While the tasting room is closed, you can use our website to order Flying Fox wines. You can also find them at the Greenwood Gourmet Grocery in Crozet or in Staunton at The Wine Cellar and the Pampered Palate.
If you are looking for something to do in February - come see us at the Virginia Wine Expo. An exciting wine festival on Feb 27, 28 and March 1st at the Convention Center in Richmond. This is a great chance to taste many Virginia wines, including Flying Fox. Hope to see you there.
|
Just to give you some idea of what we will be doing while the tasting room is closed....  Pruning is a wonderful time in the vineyard. It is making order out of chaos, removing last year's growth, training up young vines, getting ready to start the year again. We inspect and prune every plant in the vineyard, over 5000 vines. The spurs are cut back to two buds each, setting the crop load for the coming season. It is a slow and methodical process, giving you time to think about the vineyard and enjoy being outdoors. Day by day, as we move through the rows, you can feel spring approaching. Budbreak, when the first leaves appear, usually occurs in our vineyard around April 1st. A little over ten weeks from now. Time to get to work.
In the winery, we will be blending the wines and getting ready to bottle. Bottling is an exciting event. A tractor/trailer with  the equipment inside pulls up to the back door of the winery. Wine goes in via a hose and comes out in a bottle! Everything is automated - washing the bottles, filling, corking and labeling. And it moves quickly, up to 1500 cases/day. We all move quickly too! So this winter - we are taking the first steps for the 2009 vintage and
finishing up the wine-making process for the 2007 reds and 2008
whites.   See you in April. Cheers, Lynn & Rich |
serving hot, mulled wine. But the new year is upon us. The vines are dormant and the tractor and other vineyard equipment is cleaned and put away. The tasting room is also closed in the winter. We will take a couple weeks of vacation in January during this quiet time. When we return, it is time to start pruning the vines, repairing trellis and bottling the 2008 white and
rosé wines. The tasting room will re-open the first week of April with new wines, a new guest artist and daffodils and tulips instead of snow.
