Charlottesville Food (17 page)

Trump Winery is “fortunate” to be in the Monticello American Viticultural Area (AVA), which is already known as the premier wine-growing area in the state. This AVA's general reputation for being serious about wine quality lends the vineyard “more history, more longevity, more wines” and the ability to be “taken more seriously.” In 2012, the Governor's Cup picked out the top twelve wines to constitute a “governor's case”; eleven of the twelve were from grapes grown in the Monticello AVA. The prestige of this area provided the initial draw for the Trumps, given that “they like being best in everything.” Woolard has found that for the Trumps, “location is everything, quality is everything.”

Whether large-scale producers or family-run operations, location and quality are markers of many wineries in central Virginia. Picnics at Veritas Vineyards, cocktails made with Thibault-Jannison sparkling wine, the giggle-inducing labels of Well-Hung Vineyard and short ribs braised in Gabriele Rausse's Rosso are all experiences and tastes made available by the successes of Virginia's wine industry. Either for drinking by itself or for pairing with food, a bottle of wine from the Monticello AVA and nearby areas is guaranteed to have a story behind its taste, aroma and production method.

B
REWERIES AND
C
IDERIES

One can drink a glass of Virginia Fizz with two slices of cheese pizza from Christian's—the crisp acidity will help cut the salty, fatty topping—but a cold pint of beer is the more popular and likely choice. While the brewing industry of Charlottesville has not yet reached the levels of distribution and fame accorded to winemaking in the area, a reliable contingent of local brewers has appeared over the last ten years. If wine tastings and vineyard tours appeal to the Charlottesville gourmand, one who shops at Feast! and dines at the C&O, the breweries of the area draw in the festival-loving crowd, the under-thirties who choose the Whiskey Jar and hiking over crossword puzzles and Paramount concerts. The brewers are not European transplants or elegant septuagenarians but the young and the tattooed. Oyster stouts and pizza trucks, concert-friendly six packs and hot wings are the offerings of local breweries, eager to reach out to a demographic that the burgeoning wine industry has not yet enfolded.

The name “Starr Hill” has a variety of meanings to residents of Charlottesville. It can refer to the neighborhood of Charlottesville between UVA and downtown, a primarily African American area that has become more integrated recently. It can refer to the old Starr Hill brewery and concert hall, a stretching space on West Main Street that hosted the likes of They Might Be Giants and John Mayer, which closed in 2007. For most people, Starr Hill is the name of the area's largest and most successful brewery. The music-themed names and labels of Starr Hill brews, its high visibility at concerts and music venues and the foundational status of the brewery mark it as a beer to be reckoned with, a malted monolith of Trump proportions.

When Mark Thompson founded the brewery in 1999, the market was saturated with imported beer; according to Thompson, it was “a different world.” Starr Hill was one of the first breweries in the commonwealth of Virginia upon taking over a spot called Blue Ridge Brewing Company. Blue Ridge Brewing Company, started by grandchildren of former UVA writer-in-residence William Faulkner in 1986, was the first brewpub in Virginia. Founded by owners who had been influenced by the German model of small hometown breweries, the brewpub was sold to Thompson, who changed the name to Starr Hill to reflect a community investment.

Not long after beginning, Starr Hill quickly became a music lifestyle brand, aided by the visibility of its West Main location and a music hall upstairs. Thompson, a charming Will Ferrell lookalike with an easy sense of humor, tells of selling T-shirts at Grateful Dead concerts, leading to entrepreneurial skills built in the parking lot. To him, “the music connection was in our DNA.”
¹²³
Starr Hill often names beers after music and song titles; some of its product offerings speak to the needs of this lifestyle, such as canned beer's usefulness for concerts and outdoor activities. Thompson finds the connection between music and alcohol to be “two and two equals five” and refers to the ties between the craft beer scene and the music scene as “a natural progression.”

Starr Hill's mission statement includes the provision that “Starr Hill seeks to become the East Coast's most respected and sought-after brewery.” Thompson has dreams of growing the business and becoming regional, which the brewery can accomplish by “making fresh liquid.” Seasonal flavors do play into the public's conception of “fresh”; IPAs and seasonal brews, which change by the quarter, are top sellers. Thompson's research shows that consumers do like a seasonal item; winter beers are stronger, with more alcohol and a darker color. Though Thompson misses having a place for music, he doesn't miss the headaches. Starr Hill spends considerable time and effort establishing relationships with local music venues, plus Hershey Park and Raleigh. Thompson wants “to touch people with the gift of great beer.”

While Starr Hill is by no means a business of Anheuser-Busch proportions, its longevity, size and successful expansion make it one of the area's largest brewing operations. Room has been left available for new operations of smaller scale to step in and fill additional niches. Thompson views the increasing number of local breweries in positive terms, noting that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The Virginia Craft Brewers Guild displays the ethos that these businesses are stronger when they band together. Each brewery has its own niche and quality; to Thompson, if the area can house two hundred wineries, there can also be room for two hundred breweries.

Hunter Smith's Champion Brewery, housed in a strip of businesses between downtown and Belmont, fills one of these niches. Tiny, inventive and highly collaborative, Champion has already distinguished itself within the past year that it has been open. Hunter Smith wanted to “get into the beer business, really ever since [he had his] first craft beer.” Smith has found that his clientele is “all over the place” but are primarily “neighborhood residents or visitors to the Downtown Mall. The age varies from minimum legal drinking into middle-aged customers and older.”

