Shenendoah Wine Country

I took my four-year-old son hiking in Shenandoah National Park this past weekend. It was vigorous, beautiful, sweaty, green and rocky and intense. It was nothing like the hiking that we normally do on the flat Eastern Shore trails at Tuckahoe State Park and Pickering Creek. It was foreign in layout and design. The trails were full of massive, sharp rocks, seeming at once threatening and yet acting as benevolent memory markers constantly proclaiming: You are not Home. You are Away. Breathe it in, carry it with you. We drove Skyline Drive to mile marker 49.4, where we stopped to park off the road. We crossed over to the junction of a horse trail and a vehicle fire trail, and checked our map to see which would bring us quickest to Rose River Falls. My son has a brave, adventurous heart, but, alas, he is only four with short little legs, so I have to temper his bravery with common sense. Were I on my own, I would have hiked the entire four-mile-plus circuit trail, but with my little guy, we opted for the two-mile-plus trail that took us down and back along the same strip. We hiked down, down, down with my knees complaining painfully but silently most of the way. I ignored it, as I always do since I love hiking more than thinking about knee pain. We heard the traveling water some time before we saw it. We stopped in the forest, we listened intensely, and heard the whisper grow fuller and louder with each step closer to the source. The falls were gentle, despite their noise. They were composed of multiple runs over small breaks, moving quickly over the sharp and slippery rocks in the stream. We followed along on the bank, then moved in closer where the vegetation broke. We stood watching, just inches from the stream. My son, always rule-bound, announced, "We can't go in the water. We can just look." When I replied with, "Says who?", he nearly fell over with shock and anticipation. We stripped off socks and shoes, and tiptoed into the cold water.

The next day, rested from our strenuous post-Falls hike back up the mountain (and our embarrassing collapse into the stream that resulted from climbing on the slippery rocks!), we were ready for something quiet and calm. I explained to my son that, as with his toys, life experiences sometimes require the taking of turns. We had done several things on our trip that he wanted to do, and now I wanted to visit a vineyard for a wine tasting. It was time to take turns. He understood this logic, if grudgingly, so we headed off to Cave Ridge Vineyards in Mount Jackson, VA. We had passed three highway signs for vineyards during the day, and chose Cave Ridge merely for proximity. I entered the property with high hopes. The view was stunning. It was, again, that perfect, welcome reminder: You are not Home. You are Away.

There was live music playing as we squeezed into the last available parking spot in the lot. Besides two bored-looking 10-year-oldish boys breaking sticks at the edge of the lot, there were no children around. I felt a guilty twinge, wondering if I were breaking some kind of Good Parenting law by dragging my preschooler to a winery. I ignored it, and we walked across the courtyard into the tasting room. I celebrated the lone chair sitting strangely in the middle of the room, and situated my son into it with his Nintendo DS. (THIS is why we bought him that gadget, I thought! To give us the occasional much-needed grownup reprieve!) He clicked it on, and I walked happily to the bar with the muted sounds of electronic lightsaber zappings chattering from his chair. 

Cave Ridge had a wonderful array of wines to sample in their Standard Tasting that included five whites and four reds. Nine wines for the sweet fee of six dollars! There was an option to throw in four more for an extra two dollars, but that niggling bit of parental shame wouldn't allow me to go quite that far, and then drive us home on the bouncing, steep mountain roads. I stuck with the nine sampler, and found that several of the whites were stunning. The reds just weren't my style. They were spicy and peppery with notes much too strong for my taste. The whites, however, were just the kind I like: sweet but dry, not too sweet, not too bland. The big winner was the Traminette. It was devine! Just slightly sweet, just slightly dry, not a true dessert wine but so perfect that it could double as dessert. Yet, it could pair up with cheeses just fine, too. It tasted like summer nights on the back deck, moonlight over the trees. I bought a bottle for $15, and gathered up my son whose determined patience was wearing thin by that point. 

I'm saving up the Traminette for the last of summer in hopes of reviving that feel, that place, that time away. 

http://caveridge.com/shop/traminette