Winery Visit #1 - WhiteBarrel Winery - Apr. 17, 2016

Today I visited the WhiteBarrel Winery in southwest Virginia, only 25 minutes from the great campus of Virginia Tech. I brought along my roommate and best friend Shaan Sharma and he brought along his girlfriend Laura Freas. We decided to do a wine tasting and a tour of the facilities. First we will look at the wine tasting what they had to offer in general. The tasting features 9 wines that where all pretty good. There was a nice range of white to red and dry to sweet wines. The winery is located in the driest part of Montgomery County making for the great wines. 

First we tried white wines. The menu can be seen on the left. For the whites we tasted 5 different types:

1) Vidal Blanc: This was a very earthy with green herbs type of smell. It had a great goldenish color. It smelled clean and collected that wouldn't offer too much fruity flavor. That is exactly how it tasted. With no residual sugar it was a delight and slightly dry finish.

2) Vidal Blanc Reserve: This is the same wine as above but aged longer in barrels. It had an air of orange but really smelled like grandma's perfume or something similar. It also had a very strange orange color that is not typical of whites. The taste was the same as a perfume that tingles on the pallet. All I have to say was that it was interesting.

3) Bin 704: This one had a stone fruity aspect to it with citrus creeping out. It was sweeter than the other wines with a nice light body feel. It also features a nice dry finish to it.

4) Bin 997: This was said to be a blush style wine with a nice raspberry color. The guide had also said that the vines grow near raspberry plants giving it a distinctive raspberry smell to them. It tasted just like raspberry jam or juice. But to my taste too sweet for my pallet.

5) Bin 127: This was the so called desert wine that was way too sweet for my dry pallet. It had a strong scent of mango but in reality wasn't to bad. It reminded me of a summer day that you would be chilling by the pool and drinking.

Now we move on to the red wine selection. First, I'd like to point out the photo we took at the bar while tasting the wines. Bellow that picture is the menu for the red wine selection. We tried 4 different types:

1) Bin 260: This was a nice golden red color with a nice smooth dry finish with a forward taste of raspberry and cherry. It was quite good and tame.

2) Cabernet Franc: This was an interesting one as it features a semi-filtered process which means there is still some sediment in the bottle. The smell was quite funky! It was oaky and vanilla-ish. The taste was funky as well with an intense smokey and black pepper flavor that tingled on the tongue. I think this wine was modeled after Old World Wine that require food to enjoy fully.

3) Cabernet Sauvignon: This was a favorite in my mind. It displayed a nice dark cherry and blackberry sniff. It was soft but not as soft as most Cab. Sauv's I am accustomed to.

4) Chambourcin: The last wine was very good. It featured some earthy characteristics with a nice black current aspect. It featured soft tannins that made for a nice dry finish.

Next we embarked on a tour through the vines and the fermentation facility. The owners started in 2005 by fermenting grapes in their basement and offering wine tastings in their own living room! Later in 2010 they build the winery location for having people visit and enjoy their wines. So this is a fairly new winery. The grapes are harvested yearly in June by volunteers and staff of the winery.

The wines are then brought into a big shed where the grapes are smashed and put into plastic containers to be fermented for how every long is needed. Some of the wines also go through a second post fermentation process in wooden barrels.

The only thing the winery doesn't do on their own is the botteling process. This is taken care of by a truck service that takes the ready wine and bottles it on sight whenever it is needed. Usually they only bottle once or twice a year depending on how the harvest that year went or how much money they have made that season for the bottling process.

After the tour we decided to sit down and enjoy a couple glasses of wine with some food. We ordered some gnocchi, seared artichoke and lastly smoked goat cheese. They were all very delicious plates and the wine actually went very well with the food. We enjoyed the sun and had a great time just relaxing and trying some pretty decent wine. I would definitely recommend this winery as it is a great atmosphere and they have a very large selection of wines to choose from. It is a place that me and my friends will definitely go back to for more food and enjoyment.