On the Trail of the Grape

As a barman, I do not get to travel for my wine-related work. Yet I’m often thinking of maps and countryside. My wine information comes largely through importers, the people who fly to France, hire a driver, visit wine regions, taste, buy, ship.

A good importer’s website, like that of local Wine Traditions – offering excellent wine, often from off the beaten paths – yields condensed information, pictures, a general sense of land, grape, grower and wine. Wine importers tell great stories, and, of course, to find good wine, there is nothing like paying a visit to a promising vineyard.

The sommeliers who do get to travel are another source of information. The excellent Facebook page of Julian Mayor, sommelier of Bourbon Steak, reveals extensive far-flung travels to wine regions of note (which some of the rest of us look upon with envy). There are pictures of distant lands, tasting rooms, vineyards, wine-making operations. The rest of us get to taste, if we’re lucky; Julian visits in person, learning all the while.

One might even garner a good general sense of things watching the Tour de France on television, as the aerial coverage will quite often linger over chateau and vineyard. You can see the lay of the land, how vines fit in.

Wine books are, for good reason, filled with pictures, with detailed geological maps down to the layers of soil underneath.

The grape must be a wise creature. Its lives attract us, country boy or not. One too-hot-to-move summer day in D.C. an out-of-town friend coaxes me to come along on a trip to the Virginia wine country, and as soon as we are out on the hillside of Three Foxes, yes, I get it. Further on, we make an enjoyable visit to Linden, simply refreshing. We are a part of the land again, understanding the human scale in nature’s surroundings.

And then there are the pros at this, people who’ve developed an interest in wine organically over the years of their careers, who then combine talents to offer for the rest of us wine tours of the most intelligent, circumspect and rewarding kind. Annette and Christian Schiller of Ombiasy PR and Wine Tours are a husband-and-wife team, organizer and blogger respectively, with a shared passion.

So where, to what fresh air, do you want to go? And with whom would you like to travel?