Graduates & Grapes
Graduates & Grapes
Loving Cup Winery | Strawberry Season
I grew up in a college town and my first job was with the university’s catering company, so to me, May will always be the month of graduations. Thousands of students across the state have already donned their caps and gowns their, and thousands more will do so this weekend.
When I worked as a caterer, I loved these celebratory events. Students whose faces were flushed with jubilation. Parents who could not contain their pride, snapping photo after photo (this was before smartphones) with every friend, relative or statue that crossed their paths. And, after the ceremony, everyone sat down to share a meal.
The meal the graduates share with their families is the culmination of years of hard work — both on the part of the graduates, but, more than likely, their parents as well. It is a meal full of potential. Of hope. So if you dine out this weekend and see a family celebrating, wish all of them congratulations.
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EVENTS
Have an event you’d like us to share? Email: info@edibleblueridge.com
5.18 Flower, Fairy & Elf Festival - Charlottesville
5.18 Rivanna River Fest - Charlottesville
5.18 Wine & Roses Festival - Fincastle
5.18 Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Harrisonburg
5.22. Wine Down Wednesdays - Staunton
5.25 ValleyFest - Massanutten
5.31-6.02 Lebanese Festival - Roanoke
6.01 Flowers & Facials with Harmony Harvest Farm- Weyers Cave
MOVERS & SHAKERS: LOVING CUP VINEYARD & WINERY
With its heat, humidity and unpredictable weather (along with pests and invasives such as spotted lanternfly), growing grapes without conventional pesticides or herbicides in VA is no small feat. Yet Loving Cup, Virginia’s only certified-organic winery, does just that.
“As soon as we realized we were going to have to spray grapes to make wine it seemed a very selfish endeavor” says winemaker Karl Hambsch. Karl cites the use of disease-resistant hybrid varieties as the key to his success. Think of grape hybrid varieties as having a better immune system than other vines. His favorite? Cayuga, a white grape and a workhorse. Karl has been growing Cayuga for many seasons, experimenting with its potential. “We didn’t know what it was capable of until we pushed it toward its limits,” Says Karl. The grape is extremely versatile and is the predominant grape in many of Loving Cups’s wines, from a dry Germanic-style white wine, to an off-dry style, to their petillant ( a slightly sparkling wine).
Loving Cup’s 2023 White recently won a gold medal at the 2024 Monticello Cup Wine Competition, solidifying that wines made from hybrids can be of the same quality and depth of flavor as wines made from noble grapes. Though many winemakers are hesitant to champion hybrids, there is a growing movement in Virginia to change that perspective.
“We have to change the impression of these hybrids,” says Karl. “ I don’t think the problem is the public, I think the problem is the wineries and winemakers, they don’t know what the public wants. We have to change the narrative, if we don’t these hybrids won’t find fertile ground.”
Also unique to Loving Cup is their wine club. As opposed to a traditional buy-in, wine club members must work a minimum of 8 hours in the vineyard to secure their membership. Club members thus have an intimate relationship with the wines they consume, having helped with growth of the vines.
Each month this year, Loving Cup will release a new varietal: a 5 case lot of experimental wines that they hope to receive guest feedback on. This feedback will inform later plantings in the vineyard. Be a part of the experiment and experience these wines Friday-Sunday 11am-5pm at the winery.
WHAT WE’RE COOKING
It’s strawberry season! Whether you visit Chiles with your kids, pick up a pint at the market, or harvest from your own strawberry patch, we’re loving these berryful spring recipes:
POEM OF THE WEEK
Gooseberry Fool By Amy Clampitt The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity, an outlaw or pariah even—thorny and tart as any kindergarten martinet, it can harbor like a fernseed, on its leaves’ under- side, bad news for pine trees, whereas the spruce resists the blister rust it’s host to. That veiny Chinese lantern, its stolid jelly of a fruit, not only has no aroma but is twice as tedious as the wild strawberry’s sunburst stem-end appendage: each one must be between-nail-snipped at both extremities. Altogether, gooseberry virtues take some getting used to, as does trepang, tripe à la mode de Caen, or having turned thirteen. The acerbity of all things green and adolescent lingers in it—the arrogant, shrinking, prickling-in-every-direction thorn- iness that loves no company except its, or anyhow that’s what it gets: bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawl are braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetrical defense machineries. Likewise inseparably en- tangled in the disarray of an uncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (since rooted out) once flourished, is the squandered volupté of lemon- yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam— an inkling of the mingling into one experience of suave and sharp, whose supremely im- probable and far-fetched culinary embodiment is a gooseberry fool. Tomorrow, having stumbled into this trove of chief ingredients (the other being very thickest cream) I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since, four summers ago, I first brought you, a gleeful Ariel, the trophy of a small sour handful, I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thing could render magical the green globe of an unripe berry. I think now it was simply the great globe itself’s too much to carry. December 1981 Source: Poetry (June 2012)
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