… or is that barrel tasting. I forget after the 11th sample.
Today we spent a lovely day at the case club barrel tasting at Linden Vineyards.
I think everyone here knows I love Linden wines. I even have a tag in my tag clouds for them.
We have been collecting their wines for 20 years. They will drink beautifully for 10-15 years and some of them for 20. We drank our last 1990 a while back, still hanging in there.
The barrel tasting today was on a dull rainy day, not the lovely spring day we wished for.
No one out on the patio. After the tasting we ended up inside by the stove.
We tasted barrel samples of the three designated sourced Avenius, Hardscrabble, and Boisseau chardonnays. Plus the claret blend, all vintage 2011. There will be no designated reds this year, due to the huge amount of rain that we all experienced last September. The reds didn’t come to potential and will be mostly blended.
Wines from 2011 include the recently released Rose, which is made from the merlot.
We started out up in the new tasting room, the site of special events. We tasted a newly released sauvignon blanc with broiled mussels.
It has a view down into the tank room where we were tasting the claret sample. I took a couple of pics down there but in the darker venue didn’t want to use flash to bother people, and they didn’t turn out well.
Still, the whites will be good, decent wines, well made as usual. The 2008 and 2009 designated red wines were tasted side by side with very tasty paired food items from the Ashby Inn in Paris VA.
We also had a charcuterie board from Croftburn Market in Culpeper VA Their sausage made with fennel was really nice.
All in all, a lovely day, even though the weather did not cooperate. They have the most commanding view of the mountains, so I will leave you with a view from the patio a week ago, when it wasn’t raining.
AnnieRie Unplugged 