Virginia wine sales numbers steadily climbing

Thanks to the Virginia Wine Marketing Office -- through figures made available by the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) , here are the figures on sales from the first five months of 2008. This actually was in response to a question about how much the economny might be affecting wine sales in the state. What I don't have is a comparison, say, to the past two years at the same time.

Month VA Wine Sold VA Wine Sold
by Distributor by Wineries
January 9,437 6,156
February 9,332 9,782
March 11,100 10,161
April 12,374 16,685
May 14,848 22,043

Visitors welcome, but Paradocx tours on horizon

Work continues on putting the finishing touches on the new tasting room at Paradocx Vineyard in Landenberg, Pa. Melinda Sebastian, working in the tasting room at The Shoppes at Longwood Village, in Kennett Square, said yesterday she expects at some point that tours will begin at the winery. The room opened June 20.

Sebastian said it’s too early to tell how much more business the first tasting room on the grounds of the winery is bringing in, but added that she has received a number of calls while working in Kennett Square asking for directions and times. Located at 1833 Flint Hill Road, the winery expects to use the room for other activities, including weddings, concerts and private parties. Hours currently are noon to 5, Saturday and Sunday. The winery is a member of the Brandywine Valley Wine Trail.

Commercially selling since 2004, Paradocx lists a mix of the expected (Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio) and the less expected (Viognier and a blend called Leverage, a blend of Cab Sauvignon, Cab Franc and Petite Verdot). Eight wines are featured on the winery’s PDX label; two others under the Fruit 52 label, along with a small supply of Muscat Ottonel dessert wine. A total of 15 varieties are grown in the vineyard. It firsts tasting room was located on Route 52 in Fairville. That has since closed with the opening of the one at the winery.

You could write about its signature wine with a broad brush; its premium wine in a paint can was introduced last September and the uniqueness, sort of a takeoff on boxed wine, has made it an instant hit. The red and white table wine come in 3-liter bags that come housed inside a can. One hitch is duly noted on the winery’s home page, asking customers who bought can of Barn Red prior to last Dec. 19 to inspect the bag and make sure it hasn’t expanded. Some apparently have caused bulges in the sides and lid of the fan. Customers are asked to return any bad ones for replacements.

Sebastian said one of her favorites is the viognier, which is fermented in stainless steel and rolls onto the tongue hints of apricots, peaches and blossoms. Finally, she doesn’t expect the 2006 Pinot Grigio to stay on the shelves very long. “Judging by the way people reacted to it last year, it should sell real well,” she said. “They really liked it.”

Finding spot on wine list can be a tough sell

News of the designation as an American Viticultural Area (AVA) certainly was easy for members of the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail to digest. But that doesn’t mean that the word of pushing the brand is over, particularly when it comes to that region’s restaurants.

As co-owner Vickie Greff of Blue Mountain Vineyards & Cellars pointed out, the wineries are looking forward to “the restaurants in our area really supporting us. In other states they do,” she continued, “like in New York State. You can go in and a lot of the restaurants have New York state wines on the menu and they promote them, and they promote them to the point that they are a little less the California ones. We are starting to make some inroads . . . but it’s a tough road to hoe.”

Kevin Atticks, the director of the Maryland Wine Association, can relate.

“I think we’ve had fairly good luck with restaurants carrying Maryland wines,” he said earlier this week, “but it comes after significant effort on the part of the winery.” Every slot on a restaurant’s wine list, he said, “is extremely valuable, and for a winery to have to overcome all of the prejudices against everything but the top 20 or 30 brands that any restaurant knows will sell [is tough]. Other than through a hand sell, where a waiter would say, ‘Tonight we have a special, it’s a Sugarloaf Cabernet Franc and it’s local and it just won a double gold in the San Francisco wine competition, beating out the likes of bippity boppity, boo, it’s just not going to sell. And so that’s the problem that I think any winery but the top 50 brands have.”

When you have restaurants, he added, that are more interested in simply slotting the top 40 or 50 best sellers rather than showing any passion at all for surrounding wineries, they’re more than likely to “hand their list over to a national distributing company and say ‘make me a list,’ and if your winery’s not on a national catalogue then you’re not getting on. You’re just never getting on.”

There are exceptions. Atticks noted Corks Restaurant in downtown Baltimore carries several Maryland wines. That jogged my memory. One of the wines offered a couple of years ago in a library sale at Woodhall Wine Cellars in Parkton, Md., was a 2001 Chardonnay bottled special for Corks; the winemaker and his friends had a little fun by decorating each bottle with their handprints. Brandywine Prime Seafood and Chops in Chadds Ford, Pa., is another restaurant featured recently on this blog that makes a similar commitment to not on carrying wines from its region on the wine list but pushing them.

