Wine Internship
Process and principle
The latest from Orange…
Stimulating week with the season tipping decidedly in favor of autumn:
early morning on Friday a massive aerial formation of geese circled the cornfields around Orange, Virginia, a rural railroad junction where I will live during harvest 2014.
Once again, an Ollie North connection.
Dennis Horton, a businessman who made his money selling office equipment to the Pentagon, is a wreck, they say. After setting up RDI in DC, he started in Orange County with a small cabin. Over the next 25 years he and his wife Sharon, a tough Missouri farm girl, built a substantial enterprise making and selling Horton Vineyards wine.
They say Dennis sold Ollie a piece of newly invented office equipment that drew attention of the Federal authorities later.
A paper shredder.
Dennis resisted pressure and threats from federal prosecutors, and the insinuation that the sale implicated him personally.
They also say he needs a liver transplant due to wine, but perhaps not wine alone. Unfortunate combination, driving and that sort of personality.
To arrive at Horton Vineyards from Leesburg, the road south and west passes names any student of Civil War histories knows well: Gordonsville, Culpeper, Orange, Cedar Run, the Rapidan River. Along the piedmont roadside in an otherwise innocently rolling and deserted landscape, there are white enameled iron marker signs describing, as they call it here, “...the late unpleasantness...”, or more pointed “The War of Northern Aggression”.
I have no need for textbooks: there are family letters of the day describing the Virginia campaign, the desolation of Virginia farmland turned raw battlefield, and the creeping subconscious association of Virginia with death in a firefight.
The back roads between Culpeper and Gordonsville develop a haunting character this time of year: the confrontation between a federal army and “seccesh” rebels numbering about 20,000 seems unthinkable in this fertile August landscape.
Quiet, patient farmland mostly in weeks before harvest, is all.
On August 9th one hundred fifty two years back (1862), this clash became known to future generations as the Battle of Cedar Mountain.
I passed the roadside marker several times and have a mental note to return for a more leisurely stop when harvest is over. To the east is Wilderness, and Chancellorville, but these are beyond the horizon of ripening corn and hedgerows.
Week one is past and I am back home at farm in Leesburg for the weekend at least.
I walked out to the car after dinner last night. The season’s late fireflies provided the only illumination, and the crickets and frogs lend the home farm its ambience. Made me wonder whether “they” heard the same in the August night all those years back the night before Cedar Mountain.
Good to be home from Gordonsville where we spent the week cleaning, repairing and generally pulling supplies and tools together for the first allotment of 10 tons of grapes that will be picked Monday and rendered into champagne-like viognier sparkling wine Tuesday.
I know this grape well: the Virginia state grape and a challenge to grow.
Got a room next to Holladay House, a bed and breakfast in “downtown” Orange, Virginia, a few doors upstreet from the courthouse, the churches. Across the street is a fine little Charleston-style southern park with brick walled garden and fountain. A dozen miles gets me to work.
Taylor Park was given by family and dedicated to two American presidents from Orange: Zachary Taylor and James Madison who shared grandparents. Two seems excessive for a town not much larger than the two strip malls that flank the courthouse and the modest antebellum train station passed by CSX every few hours without a stop.
Fortunately next to the station is a comfortable expresso bar and storefront eatery called “Lightwell”. Imagine I will get to know the waitress and owner better as it is a place to spread out notes uninterrupted on a table over a glass of Horton vidal blanc or
Barboursville pinot grigio.
Across the street is Mosby Antiques where the owner knows, and sells, local history: rusted bayonets, fine muskets and Ames cavalry sabers, but I will have to do more when there is time, than squinting in the dusty windows.
After one or two trips into Orange from the winery to pick up paint, small farm tools and other chores, I believe I have met the greater part of the Orange business community.
Or at least the families: seems that Jim Tucker, who owns the paint store, must be kin to Tucker Veterinary clinic a half mile down the road, and so on....
More as this adventure develops...