Virginia Wine Expo 2023
We planned our trip to the 2023 Virginia Wine Expo way in advance with a group of friends to include taking Amtrak from Ashland to Richmond’s Main Street Station where the event was being held (with the idea of ubering back home) - seemed like a great idea even though they were about 10 minutes late in boarding us…two+ hours later (thanks to a CSX snafu - argh!), we finally arrived downtown - we missed our Master Class, Tour of the Southern Rhone With La Ferme du Mont’s Winemaker, Stephane Vedeau, and Bartholomew Broadbent and were about 90 minutes behind the Walk-Around Grand Tasting, so we had to quickly get to the booths we had on our must try list. Lucky for us, the first one was Broadbent Selections and to our delight, Bartholowmew Broadbent literally got us “back on track” - he poured many of the wines that were for the seminar only and made it an amazing tasting experience! We loved all these wines from La Ferme Du Mont, but personal favorite was the 2017 Vendange Châteauneuf-du-Pape Rouge - super smooth with dark rich berry - no doubt would go nicely with the Cocoa Creek Chocolates we bought, plus makes us want to take another trip to France!
Time to taste the VA Wines now……next up was Barboursville - unfortunately they did not have their Gold winning Fiano or Vermentino, but the reds they brought were excellent as usual - favorite of the taste was the Nebbiolo. Continued on to King Family who had a wonderful, bubbly Brut Rose and their Chardonnay (IMHO best Chardonnay in VA). Moving right along we visited with Nick from Pollak (we are wine club members here, so always a lot of fun!) Love their Cab Franc and Petit Verdot - go visit them and check out the award winning Meritage! Made a stop at Jefferson’s booth - they had two Gold winners in their ‘21 Petit Manseng and ‘19 Meritage. Sought out a new to us winery, Eastwood Farm, also Gold winners and women owned! Gotta love that - super enjoyed tasting their wines and getting to know the owner - they will definitely be on our next tour of the Monticello WineTrail!
Feels like we missed a LOT of booths between the ones we knew we wanted to visit and not being able to hit them all - a few notables were Notaviva and their unique packaging, plus a curated booth of Bordeaux wines. But, our evening would not be complete if we didn’t stop at Birdie’s booth. Not just for a taste of the pimento cheese, but to meet Birdie in person - she made our New Year’s Day with her awesome varieties of Birdie’s Pimento Cheese and navigated us to where we could purchase - we are hoping to get our local store in Ashland to start carrying a few!!
We have a lot of wineries on our list to visit now so we can do some more tasting and bring home the ones we want most. For those we can’t get to in-person - think we’ll be placing a few orders at our local wine store to get for us!!
Cheers - Cin Cin - Sante - Slainte!!!
See below for a full line-up of the exhibitors - hoping next year we see more VA Wineries and more food options - we will NOT be taking the train next time!!