Greff would like to see the same attitude at more eateries in their area.

“They really have to make the commitment that they’re going to give up a little part of their profit but they are supporting a local winery and people like that,” she said. “So they’re going to make some goodwill there with customers. But it’s tough. I mean we’re in several restaurants around the area, but it’s not easy.

“And that’s kinda where we’re coming from with the wine trail, too. I mean, we’re getting to the point where if you want to be part of our Web site and stuff like that, then you need to support us. In order to be part of our wine trail book, you need to have Pennsylvania wine on it, Lehigh valley wine on it. Things like that. You know, we just feel that we’re really getting some recognition for our wines as a whole. For the trail we deserve that respect.

“There are restaurants that are starting to do that, and I think that’s going to happen more and more as people need a little niche to draw people to their restaurants, because there’s a lot of competition out there. People are looking for different things.”

AVA tastes great to Lehigh Valley wineries

The good news out of the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail?

After five years of pushing for it, the trail received the official designation on April 10 as the state’s fifth American Viticultural Area (AVA). That makes Lehigh Valley one of around 200 wine grape-growing regions in the country and the fifth in Pennsylvania.

The others include Lancaster Valley, Cumberland Valley (which combines parts of Washington County in Maryland and Franklin and Cumberland counties in Pennsylvania), Central Delaware Valley (which covers parts of Southeastern Pa.) and Lake Erie. These boundaries are defined by the U.S. Department of the Treasury Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).

In the Lehigh Valley it covers nine wineries, 13 vineyards and over 220 acres that have been set aside for viticulture. All told, it’s an area that amounts to 1,888 square miles and It means, essentially, that the area is officially recognized as a wine region and can label its wines accordingly, said Vickie Greff, co-owner of Blue Mountain Vineyards & Cellars. “At least 75 percent must come from the appellation in order to say Lehigh Valley wine [on the label],” she said, “which in the majority of cases our wines are from the Lehigh Valley. It’s pretty exciting, and it has really opened a lot of doors.”

How many doors it opens could well depend on how well the wine trail promotes its distinction. In a story written around the time of the announcement on appellationamerica.com, the outgoing president of the Pennsylvania Wine Association said educating the consumer about the meaning and importance of the designation must accompany any of these AVAs that are awarded.

“We are in the trenches, introducing people to wine,” said John Kramb. “If we use an AVA on our labels, we have to educate consumers as to why we are doing it and how it makes a difference in what they are drinking. The average consumer doesn’t understand that. We need to make sure our customers do.”

Learning never ends for Boordy's Deford

Our only trip from York to Boordy Vineyards in Hydes, Md., happened to be a Saturday late last spring that coincided with what we were told was going to be the final wedding that the winery was planning to host.

Who could blame anyone wanting to bring their ceremony and subsequent reception to the 230-acre farm, with its rolling hills and fences and vines as far as the eye can see? But Rob Deford, owner of the oldest family-owner winery in the state, said earlier today that the marriage with the wineries facilities just presented too many hurdles to overcome.

“We’re trying to get out of the wedding business, well, you know, we just want to redirect our energies, that’s all,” he said. “There is an infinite demand, it seems, for wedding venues, and we could make money that way, but it’s not really what we want to be doing. We do an awful lot of public outreach and we’ve found that weddings are just a little too far out on a . . . they’re one generation removed for why people should be here.. It’s because maybe it’s a pretty barn, I mean, you can draw the dotted lines and say it makes for great marketing and you’ll win lots of customers, but unless you’re really, really set up for it, you just plain don’t want to be in that business. What I mean is turnkey perfect. Otherwise it reflects poorly upon you, and I just don’t want to be doing things where each time we have to worry that it’s not going to be right. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the winery right for casual visitors and for the events that we hold that are more wine and music focused.”

Those will continue, Deford said, including the continuation of the Good Life Thursday concerts tomorrow at 4 and 8 p.m., and then the next installment of the Summer Evening Concerts on Saturday night from 7 to 9 p.m. The gates open at 5:45. By the way, check out the Web site to acquaint yourself with the detour you might have to take because of a bridge that’s closed for the summer. “The real sufferer is the hardware store down the street,” Deford said. “People find their way to get our wines, but they don’t seem to think they have to go there to get that lag screw they need. Now they’re going to Home Depot. Poor guy. He’s suffering.”

