My 30th Vintage: Making wine wine wine Spodie-Odie.

Originally published August 26, 2009 at 4:45pm

Yesterday was the beginning of my 30th wine making season. I had decided I was not going to make wine this year, just to make a little room in my bank account, my house (which is over-run by wine making equipment and the fermenting and aging products of my endeavors), and my personal time schedule. But fate and my friends would not let it be. They swamped me with offers of free grapes in exchange for the use of my winery equipment, or my expertise, or my blessings.

Yesterday morning I drove about 30 miles east to Bill Duggan's vineyard to help him harvest his Seyval Blanc. Bill is a 70-year-old Marine vet who, along with his wife, Norma, and their nephew have built a beautiful and productive vineyard, as well as a small personal winery, complete with a cellar for fermenting and aging. When I arrived there this morning, Bill, to my shame, had already completed harvesting his Seyval, and the harvest lugs were stacked neatly in the cold room in the wine house. Together we crushed and pressed, and Bill gave me the gallons of juice he had offered me because he just wanted to see what I would make of it. The "numbers" were wonderful, and the grapes looked fantastic. This would be another excellent Virginia vintage, I thought.

When I first began making wine from Virginia grapes, it was a totally new experiment being carried out by a few brave, far-sighted, and highly frustrated people to grow Old World wine grapes here in the steamy South. When the harvest came, the grapes were covered with bunch rot and the birds and bees and hornets had turned much of the juice to vinegar. And yet there were a few of us who pushed on trying each year to make the best possible wine we could from whatever Vitis vinifera or French-American hybrids we could get our hands on.

Now it has become completely routine to get excellent grapes--although I remember as recently as 2003 and 2004 having to dump out hundreds of liters of wine because the vintage had produced graoes incapable of being turned into wine.

Seyval blanc is a French American hybrid grape that was developed by French horticulturalists in the late 19th century in order to save the French wine industry from the vine plague called the phyloxerra louse. Many of these hybrid grapes, genetic crosses of Native American grapes (generally agreed to not be worthy of wine making) and the Old World wine grape, Vitis vinifera, have proven capable, with proper treatment, to make world-class wines, both in France and in the US.

SO yest I helped to harvest, crush and press a few hundred pounds of Seyal blanc, and to appease the wine goddesses, last night I drank a fine Virginia example of the wine made from this grape variety. My few gallons of juice are now sitting in refrigerator #3 in my garage. Today I siphoned the juice off the sediments and tossed in an actively fermenting culture of a special yeast I have chosen to give me a certain austerity in the final bone-dry table wine.

And before that In spent hours cleaning and sanitizing my crusher and press, awaiting many hundred pounds of Chardonnay to arrive, along with the man who grew the grapes, to use my equipment and learn from me how to treat the sweet juice to turn it into excellent wine.

I wasn't planning on making any wine this year, but as I sit here tonight, sipping a glass of very fine Virginia Chardonnay, I wonder what the heck was I thinking when I made that stupid decision. So, to the wine goddesses, and to 30 years of turning grape juice into wine....Salud!