I enjoyed Mr. Beard’s column about overpriced Virginia wine [“Workingman’s pour,” The Working Pour, November 18, 2008]. I believe the big problem is that winery owners, having spent most of their capital (or borrowed it) on land, vines, and all the expensive equipment and barrels needed, want to recoup their investments as soon as possible. Old wineries in Europe, California, Australia or Latin America don’t have this problem and can afford to price their wines so they are accessible to all. Peruse the shelves at, for example, Whole Foods and you’ll find countless excellent wines from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal that are less than half the price of Virginia wines (most of which are good but certainly not any better than the European). That’s why no one is buying them from shops. Mr. Tobias didn’t mention that wineries in Virginia sell 90 to 95 percent of their wines through tasting-room visits. It’s become a very chic thing on a Saturday or Sunday to motor ’round in your high-end SUV to two or three Virginia winery tasting rooms to engage in winey lingo (and maybe foody lingo) with the new gentlemen farmers of Southern viticulture. Almost all tasting room visitors purchase at least two bottles, if not a case, before they move on to the next imbibing. These people never worry about the price of gas or maxing out their credit cards. Virginia wine has become quite elitist. At Whole Foods, I did notice one Virginia label, Chateau Morrisette, that was half the price of its compatriots. Might make a good story as to how they do it.
Djuna Laws
Charlottesville
Editor’s Note: Sports as a metaphor for life
I have a friend who is a sportswriter of the old school, like Frank Bascombe or George Plimpton. He sees the game as a metaphor for every noble human experience from tragedy to exaltation. In that world, Mickey Mantle’s story is about an Okie who conquers the Big Apple with raw physical talent,
Editor’s Note: Free content isn’t really free
Way back when Playboy started, Hugh Hefner expertly surfed the wave of a sexual and social revolution, selling cigarettes and Scotch via Mad Men-designed print adverts paired with corny profiles of topless coeds and Vargas girls. The setup made enough money to get him rich and to pay for
Editor’s Note: Schools come alive after the last bell
Sunday night, I watched a documentary called “Mariachi High,” which follows the fortunes of the mariachi ensemble at Zapata High School in a sleepy Rio Grande border town in Texas. The film is, more than anything else, about how a music teacher with a passion for tradition has created a reason
Editor’s Note: Onward Christian artists
As humans, it’s hard for us to know with any sense of certainty where we are in history. The narrative ribbon that connects age to age is knitted with intergenerational strands that are longer than our lifetimes. But there are moments, ripples in our collective fabric, in which societies
Editor’s Note: Tom Tom Festival take two feels good
You can never go home again. The line expresses a quintessential sorrow embedded in the American dream. You move up and out. You can’t go home again, because you left and became someone different. When you go back, no one will understand you, and the place you idealized can’t ever live up
Editor’s Note: UVA isn’t a place or a thing
UVA employs almost 15,000 people and another 20,000 are enrolled there as students. Of the people who move to Charlottesville for work, nearly every one of them has some connection to the University. The “town and gown” relationship is a false dichotomy left over from a time when being from
Editor’s Note: Make art, not money
There aren’t many things you can’t learn in school. You can learn to be a poet or a cake baker, a philosopher or an engineer, a composer or a chemist, a carpenter or a priest. But, in spite of Jack Black’s best efforts, you can’t learn to be a rock star. There’s irony, I think, [...]
Editor’s Note: Job satisfaction and the economy
The Dow Jones broke records and the unemployment rate found its way to a five-year low last week. Look around and you can tell the construction industry is perking up. Roofs are coming off and going back on all over town. Site prep is moving forward on some major development projects. “Under
Editor’s Note: Contemporary art and the 40 year problem
In the beginning, the city’s visual arts community had two centers, Second Street Gallery and the McGuffey Art Center. The acropolis and the agora. The gallery was a place to recognize inspiration, to elevate its status through the ceremony of formal exhibition. The center was a pure democracy
Editor’s Note: Race in the post-racial America
This past Saturday at the Savannah Book Festival, I listened to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. talk about his new book Freeman, the story of a freed slave tracking down his wife after the Civil War. During the Q&A, in an auditorium mostly filled with middle-aged white
Editor’s Note: Love is all you need
I watched the Grammys last night. Well, I watched the first hour of it anyway, which is about all I could manage. I’ve been interviewing singer-songwriters recently and have been thinking a lot about the chances they have at success in today’s music industry. There was Taylor Swift, the child
Editor’s Note: A word on the American dream
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” So go the familiar lines of “The New Colossus,” a parochial sonnet that found its way
Editor’s Note: Creating the creative economy
I had a funny note last week from a reader named Pete, on Facebook no less, who asked me to “keep the faith,” before telling me he liked my commas. 10-4, Pete, and amen. How do my semicolons look? Pete was reacting to the Read This First (he made sure to tell me he reads [...]
Editor’s Note: On health, mental and physical
It is common sense. The body affects the mind; the mind affects the body. But medical science is not a field built on instinct or conjecture, and the variables that need to be isolated in order to support even the simplest causal relationships between mental and physical health are daunting.
Editor’s Note: The Tao of city planning
Last week one of our online contributors, Jim Duncan, predicted that 2013 will be the year the real estate market turns. Jim is a Realtor with Nest Realty, so he’s not exactly a dispassionate observer, but market indicators around the country and locally are supporting his claim. Prices, at
Editor’s Note: We are living in an editorial world, and I am an…
We live in an editor’s world. I read that, I think, in The New York Times, and since I am an editor, it perked me up. Finally, someone telling me the world is my oyster, stars have aligned, time to make hay, stack wood, etc. When I dug into the message, though, it was somewhat [...]
Editor’s Note: War, gun violence, and the New Year
A new year. Time to think about time and how it slips past. A few weeks back, the subject of an interview, Elliott Woods, posed a question: How has America changed over the past decade? He was asking about how the country has changed since we went to war, but sometimes questions, like rivers,
Editor’s Note: War and the culture of violence
As we make final preparations for the holidays, 68,000 U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan. On Christmas Day, some might get a decent meal and a little booze at a base where they can Facebook relatives; others will be stuck in inhospitable outposts littering the remote countryside. They’ll
Editor’s Note: Hunger is a powerful metaphor
Americans are hungry. We work more hours per week than our counterparts in Europe and we eat more, too. Charlottesville has over 370 restaurants and a grocery store for every palate. We have no staple food, culturally; the cornucopia is our defining principle. Stay hungry out there, a pee wee
Mailbag: C-VILLE readers’ letters, November 6-November 26
I’ve read and reread your article about Charlottesville’s gay community [“Before out was in,” November 13], and I was deeply moved. The background work you did for the article and the thought you put into its construction were simply superb. I know the wider community needs to read it and I