowers festival. Over 50 wineries present, lots and lots of people. And the weather was extremely cooperative for the middle of August: neither torrential rains nor over-100-degree temperatures.

I go to festivals like this one to try new wines from familiar wineries and wines from new vineyards, and to enjoy the wines I'm having, but not to seriously taste the wines I'm trying. The middle of a field, ninety degrees, and too many people smoking cigars nearby all work against serious evaluations. With those caveats, then, I came up with some observations:

Wineries that make good wines continued to show their quality at the festival. Among them: Barboursville, Cardinal Point, Am Rhein, Wintergreen, Burnley, Breaux, and Villa Appalaccia. I was especially pleased by Cardinal Point (open only since May) and Am Rhein (relatively new to me, and willing to take risks to experiment: bottling a 100% petit verdot, for instance).

Those wineries that haven't done such a good job continue to do poorly. One such winery is trying to sell off its back stock of a chardonnay by offering it at $6 per bottle and calling it "Six Buck Chuck". You should get that wine only if they're paying you the six bucks, and you can quickly discard the unopened bottle. There's a good reason why so much of this wine was in unsold stock, and it's not that it was too expensive. (It was yummy, if you like the taste of freshly-sharpened pencils.)

And on a reasonably-warm August afternoon, a good chilled white wine is wonderful. (Unless, of course, it's "Six Buck Chuck".)