am still not sure...
On Tuesday, we drove up to Boonsville, N.C. Along the way we stopped at the Richard Childress Winery. Richard Childress owns several NASCAR teams along with all his other ventures. I have to say that he has put a great deal of money into the winery. The building and the grounds were something. They have a small bistro in the winery, so we had lunch there. It was excellent. We had some wonderful soup and sandwich. Then we took the tour of the winery and learned that they have not been making wines very long. They planted the first vines in 2000 and produced their first wines in 2002. They are wonderful and have won awards already for their wines. The grounds are very beautiful and very well kept.
On Wednesday we went to several other winery's in the area. One was RagApple Lassie. This again is a new winery. The name comes from 1957 when the owner of the land entered his prize cow in the county fair and won first prize. The label on their wine has a picture of a cow sitting on a half moon. When the farm was no longer profitable the family turned from crops and cows to tobacco. The tobacco business did not last very long with the decline in smoking in the US. Rather than let the lane be turned into developments for housing, the family wanted to keep the land and the area the small town that it was so they turned to growing grapes and producing wine. Their wines also were very nice! From Rag Apple we went to Shelton Winery. John and I had experienced some of their wines on previous trips to North Carolina and had been very impressed. They also have a very lovely winery and a restaurant on the property. We had lunch there and the food was excellent. John had called and made an appointment for their reserve wine tasting. We found several great wines there. Their Reserve Chardonnay was out of this world. It is in high demand that one could only purchase 3 bottles. Not near enough for my liking. John also enjoyed their red wines. Have to admit that we did spent over our wine budget but got some beautiful wines.
As our budget was spent, on Thursday we decided to drive north along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We had only been south on the Parkway from where we were, so we headed north into Virginia. The weather was sunny and nice! Along the way we stopped at the Mabry Mill. It has been preserved and very lovely. The trees were just beginning to bud out. There were some Cherry blossom trees that were in full bloom and they were very pretty.
The last photo here is of a still that they had on the Mabry property. I think that this reminded John of the good old days!!!!
I will close this blog for now as I can only seem to get 4 photos on each blog. I will finish up with the race photos in Martinsville in the next up date. That's all for now.
Your wandering travelers,
Candy and Johnny
