GRAPEVINE
NANCY BAUER
2019 IN VIRGINIA VINEYARDS A TIME TO SABER
Sabrage is a technique for opening a champagne bottle with a saber, used for ceremonial occasions. The wielder slides the saber along the body of the bottle to break the top of the neck away, leaving the neck of the bottle open and ready to pour. 38 | December 2019
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ike a life raft for the forsaken after 2018, this year’s Virginia grape harvest started a little damp and unsteady, but when the sun came out in late spring, all was well. More than well, actually—splendid. Superb. All the right feels— wet, dry, sunny, cool, hot—at all the right moments. Some who live that life 24x7, like Melanie Natoli, might even say that 2019’s is a vintage beyond compare. So a few weeks ago, the winemaker from Cana Vineyards in Middleburg did what many an exhausted, giddy winemaker did to mark the end of this year’s knockout harvest: she knocked the head off a bottle of champagne with a machete— “sabering” it. When you have a job that, at times, makes you want to turn the machete on yourself, a completion ritual like sabering is relief: mental, emotional, physical. One more harvest over, one more transition from the heat of the vineyard to the chill of the cellar. One more start of the cycle, complete.
Melanie during budbreak19 These days, the wine industry is such an important part of Virginia’s economy that harvest success and failure regularly make the 6:00 news. But twenty years ago, while most of us had some vague, glamorous notion of life on a vineyard, few of us knew anything real about what it takes to run a winery. And what we did know – or thought we knew – looked a lot like those Bartles & Jaymes guys relaxing on their porch. “You call that a job?” we would have scoffed, if we’d thought about the wine life at all.
My window into the lifestyle grew from a peephole to a porthole one sunny fall day when my now-husband and I stopped by the nowclosed Piedmont Vineyards. After sampling a couple of nice Chardonnays, we asked to try some reds. “We’re out,” they said. Turns out they’d lost nearly an entire vintage of red grapes to deer. Deer? We were floored. Deer like grapes? If, like me, you’ve never farmed, it’s hard to fathom the slow, sad feeling of defeat that must come from an entire season of growing ending in a whole bunch of nothing. Wineries have learned much over the years, and they now have better ways of controlling the wildlife onslaught, the bugs, the rot and the mildew. Weather, though, is forevermore the big unknown. An early frost can kill all the tender vine buds that deliver the grapes. A drought will stress the vines and cheat wine of its flavor. A late-September hurricane, always perfectly GRAPEVINE > PAGE 40
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