October is Virginia Wine Month and to kick off the month in style, the Virginia Tourism Board invited me to a wine tasting and Tweet-Up called Vintage Tweets. I’m going to have a full recap of the event in the next few days (in the meantime you can check out the tweets at #vawinemonth). Today though I thought I’d share 10 fun facts about Virginia Wine that I learned last night. Did you know:
1. Williamsburg Winery is Virginia’s largest and Mountain Cove Vineyard is the oldest winery (est. 1973)
2. One million visitors each year include a trip to a winery as part of their Virginia vacation.
3. Each Jamestown settler was required to grow and tend to 10 grape vines to make wine
4. Virginia has 148 wineries, 12 wine trails and 6 American Viticulture Areas.
5. Norton is Virginia’s native grape and is the oldest varietal in North America (Chrysalis Vineyards had a great Norton that I tasted at the event)
6. Travel +Leisure magazine recently named Virginia one of five up and coming wine regions in the world.
7. There are 15 million acres of fall foliage in Virginia. A trip to a few of your favorite VA wineries is a great time to check out all this beautiful foliage.
8. 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Virginia is for Lovers campaign and 9 wineries made special anniversary labels for their wines to commemorate the occasion.
9. Barboursville Vineyards served two wines at an inauguration ball for President Obama. Barboursville wines were also served to the Queen of England when she visited Virginia in 2007 for the 400th anniversary of the settling of Jamestown.
10. The first Virginia Wine Month was in 1988.
This month, I’m going to serve up a lot of great wine content in honor of Virginia Wine Month and have a couple series in mind to keep things interesting. Let me know if you have any suggestions for topics that you’d like to see me cover.
Cheers!
