Alt-Dominion

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Virginia's Piedmont
Charming rural communities in Virginia's Piedmont region, roughly between Middleburg and Charlottesville, are filling up with formerly big city residents, with high-paying jobs, who can now work wherever they can stay connected.

This new culture is all about juxtapositions. Within 20 minutes of Duvall's farm there are three stages outfitted at levels that would delight many Off-Broadway theaters. These include the $6 million Rice Theater complex at Highland School in Warrenton, with its killer 32,000-watt surround-sound system; the $2.5 million extravaganza at Hill School in Middleburg donated by Sheila C. Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television; and the Fauquier Community Theatre at Vint Hill.

Far more important to Duvall than that, though, is that it's a place where he has made important human connections.

It's a place, he says, with "some of the best horsemen in America. You speak with humility when you are a horseman here." It's a place where his wife could give him, as a special Christmas present, "a young colt, half Andalusian, one-quarter Arab, one-quarter thoroughbred. Very smart." The colt, Manu, came from the nearby farm of Alan Geoffrion, who boards, breeds and trains horses. Duvall encouraged Geoffrion to write his first novel, "Broken Trail," which they made into a TV movie starring Duvall. It just premiered on AMC, setting a ratings record for the cable network. "My friendship with him was the catalyst that made the whole thing happen," Duvall says.

New kinds of connections mean new kinds of problems, however.

The Talk of the Town

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Fifty miles west of Washington, in Warrenton, Va., population 8,295, the Arby's just shut down.

It has been replaced by a Starbucks. The town's third.

Didn't use to be this way. This is a county that still has almost as many cattle and horses as people. One of its landmarks is Clark Bros. Guns, with the life-size bear on the roof and the firing range out back. As recently as the late 1970s, the only place in the entire county to buy fresh fish was from the guy who sold it out of the back of his pickup truck on Saturday morning.

Nowadays, the Safeway recently underwent a "lifestyle remodel," expanding its wine section to 115 aisle-feet with 1,200 varieties. It competes with a similarly stocked Giant. Yet Warrenton has just seen the opening of its fourth wine and gourmet shop.

It is called the Galloping Grape and it is the talk of the town not just because, back behind the railroad tracks, in the building that used to house the Warrenton Farmers Coopfeed store, it offers hunks of Basque sheep cheese for $23.25 and wines from everyplace from South Africa to local Virginia vineyards.

The big deal is that it primarily smells of leather.

What it mostly sells is $700-to-$1,700 big, wide, comfortable Western saddles, as well as cowboy boots, hats and tack.

Kim Pinello, its proprietor, admits that the Galloping Grape may seem an odd combination.