October 2020 is Virginia Wine Month

This gives us a great opportunity
to highlight some of the many
incredible wineries we’ve visited
over the years.

We look forward to visiting these
wineries again very soon.

We are featuring Andika Ridge Vineyard, located in Blue Ridge Mountains, Amherst County, Virginia. 

Their site is unique to Virginia viticulture, given our high elevation and extremely rocky soils. This created many challenges in the planting of the vines, sometimes needing heavy equipment with jackhammers to create the holes for planting. As difficult as the planting was, they know that these well-drained, rocky soils will give us fruit of a very high quality, given they typically receive high amounts of rain or snow throughout the year.

Andika Ridge is more than a vineyard. They are a farm that incorporates the use of their animals in the vineyard. They are a forest and recently experienced a forest fire that crept to within 20 ft of their home and up to the vineyard fence, spreading to cover over 11,000 acres in the George Washington National Forest behind them. They are forever indebted to the firefighters who worked so hard to save their home and vineyard. They are true heroes.

We worked for over a year removing rocks from our 4 acre expansion site adjacent to our original block. This granite bedrock is over a billion years old. The Blue Ridge Mountains are one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet. We had to jackhammer and pulverize for planting in some places, exposing the granite to the light of day for the first time in a half billion years. It decomposes into a beautiful schist-like soil, allowing for beautiful drainage, an advantage for our wet climate here in the Mid-atlantic, especially when growing thin-skinned pinot noir. 

Learn more about Andika Ridge here.