Hidden an hour outside of Blacksburg in nearby Floyd is Chateau Morrisette. After taking a left down the narrow Winery Road off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the winery appears out of the green foliage and hillsides that surround it. Like stumbling upon a giant surveying its domain, the 32,365 square foot winery sits amongst the quiet mountains and hills of Appalachia, casually producing around 80,000 cases of wine annually and maintaining a restaurant on the other side of its parking lot. The European villa look of the winery is colored with tan walls and a darker, brown roof and supported by a timber frame.
"We're believed to be the largest salvaged timber frame in the United States," said Nora Kuper, vice president for marketing for Chateau Morrisette. "It's all made from Douglas fir, some of the wood came from the St. Lawrence Seaway and some came from an old warehouse in Seattle, Washington."
I meet Kuper while passing through the entrance of the winery. She is standing at a booth made of the winery's wine boxes; above her is a large black chandelier, which is complimented by arches of finely polished wood and white walls.
Today is the winery's open house, and everything looks particularly elegant and neat. Bottles, food, books, merchandise and people are everywhere. Further inside the complex, past the foyer, is a stone fireplace and large wooden bar where the wine tasting of some of the 26 varieties of wine made by the winery, not including the Hokie Bird wines from which part of its fame stems, is offered at the end of each of the multiple tours happening today. I notice that most of the lights on the wall have an upside-down, shield-looking plate with an "M" in its center.
When I arrive it is dangerously close to 2 p.m., the time of my tour, and I am instructed by Kuper to stay in the foyer and wait for my tour guide.
My tour guide is Dick Chandler. He wears glasses, green pants and a beige shirt. A white, well-trimmed goatee sits on his face and a black apron with the winery's name embroidered in red hangs around his neck. He meets us in the front room of the winery and, after giving a speech that is a combination of information about the wines and history of the establishment, leads us to the crushing pad.
If one is facing the building, the crushing pad looks out over the hills and trees on the left side of the complex. It is an outside, square, gray platform covered by the brown roof of the building, and it sort of resembles a patio with a high ceiling. Several large bins, which during the mid-August to mid-October harvest season are sure to be full of grapes, are on their sides and stacked against the wall to make room for the crowd. In the distance, the section on top of an adjacent hill has been cleared. This clearing, Chandler informs the group, is a 25-acre plot of land that contains five different types of grapes. Though this is a source of grapes for the winery, it is far from its only one.
"We have 15 growers all over the state of Virginia growing grapes for us," Chandler said. "70 percent of them grow just for us. They're really spread out. We have one of them way up near in Loudon County."
There are two large metal machines standing across from each other on the pad.
One is the destemmer and the other is a crusher. They are named Ethel and Lucy, respectively. Both have metal frames that give a rigid outline to the behemoth machines. The destemmer has a visible cylinder with holes in it, while the top of the crusher looks like a giant bin with the curve of the inside of a conch.
During the harvest time, this is the first stop for the grapes after they have been collected.
"They (the grapes) come in straight from the vineyards on our tractor trailer; they're taken off the truck with a forklift, put through this machine right here," said Chandler. "That's a destemmer, takes them off the stem and slightly breaks the skin. Then they go into one of our two crushers. ... That's a 20-ton crusher; we have a two-ton crusher that's sitting right inside the doors over there. Normally it's right out here. Those operate like a bladder inside like a balloon that we pump air into, slowly presses the grapes, it slowly turns, the juice comes out underneath into a pin, and we pump it from there with a portable pump through big hoses into one of the stainless steel tanks for fermentation."
During this time, 707 tons of grapes will come to rendezvous with Ethel and Lucy.
Once the grapes have been destemmed and crushed, the end product is moved through the hoses into large tanks or placed inside of oak barrels located in the back warehouse-esque cellar of the winery. Though it is much larger and more business oriented, the cellar still gives off the same charm and polished appeal of the foyer. Inside the cellar, there are several rows of these large tanks that look like Campbell soup cans without the label. Some of the tanks are so enormous that they are able to hold up to 6,200 gallons at once.
The winery has a stainless steel tank capacity of 130,000 gallons with an additional 740 white oak barrels that hold 59 gallons each, and when new liquid comes into a tank, it does not stay there for long.
