The 100 Mile Liquid Diet?

I love food. And I loooove wine. Obviously. And while I’m a dirty lefty treehugging froot loop, I can’t get behind the 100 mile diet thing. I mean, let’s be honest- how many people in 2010 can pull that off? Quick, you have 30 seconds- where’s your closest flour mill? Exactly. It’s one of those concepts that sounds really good in theory, but you can’t exactly execute it in most parts of the US.

So you may wonder, what’s with the focus on local wine? Well, it’s a place where it actually IS possible to rely on a product grown and produced in our backyard. I’ve had some great imported wines, but let’s be honest- a lot of fuel gets burned to schlepp tons of glass around the world, for the sole purpose of containing wine. It’s not like buying Virginia wine is carbon neutral, but it’s a more environmentally sound choice.

It’s also important to support local agriculture. How different would Virginia look if our county supervisors had their wildest dreams fulfilled, and our rural counties were a sea of rooftops? If we value open space and undeveloped, agricultural land, we have to support the folks who own those parcels. As more farm land goes under vine, it gives us an opportunity to have a heck of a lot of fun while keeping the rolling green hills that make Virginia magical.

It’s a small business issue, too. I’m not going to pull up the statistics, because I’m sure you’ve heard them before: way more of each dollar you spend in a local business stays in the community than a dollar spent elsewhere. And, while wineries don’t employ a ton of people, you can’t deny that right now every job counts.

The most important factor for us, though, is the personal connection to the producer. I ranted a bit about this in my discussion of Marterella’s woes. A small winery, interacting with its customers, is going to be held very accountable. If their current vintage sucks, the feedback will be pretty immediate- especially for the folks who actually work in their own tasting rooms. There’s nowhere to hide.

Oh yeah, and Virginia wines are really, really good. I’ve learned a ton about wine in the years that we’ve been drinking locally, much more than I would have if we were still buying random bottles at Total Wine, based on who has a pretty label or a respectable Wine Spectator score. For example, I’ve had the opportunity to drink and compare a lot of Cab Francs, so when I got to try a California Cab Franc, I had a good sense of what I should expect. A five dollar tasting fee for us is more like a five dollar classroom fee in learning about wine. There are many, many worse ways to spend some time with someone special!

The The 100 Mile Liquid Diet? by Swirl, Sip, Snark, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.