The PoLo Wine Club of VA has been off the trail for the last six months. It's been almost four years since the Lo half of the club moved from Yorktown, VA to State College, PA, and it has gotten more challenging coordinating our schedules. This past Friday was graduation at the high school the Lo's younger son's Yorktown friends attended, so they came down for one last hurrah. As always, we love getting together, and they are very easy house guests.
Our plan was to spend Saturday driving up to Potomac Point Winery in Stafford. It's about 2 1/2 hours and not particularly close to other wineries, so as Jerry Seinfled would say, "It's hanging out there like a matzoh ball." Potomac Point would be #163 on our quest. From there, we would head about 2 hours south to the only new winery on the Northern Neck we have not visited: Jacey.
We enjoyed Potomac Point tremendously. It's a big operation, designed as much for events as for wine sales, but we definitely had some favorites. The Viognier was excellent. It had no residual sugar, yet its fruitiness gave the hint of sweetness. Their Belle Vie, a white table wine, with its slight sweetness is the proverbial "porch wine". They had a wonderfully bold red blend, I believe it was called Richland Reserve Heritage, but it was a little pricey for us. We ended up buying a bottle of Abbinato, a very drinkable Chianti-style blend.
Potomac Point is an impressive facility, and it would be the perfect setting for a wedding or other big event. It's clear what it wants to be, and that's fine, but it lacks the personality and character of some of the smaller, more personal wineries. No doubt, it's worth visiting and worth spending the day, and the servers were personable and knowledgeable (thanks, Erin), and I'm sure we'll be back.
Our next stop was to be a restaurant in Fredericksburg called Foode (w/- on top of the e). Our son's girlfriend is from the area, and he visits her often. Somewhere in their travels, they discovered it, and he said the "burgers are to die for". Our GPS directed us to I-95 S, but we could see from the on ramp that the interstate was bumper-to-bumper, so we opted for Route 1 instead. BIG MISTAKE. It took us about an hour and a half to get from Stafford to Fredericksburg, and that delay put us on the wrong side of Foode's lunch hours. When we finally got past the traffic jam, we decided to go directly to the Northern Neck.
Before going to Jacey, we wanted to revisit Ingleside, an old favorite. When we arrived, I programmed the GPS for Jacey to see how much time we had. If we had stayed at Ingleside for a half hour, we would make it to Jacey just as they were closing. Mike's a charmer over the phone, so we had him call to see if they would stay open late for us. This usually works, but they had an event planned for the evening and needed to close on time to get ready. Number 164 would just have to wait.
We used the time we had left to grab a bite at a roadside eatery and then make a stop at General's Ridge Winery. This was another old favorite. I think that between the traffic and the long distances, we were about all spent. We did a full tasting, but our hearts just weren't in it.
From there, we headed back to Yorktown and on the way we planned our next trip. We're hoping to hit the trail again the second weekend in August. We'll either go to the very northern tip of the Northern VA Region or hit the I-81 to Roanoke to Blue Ridge to Southern regions. With luck and effort, we'll get to #170 by the end of the summer.
