Wine festival in Charlottesville.

I went to the annual wine festival at the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville this weekend. They've had a festival there each year for 23 years; I've been to 21 of them, and I have good excuses for the other two years.

The festival was okay, although no better than that. They had no idea what they were doing with parking, other than not letting you park in the nearby (and unused) lot where I've parked for the past 10 years. Incredibly disorganized. The awards, as usual, bore no relationship to the actual quality of the wines. A couple of the gold medalling wines were abominable, and the same wines from someone else were wonderful and completely unmedaled.

Barboursville had some new wines out. A malvaxia; first release in 3 years. Pretty good, and I'd realized how much I'd missed it at festivals over the past couple of years. A new cab franc, a new release of Octagon, and a new cabernet sauvignon. The Octagon and cab sauvignon were for sale this weekend only, and then won't be officially released until next spring or summer. I picked some of the cab sauvignon to stick into my cellar for a couple of years.

Cardinal Point's cab franc got a silver medal - one of the deserved medals - and is drinking well. Wintergreen finally released their "Black Rock Red Reserve", a Bordeaux blend. Rich and smooth, in large part because it's had another 10 months aging in the bottle beyond what they were expecting, while the BATF (or whoever they are this month) approved the label.

A new winery - Keswick Vineyards (not yet open for tours, but they were there selling their stuff) - had 5 wines: an unremarkable chardonnay, a viognier, a viognier reserve, and two reds, a touriga and a touriga reserve. (Touriga is the varietal that port is usually made from.) The regular viognier was fine, especially for a new vineyard. The touriga was interesting and the reserve touriga was better; each might have been reasonable at half the price being charged ($20 and $30, respectively). The reserve viognier wasn't being tasted - if you wanted it, you had to buy it, at $5 a glass. More reasonable than the $45/bottle they were charging for it, I suppose. What was especially amazing was their publicity for this wine - they had banners and you could buy T-shirts heralding the reserve viognier, which had been named "Best White Wine in the U.S." by the 2003 Atlanta International Wine Summit. (By the what?) It also got a silver medal in this festival's judging. And the vineyard owner seems to think that pricing his wines high is a strong selling point. Okay, not to me - I think actual quality of the wines would make a better selling point. But maybe that's just me.

And the music was pretty poor. This wine festival is called the "Monticello Wine and Jazz Festival" and it had one guy with an acoustic guitar, singing 60's era hits. Fine for geezers like me, I suppose, but even I know that wasn't jazz. Still, it's a whole lot better than the bad country singers they've had for the past decade.