Winery Visit - Valhalla Vineyards

Entrance to the Vineyards

This past weekend I visited Valhalla Vineyards with four of my friends from the class. Valhalla is a small family owned vineyard in Roanoke, VA. I grew up ten minutes from Valhalla, but had never seen it before, so I was very excited to finally go. The vineyard is situated on a little mountain with the last few minutes of the drive there involving very windy little roads through orchards. Our first stop was the tasting room, called the "Cellar Door," which was built in 2003. The tasting room was very pretty, with nice views from the patio. There were a lot of people sitting on the patio eating food they brought, drinking the wine, and enjoying the views. The tasting room was fairly busy when we got there so we relaxed outside for a bit while we waited for our chance to taste. We went inside just in time for the clouds to descend on the mountain and for it to start raining. They had several different wines available for tasting, you could choose any five for $6 or eight for $10. I chose to do the five all white tasting. Below are the details on the wines that I tasted. All the wines are from grapes that they grew themselves. They sell their grapes, but they do not buy from other vineyards.

Tasting Room

View from Patio

1st wine:
Name: "Row Ten"
Variety: Chardonnay Viognier blend
Year: 2008
Price: $15

Valhalla's notes: Experimentation led us to this blend. Called the "best of both worlds" our classic Chardonnay and Viognier grapes are fermented then blended to produce a wine exploding with floral aromatics, with a clean crisp finish. 

My Review: This wine had an aroma of green vegetables and grass.  It was sweet at first taste with a citrus and tangerine mid palate and a vegetable finish.  It was crisp and light.  This was my favorite wine of all five.

2nd wine:
2008 Viognier
Price: $16

Valhalla's notes: Asuperior white wine with aromas of apricot and citrus. Stainless steel fermented since the 2004 vintage, Full Oak fermentation in 2002. Made in the French style of unfiltered wines, try with chicken, veal or pork.

My Review: This wine smelled very tropical, like pineapples, but with a slight rotten fruit aroma mixed in. After smelling it a couple times I began to detect the alcohol which made it smell a little bit like nail polish remover.  The taste was very tangy, with a really strong flavor of lemons. It seemed well balanced but it lacked any special flavors.  It just sort of seemed generic, to me.  

3rd wine:
Name: "Rheingold"
Variety: Reserve Chardonnay (Burgundian Style)
Year: 2005
Price: $24

Valhalla's notes: Our finest. In the sytle of French white Burgundy, full bodied with butteriness, flint and mineral in the mouth. Not made every year --- only in the best years!

My Review: This wine smelled very earthy.  It had a strong aroma of vegetables and dirt.  I could also detect some gasoline on the nose.  It tasted like green peppers, not the hot kind, and other green vegetables.  Overall, it was rather bitter.

4th wine:
2008 Rose
Price: $11

My Review: This wine had a very interested smell of rose water mixed with sea water.  It made me think of someone wearing rose water on a beach or at a fish market. It was very different from any other rose I've smelled before.  The taste was bitter and peppery, but also had flavors of dried vegetables.  It was very acidic, adding a lot of lemon flavor.

5th wine:
Name: "Late Harvest Viognier"
Variety: Viognier
Year: 2009
Price: $20

Valhalla's notes: Just sweet enough to love on its own. 

My Review: This wine smelled like apples, peaches and honey suckle. The taste was really, really sweet, like honey. It was even honey colored and had a thicker consistency than wine normally does (not as thick as honey of course). It had an incredibly big flavor and a very, very slight bite. It would be hard to drink very much of this wine at once.  But it was a very good dessert wine.

Glasses from the tasting and a bottle of Syrah

Award winning Late Harvest Viognier (sold in a split)

After tasting we went on a tour of the winery. Our tour guide gave us a lot of information about the vineyard and their wine-making process. As we were walking from the tasting room to the winery building our guide told us that  the land was purchased in 1992 by James and Deborah Vascik.  It was originally apple and peach orchards and it took two years to prepare for the vineyard, which was established in 1994. Their first vintage was in 1998. The vineyard is 2,000 ft in elevation, and is very similar to Sonoma Valley in terroir.  Red wine grapes grow particularly well  in the vineyard due to the decomposing granite in the soil.  This was the reason James and Debra picked this location. They wanted to bring good red wines to Virginia. There were about 55 wineries in Virginia when they built the winery and now there are around 120, but red wine is still under represented.

They harvest in the end of September and the beginning of October.  They can wait a little longer than most vineyards because the temperature on the mountain is often higher than average.  All the harvesting is done by hand by workers that live on the property and care for the vines year round.  During harvest they pick the grapes and sort them into bins then slide them down a wooden slide onto the roof of the winery building.  Then the grapes are poured into holes in the roof of the winery.  These holes lead to de-stemmers inside the building.  The grapes are then transferred into bins and stored five to eight days for reds and less for the whites.  Then the grapes are all mashed by hand, to reduce the number of seeds that are crushed in the mashing process. They believe that the oils released by the seeds in the mashing process causes the "red wine headache." After mashing the grapes go into oak to ferment.  They use natural fermentation in the French style in barrels that are 60 gallons each.

Sign on the way to winery building

Wooden slide to winery building

De-stemmers

In 2001 they built a cave for storing the barrels.  It took six months to build.  The cave remains 55 degrees naturally year round with 80% humidity.  It smelled very strongly of vinegar as soon as we walked in from all of the spilled wine on the floor.  The barrels are stacked in two rows along the sides of the cave and are rotated every so often.  The barrels are made of both American and French oak and are kept for 36 months before using.  They toast all their barrels there at the winery.  There were some kegs in the cave as well that are used to top off the barrels.

Barrel Cave

They used to have a company come in to bottle their wine, but became inconvenient since its difficult to know exactly when the wine will be ready to be bottled. So eventually they purchased their own bottling machine.  All the bottles come from France and they use cork because the owners are traditinalists. The wine making is mostly run by Debra Vasicik, who studied wine making in France. The winery can produce around 25,000 bottles a year and it is designed to be small enough for two people to run it. The bottles are stored in an artificially temperature controlled warehouse. They make 13 different varietals.

Viognier Vines

In the first few years of production, Valhalla only sold to small local wine shops. Then the laws for wine distribution in Virginia changed and they had to higher a distributor, since they could no longer distribute their own wine legally. Now their wines are sold in Kroger and other major food stores as well as the small wine stores, like Vintage Cellar.
When they were constructing the winery they uncovered a Buddha statue.  A friend of the owners told them that it would be bad luck to throw it away so they kept it and display it on a wall near the winery building and the bottle warehouse.

Buddha Statue

 Overall, the trip to Valhalla, the tasting, and the tour was a very fun experience. 

Picture of us after the tour