Too many Virginia wine events?

The title is somewhat facetious, but it can be quite confusing tracking events when Virginia is now replete with wine events. It certainly confused me as we headed out to what we thought was the Virginia Wine Festival this weekend. Last year's festival was held at the Fairfax County Fairgrounds, which was awful in many respects. Earlier this summer I received an email announcing that the wine festival was moving back to the Plains near Middleburg. Except it wasn't the Wine Festival we were used to; rather it was wine and polo at the Plains. And none of our favorite wineries (Barboursville, Am Rhein, Keswick, Chrysalis, Veritas, etc) were there. Frankly, most of the wineries were not very good at the Wine Festival at the Plains, but there was at least one rough gem we discovered. Gabriele Rausse, one of the original founders of Barboursville and Jefferson Vineyards, was there in person to sell his new wines under his own name.

As soon as I saw Gabriele, I knew he was a real old-world wine maker. Wearing a sweater over his button down shirt and with his jeans, his hands spoke of decades spent in the fields. The experience shows in his new venture that clearly outshone the others there. Both his reds and his whites are very good, including a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Touriga, the basic bianco, and a Trefosco, which is a little-grown, and little-known, grape from the upper northeast of Italy near the border with the former Yugoslavia. Not everything works perfectly, but I'm sure more time will lead to better wines. And Gabriele is passionate about using french oak for his aging, despite the expense (upwards of $1000 a barrel). We bought several bottles of each.

And so, it's on to the "real" festival this coming weekend to see some old friends...