As was mentioned in last week’s post, we’re in the planning stage for the winery building and meeting with architect David Jameson this afternoon. He had a simple request: “If possible bring some images and plat of the vineyard.” Images — we have thousands, but surely he needs something in context. So on a cold and overcast Saturday afternoon we spun in a circle in the spot where we think the building should go — but ssurely this decision requires an engineer’s blessing? We made a half-baked panorama from there so Mr Jameson could get a sense of the topography and one of the images appears here.
The site that makes the most sense is the southernmost tip of the property, where Sunny Side Road meets Westview Farm Road. Sunny Side continues west to the village of Saxe, where it meets Scuffletown Road, which goes over the Staunton River to reach Hunting Creek Vineyards and the rest of the Southern Virginia Wine Trail. Westview Farm Road takes you down to Route 360, which carries you to the town of South Boston. That southern tip is a natural meeting point for traffic converging on the site. The land just beside the road is fairly level, then drops down rather steeply about 25 feet where the land drains into an old spring-fed stock pond on that part of the property. We know the pond has been there a while because it appears on county soil survey maps dating from the 1950s; the larger pond next to the vineyard was built in the 1990s.
Perhaps the solution is to slip the building into that steep gap between hills. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, somewhere a banker just woke up in a cold sweat.
We also like the site because looking east you take in the entire property and can see the vineyard in the distance. The elevation at this point is about 542 feet above sea level. Future plantings in the next couple of years will be on the ridge tops between this point and the existing vineyard. It isn’t nearly as dramatic as the setting for Linden Vineyards — but Linden is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, while we’re in the rolling hills of the Southern Piedmont, which is a totally different experience. For those of you who know the vineyards in central Virginia, our land is more like that of Barboursville and Horton. Their elevation is about the same as ours.
There are also practical considerations — the bridges to the north and west of us aren’t able to handle your typical tractor-trailer, so any delivery would have approach from the east on Sunny Side Road, then turn around and go back to Route 360, some five miles distant.
When you come visit you’ll notice that the roads tend to run on hilltops, while the land falls gently away towards the fertile river bottoms that were reserved for cultivation. Houses, of course, in the Southern tradition were also sited on hilltops to catch the breezes that made the South tolerable in summer. Some older grand houses like Prestwould in Mecklenburg County stuck stubbornly to that Tidewater tradition of having two entrances, a river entrance and a land, or carriage entrance. This building may be the antithesis of that, being stealthily sunk into the earth, rather than crowning a hilltop. We’d like it not to disturb the neighbors or loom over the landscape like some otherworldly thing, so perhaps this is the way to go.
Don’t forget that we have two events this weekend — on Saturday is the first annual SoVA Wine Fest in Chatham, and on Saturday and Sunday the Virginia Wine & Food Showcase at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington.
Bottled Poetry. 