The variety of offerings at Champion mirrors the diversity in customers; a German-style
gose
with the name of Face Eater, a seasonal oyster stout and an 8.5 percent ABV Belgian
tripel
are all available at Champion Brewery. Partnerships with other local businesses, such as Blue Ridge Pizza Company, Taqueria Mi Ranchito and the Clifton Inn, keep the offerings at Champion fresh and eventful. Smith displays similar support to Mark Thompson for would-be competitors in the craft beer scene. “I think it's great that there's enough local demand for beer and wine, and it looks like local markets show strong support for growth,” Smith says. “I think the number-one thing that matters is quality product. As long as the beer and wine is good and the most important thing on anyone's mind, then it's all good.”

Industrial beer brewing.
Photo by Kevin Haney
.

In the last several years, quality products of an alcoholic nature have begun to develop beyond wine and beer. The general interest in heritage food products, animal breeds and lifestyle choices has resulted in the resurgence of hard cider as a viable beverage option. Vintage Virginia Apples, in conjunction with Albemarle Ciderworks, has promoted education about and access to heritage varieties like the Arkansas black and the Geneva crab.
¹²⁴
The joint work of Peter Hatch and Tom Burford, “a modern day Johnny Appleseed, part philosopher and part planter,” at Monticello has also given root to a revival of interest in hard cider production.
¹²⁵
But perhaps the greatest asset to the cider industry is the quality of the cider itself.

Absent from the offerings of Charlottesville-area cideries are the sickly sweet, overly processed varieties prevalent at chain restaurants and corner stores. Single-variety bottles, oak barrel aging and reserve blends are merely some of the marks of the new hard cider movement. Potter's Craft Cider, with its dry acidity and nuanced palate, appears at the forefront of these offerings. Reasonably priced and highly accessible, customers can choose between a 750-milliliter bottle or, in many cases, a glass of the effervescent stuff on draft at many local restaurants.

Potter's Craft Cider is a labor of love for two Princeton graduates who stumbled on a love of craft beer outside of their day jobs as a “hobby going out of control.”
¹²⁶
Tim Edmond, one half of the cider team along with Dan Potter, laughs when comparing his former career in finance to the work he does now at the cidery. Possessing a wealth of information about various cider-making processes, Edmond has an excitement for his new day job that's palpable in his speech and in his product.

Edmond and Potter began drawing on research, pre-Prohibition materials that hadn't been used for over one hundred years. Edmond relates that “really forward-thinking” local businesses in town were excited about their cider; Edmond states, “Cider by nature is a super-local thing. You can be a local brewery but still get hops and barley from other places; it's difficult to source local ingredients as a brewery.” Edmond finds their business to be fortunately situated in this area; they picked Charlottesville for its good apples and orchardists who've been doing it for generations with heritage varieties. Other people than commercial growers are bringing back nurseries with apples that are early, such as Vintage Virginia Apples, which supplies Potter's with cider-specific apple varieties like the Hugh's crab at Monticello. Edmond characterizes these people as “forward-thinking, food-focused individuals that are very forensic about where their food comes from.”

Edmond notes that unlike wine or beer, “cider has yet to emerge as its own market—are they beer drinkers? Are they wine drinkers?” The average consumer of Potter's Craft Cider has the expendable income to buy local and is interested in craft products. Edmond states that he and Potter are trying to “make that market” of craft cider drinkers, noting that there's an “established macro category of what cider is. We're trying to create that craft category.” With a grassroots marketing approach and relationships with everyone from Whole Foods to Free Union Grass Farm, Edmond and Potter are quickly uncovering the nature of the customers who have made Potter's Craft Cider a household name in the area.

Wine, beer and cider from central Virginia appear on menus next to local dishes and family-recipe menus. Bottles of each dot the local retailers, whether big-box stores or gourmet grocers. The love and pride that Charlottesvillians have in their local food producers is well matched in their support of the burgeoning wine, beer and cider industries. The thread that connects all elements of food production and consumption in Charlottesville, from young farmers to locavore restaurants to Virginia wine, is the love and appreciation of fine craft and good taste—qualities that mark all aspects of local beverage production.

Notes

I
NTRODUCTION

1
.  Fearnside, “Digging In.”

2
.  Ibid.

C
HAPTER
1

3
.  City of Charlotte, “Community Profile.”

4
.  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “NowData—NOAA Online Weather Data.”

5
.  U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2010, generated using “American Fact Finder,” accessed October 21, 2013.

6
.  University of Virginia, “Human Resources.”

7
.  Ingles, “Immigrant Story.”

8
.  DeWitt,
Founding Foodies
.

9
.  Malone, “Jefferson, the Virginian,” in
Jefferson and His Time
, 1:3.

10
.  Jefferson, “Summary of Public Service,” 32:124.

11
.  Betts, ed.,
Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book, 1766–1824
, 462.

12
.  Hatch, “Thomas Jefferson's Legacy in Gardening and Food.”

13
.  Ibid.

14
.  Hatch, “Thomas Jefferson's Favorite Vegetables.”

15
.  Peter Hatch in discussion with the author, May 2013.

16
.  Ibid.

17
.  Jefferson, “William Maclure to Jefferson, Paris 1801,” in
Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book
, 276.

18
.  Jefferson, “Bernard McMahon to Jefferson, Philadelphia 1806,” 328.

19
.  Ibid.

20
.  Ibid.

21
.  Morris, “Heritage Harvest Festival Transforms Monticello.”

22
.  Cornett, “Jefferson's Botanical Perseverance.”

23
.  Hatch, “Thomas Jefferson's Favorite Vegetables.”