"It's a complete cycle," said Kuper. "Late summer all the grapes will come in. They'll put them in the fermentator tanks here. Add the yeast. The yeast converts the natural sugars into alcohol. We just let it sit and we mix it up. You do a lot of filtering and blending."
In addition to the expansive cellar, there is also a bottling facility and lab in the facility.
Bottling is an important part of distributing the wine and a task that the winery oversees. Empty bottles arrive in cases to the Chateau. Workers then take the empty bottles and put them on the line where nitrogen will be shot into them to remove air, and then they are filled with wine and finally corked. Labels are applied by hand afterward, and then the product is put back into the cases in which it arrived and sealed. Bottling the wines is a long investment that requires the winery to seek outside help.
"We hire a bunch of local people," said Kuper. "They just help us for bottling. They've been bottling for three weeks, and they put them in the box as fast they can. We can do a pallet, which is 60 cases, in 15 minutes. They crank up the music, and they just do it all day long."
Thanks to modern technology, the production rate of these bottlers has increased astronomically.
"We can do 30 pallets a day," said Chandler, "60 cases on a pallet, eight-hour days, 40 bottles a minute."
One of the challenges of running a winery is keeping up with new methods, technologies and advancements in the production of winemaking. Dan Tallman is director of winemaking at Chateau Morrisette and has been working at the winery since 2001. His career in the wine industry began in 1980 when he was running a sheep ranch in California and, needing a harvest time job, became employed by a local winery through a friend. Today, he has seen the winery and the art of wine making change into a much more globalized and quickly developing enterprise.
"My dad was a dentist," Tallman said, "and it was probably a good thing that he retired when he did because he was so out of touch with dentistry and how it had grown over the years, and I tell the guys, 'If I'm pushing them I want you to keep me on my toes, too,' because the last thing I want to do is be one of these out-of-date winemakers that is just so stuck in his old ways because the industry, the technology and the methods are changing over the years, and you've got to stay on top of it as much as you can."
In a business where timing is everything, part of Tallman's job is making sure that the winery and its employees can properly perform a task that may only come about or be necessary once a year.
"I spend a lot of time just going back and forth making sure that the winemaking is being completed per our specifications. It's a yearlong process, and when people come into the cellar they normally aren't going to get very good at what they're doing until at least the first year because we come in every morning and it's a different process. One of the guys yesterday was pumping out chardonnay barrels and he said, 'Well, I've never done that before,' and I said, 'Yeah I get that, but you watch some of the other guys,' because a lot of the processes we do, we might do once a year."
In a state with the fourth highest production rate of wine in the country, the winery has significantly grown since its humble beginnings. Chateau Morrisette originated when founder David Morrisette graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in enology and viticulture. It was the school's first attempt at the program, and he was one of the three students. After he returned to Virginia, his father, Bill Morrisette handed over control of his winery, then named Woolwine Winery, to his youngest son.
According to the Chateau Morrisette Web site, "In 1982, the first commercial wines were produced, a modest 2,000 gallons, under the Woolwine Winery label."
The Woolwine Winery was located near where Route 8 crosses the Blue Ridge Parkway; its headquarters was a cabin where David and his father had spent a lot of time since David was in high school.
Soon after David Morrisette took control of the winery, he decided that he needed a change of location.
"One of the first things that David did," said Chandler, "was come out here on top of this mountain, buy 52 acres along with the farmhouse that stood right there where the restaurant is. Two-story red farmhouse, and he moved the winery from the cabin to the farmhouse. Somewhere along about that time, he renamed it Chateau Morrisette."
What Morrisette originally purchased is no longer the face of the Chateau. The immense building was completed in 1990 and took two and a half years to plan and build.
Today the sky is the limit for the winery as its labels are beginning to appear on more and more shelves across different state lines.
"Virgina, North Carolina," Kuper said, listing off the states where the wine is sold. "We just went into West Virginia; we're in a little bit of Tennessee, a little bit of Maryland, and that's it. We're still very regional. We may go into South Carolina."