Boordy perhaps would be if it didn’t supplement its wines with the entertainment. Told I’ve encountered several wineries this year that have ditched its activities altogether with the intent instead of focusing on making wine, Deford sang out with a “don’t we all wish we could do that,” then expounded on the thought. “There are three aspects to sustainability, there’s the human aspect, the environmental aspect and then there’s that economic bit you got to sort out. For the first 10 years of my existence I . . . had two of the three figured out, but the economic part just kept haunting me in the wee hours of the morning. I have a lot of respect for people who can make a living out of farming generally but winemaking in particular. I think right next to being a playwright . . . it’s… tough. Everyone assumes that you’ve come in with a lot of capital and that you’re there to do the old thing of turning a large fortune into a small one. That doesn’t necessarily apply to all of us. So I feel what we’re really trying to do is learn as we go along what works and what doesn’t . . . continue to have a viable business while getting better and better at the things you really want to do.”

Still learning, he was asked? “Still earning, and this is why it’s multigenerational, why it’s so important. My son [Phineas], he’s 30 years old, and he’s going to come back and join the business, and that’s the future. It’s refining and passing along and then you start to feel more like a carrier of a message instead of the end user of it.”

Blue Mountain icewine takes some sting off heat

It’s mid-evening and still feeling like a blast furnace when you take a step out the door. That’s the perfect cue to begin a discussion on icewine, an ultraweet specialty that a few wineries in the region produce, including up at Blue Mountain Vineyards & Cellar in New Tripoli, Pa. The winery is a member of the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail.

Blue Mountain’s icewine was just bottled, and owner Vicki Greff said that the demand for their nectar has kept her ear glued to the receiver ever since. “We’ve had it less than a week, and I’ve already sold several cases just at our stores with people making reservations,” she said. “I spent the whole evening the other night at our Coventry Mall store just calling people that were on the list. ‘I want eight bottles, I want five bottles, I want three bottles.' It’s the kind of thing that it’s very, very popular and high in demand.”

Blue Mountain imports its juice from Canada. Greff said that her husband Joe, the winemaker, adds his own touch to the production on the icewine, which sells for $44.50 for a small bottle. “I’m not a sweet wine person,” Vicki said, “but our icewine is very special. My husband uses a certain yeast, it almost has a little bit of dryness in the finish. Like a lot of icewines are all honey. Ours has a lot of apricot in the finish, so when you have it the way I was telling you, it’s just excellent.”

She suggested a variation on what’s generally considered a dessert wine. “How I love it is not even with dessert,” she said. “You can have it as a dessert wine. Some people rave about it over ice cream, and it is very good over ice cream. I’ve heard of an ice wine martini, and I’ve also done desserts with it, done it with some sort of pear and put some Gorgonzola cheese in it, and then like walnuts on top and then bake it in the oven kind of thing. But how I love ice wine is very cold, in the proper glass, an aperitif, and I love it with a very strong blue cheese, bosc pears, very crisp, very cold, and I like to take walnuts and put some nutmeg and cinnamon and cayenne and put them in the oven with a little olive oil, and toss them in the olive oil and just bake them off a little bit, and then just chomp on that for dessert, and that is my dessert. I love it.

“And that’s actually [what we’ll serve with it] if we ever [have it for a tasting]. We can’t do the pears because they get all brown, but we do the walnuts and the blue cheese, and we’re kind of known for that.”

Certain about what would accompany the icewine, Vicki was less certain about whether they’ll even put the 2007 vintage out to be tasted. “The demand is so high and we go through it so fast that we’re not sure what we’re going to do yet, whether or not we’re going to taste it," she said. "We’re just kind of kicking it around, how much we’ve already run through just form people reserving it. The stores are already calling in for replenishment. So it’s like, ‘OK, maybe we won’t taste it.' We don’t want to be out before the word really gets out there. If we do, we’ll have to charge $3 a taste, but you know what, people will pay it. But that’s what we’re going to have to charge.”

Black Ankle pushes opening back a month or so

We've written at length about Black Ankle Vineyards in Mt. Airy, Md., a winery that has made a lot of news despite not even opening its doors to the public as yet. As one who checks as many Web sites as possible of wineries throughout the region, I noticed this note on the Black Ankle home page that I wanted to share with you:

"Our Tasting Room Construction is progressing steadily, but not quite as fast as we had hoped. Although we had hoped to be open by late July, our current best estimate for when we will be able to open our doors for sales and tastings, is mid-August. We will post opening days and hours here once we have them! If you would like to be notified by email when we open, and receive our occasional updates and news please join our Friends of Black Ankle email list."