Stomping through the Wineries

Two bags of Peanut M&Ms from the gas station, a shared bottle of Aquafina, a touring guide to Loudoun County wineries, and we were off to get a quick handle on the whole “wine thing” that everyone talks about but that we snarked-off as a bit too snobby for our down-to-earth sensibilities.  We thought our tastes had already moved up considerably from the days of Everclear punch and flat beer in red Solo cups when we up-scaled to the expensive bar shots of Patrón and Grey Goose.  Frankly, our experience with wine was limited to “Three-Buck Chuck”and Manischewitz at my mom’s house twice a year. Clearly we knew better than those haughty folks who hauled their cookies all over the place to “become one” with the grape. After all, wine is wine, right?

On the one day this month that Erin and I both have off together, we were both dead set on doing something other than our usual piling of shopping carts with projects we’ll never actually finish from Michael’s and The Home Depot. With the thought of adventure spurring us on we set out for a great adventure in the wilderness. Not actually being the super adventurous types we looked for something just far enough outside of D.C. to have cows and suitably romantic dusty back roads, but that would also still leave enough time in the day to stop at the mall in Tysons for a quick Cinnabon and then on to a movie about a raccoon and tree that help guard the galaxy.

We headed to the northern tip of Loudoun County on Route 9. Erin drove, I fell asleep and Google navigated us through a couple of short life lessons that went a long way in establishing that we were the real wine snobs.

Our first stop was the Corcoran Winery. There is a zero snooty factor about the place. Erin even used the word “charming” out loud before catching herself.  The folks hanging out at the winery seemed totally without the pretension that we had previously, and now to our mutual chagrin, derisively projected onto all those we saw as the high-born bourgeois wine-swirling and goblet-sniffing crowd.

This place was exactly what we didn’t know we needed. After walking past the rows of vines, a good number of picnic tables and ponds appeared. At the tables were folks just hanging out as if they were in some hyper-glorious rural backyard. The vibe was definitely laid-back but not sleepy. Just a few feet away stands a small, super-rustic tasting house where the people working behind the bar actually seemed to enjoy the wine they poured and the people they were pouring for. The various groups “tasting” that day included a thirty-something woman and her friends enjoying a low-key birthday celebration; another group getting ready to go to a Nat’s game; and in the corner, a cluster of three friends huddled together and shaking-off a bit of city angst before heading into a new work week.  Corcoran’s tasting room is by no means a fancy place. T-shirts, shorts and sandals seemed the outfit for the day.  It hurts a little to say, but the wine we tasted there left the “Three-Buck Chuck” and the Manischewitz we thought of as wine, as firmly displaced as the grain alcohol punches and the bad frat house beer of earlier years. We even began thinking about where in our house we could build a kinda-sorta wine rack from the wood I bought on our last outing to Home Depot for the closet shelves we both knew I’d never really get to.

Our next stop was the Crushed Cellars winery, a small boutique winery that puts out about 1,500 cases of wine from their ten acres of land. The affable owner Bob Kalok gave us a bit of a tour and showed us the actual grape part of the process as he made his way to feeding the koi in one of the winery’s ponds. We walked among the vines and while not quite Provence, by the last row Erin and I were holding hands and talking about getting out of town more often, maybe to a bed and breakfast. For God’s sake, this place even had a dog sleeping on the floor in the sun and folks sipping their wine on a terrace while over-looking the grapes that would find their way into the next batch. There was something about the serenity that seemed to seep through the place. We didn’t feel like strangers in a strange land. We were among friends we didn’t know an hour before and when we left, we left with a case of wine and no desire to get that Cinnabon. If we did rush out, it was to get home and start building that wine rack that Erin was already sketching out on the back of the Wine Touring Guide.