It's Not Napa, but It's Near

The sommelier steered us away from a red we had sampled earlier at Barboursville -- no surprise, since even the folks there had told us it still needed a few years to mature -- and onto another red from the Veritas Winery west of Charlottesvile, the 2005 Petit Verdot. It went wonderfully with both my Veal Parmesan Reincarnated and his Beef Two Ways.

To sort of keep to our Virginia theme, we had an Italian pinot grigio with our first and second courses. I assured my husband that, without a doubt, it would sort of remind him of the local pinot grigio we had tasted a few hours earlier.

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After a few years as Washington innkeepers, Michelle Schwartz and her husband, Gary, have become experts on what all those anniversary celebrants -- their house was full of them -- should do in and around Rappahannock County after they've had that big dinner. Where to hike? Shenandoah National Park, of course. Where to eat dinner if you're staying a second night? Four and Twenty Blackbirds in Flint Hill.

And how about some more wineries? For this, Michelle handed out photocopied directions to Rappahannock Cellars and then, via unpaved back road, to Linden Vineyards, two of her favorites.

Both are pleasant places that lure you to relax, chat a bit, maybe have a picnic in the shade. Linden has tables under the trees and a deck where you can eat warm baguettes and wedges of local cheese while you sip your by-the-glass or by-the-bottle wines. It's just a short hop back onto Interstate 66, so it would be a perfect end-of-the-weekend stop.

But we had other spots on our to-do list first, including the bison farm and the meadery.

We're fans of the buffalo hot dogs from Cibola Farms outside Culpeper, but the farm hasn't been selling them at Eastern Market this spring. So a Virginia trip had to include a 15-mile detour to Cibola. While we waited for the guy who knew how the computerized sales system worked, one of the bison wranglers (you wouldn't call him a cowboy, would you?) explained how they rotate the beasts from field to field so they can eat free-range without ruining the land.

I had also promised a mead stop. Mead is wine made of honey. It's what Vikings and others who quaffed rather than sipped favored.

John Hallberg, the proprietor of Smokehouse Winery, up a steep wooded road near Sperryville, serves samples of his mead in a thatched-roof tasting house. He grows vegetables in a kitchen garden and raises bees nearby. He's not a very talkative guy, at least with strangers, but he's generous with tastes of his sweet, smoky product, more a liqueur than some uppity vino.

Also, he sells it for about $15 for an extremely cool-looking skinny black bottle. When we visited, he hadn't quite gotten around to pasting the labels on the current crop, which meant the bottles looked even cooler, if that's possible.

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Bill Gadino, the owner of Gadino Cellars in Rappahannock County, was talking wine with a visitor who said he worked at a California winery. They discussed grape varieties and Gadino's month-old Nebbiola vines, while the Californian did that thing where you swirl the wine by moving the base of the wine glass around the counter. As far as I could tell by eavesdropping, the visitor said all the polite things you would expect a guest to say.

At the same time, I was trying to pay attention to Mary, the friendly former Hill staffer who was pouring my tasting portions and pointing out the hint of peach in the winery's 2005 Reserve Viognier. We chatted about eating at the inn and about how that Viognier really would be good with seafood.

And, as the warm Virginia sun beat down on those young vines outside, it struck me that the bumper sticker on the wall behind the tasting counter was just a bit too defensive:

"Virginia makes wine. Napa makes auto parts."