The success of the winery comes from the quality of its product, a product that has been crafted by those who consider the process of making wine as more than just the creation of a beverage.
"The process of winemaking is sort of an organizing principle for life,"
Tallman said. "You got all these different wines,vv and they are peculiar, and you get to work with all these different people that are just like the wines, and it takes time to get to know the wines and the people that make them."
WINE TASTING
To appreciate a good glass of wine takes experience and a knowledge of what to look for when measuring the quality of the wine. Professor Bruce Zoecklein began his long affair with wine teaching enology at Fresno State in 1976 and now acts as Virginia's state enologist. Currently, he is a member of the Enology Grape Chemistry group, which is performing extensive research on the many factors, which influence the quality of a wine grape. The group is gathering information through research and studies and is addressing impacting factors of grape production such as disease and climate change. In his role as a teacher, Zoecklein teaches the Wines and Vines course (FST 3114), and among the topics taught in the class is "the theory and practice of sensory evaluation."
While sitting behind his desk in room 14 of the Food Science, Zoecklein was nice enough to cover the basics of wine tasting. The first thing to do when tasting wine is to understand what it is that is being taken into consideration.
"You're taking something," he said, "that is a complex chemical symphony, and that's what wine is. It's composed of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chemical components, and you are sort of dissecting those into certain groups."
There are four categories to consider when evaluating a glass of wine:
1. Sight - Most people will examine their glass of wine's clarity and look for any haze in the wine. Normally, haze can be the result of things like dead yeast that has not been fully filtered out.
"In our society," Zoecklein said, "which is not the same as everybody around the world, our society, where you and I have been brought up drinking processed, sometimes over processed, sparkling clear beverages, physical haze precipitant and whatnot, is frequently considered a detriment or considered a quandary by many who are not that educated in wine and are afraid that a cloud or a haze could represent a public health issue."
2. Color - Evaluating the color of a wine is more based on precedent and expectations than anything else.
"If you pour a glass of white wine," Zoecklein said, "you expect it to be light, straw colored not deeply gold and brown. If it is, then depending upon the wine, that might be a signal that something's happened there."
3. Olfactory response - There are two properties to consider when evaluating your olfactory response. The first is called aroma.
"We used the term a little bit differently in wine than we would in the common vernacular. Aroma means the smell of the grape. There's two distinctive types of smells that you get in wine. One would be aroma, which is from the grape. The other would be bouquet which is a smell derived from processing," he said.
Bouquet comes from the various conditions that influence the wine as it is being created. Factors such as wood and yeast add complexity to the odor.
Incidentally, what stemware a wine taster uses affects the aroma and bouquet of the wine.
"The surface area, the depth of the glass, whether the glass funnels, in other words, cones up to channel orders to your nose, all impact the volatility of components that contribute to your sense of aroma and bouquet," Zoecklein said.
There is also the mystery behind swirling a glass of wine, which has its own proper form.
"What you should do," he said, "is bring the glass up to your nose, take a sniff, make a note mental or written of your first impression and then swirl it and then do the same. The swirling, of course, is to increase the level of volatility."
(Note: Another factor which affects the volatility of the wine is the temperature at which the wine is served, the general rule is that the lower the temperature, the less volatility.)
4. Palate - Like olfactory response, evaluating the palate is a more complex task. The first thing to consider is called the "mouth feel" of the wine. Zoecklein breaks down the mouth feel into the "mouth feel balance equation". The equation is composed of sweetness derived from the grape balanced with the acidity of the grape plus the astringency (dry mouth sensation) and bitterness which comes from the grapes and barrels.
"When we're tasting a wine (we look for)," Zoecklein said, "... good mouth feel. ... That this relationship is in harmony, that you don't get an overall propensity of sweetness, you don't get an overall propensity of acidity, nor do you get an overall propensity of astringency and or bitterness."
The other half of the palate category is flavor.
"Flavors," Zoecklein said, "(are essentially) odors because the only thing that we can taste are five components. We say we can taste wine, but frequently when you use that expression it's not in the context of sensory since it's in the context of sort of common vernacular.
We taste five components."
The five components that people can taste are sweetness, sugar, acid, bitterness and umami (savory character).