NEW newbie and Virginia Wines

Welcome! Visiting wineries can always be instructive. Alas I don't have any information to offer about Virginia. (Is its wine industry young? One fairly recent reference book, covering wine production in many parts of North America, lacks any entry for Virginia; but as with any bearer of information, that situation may reflect on the book, of course, more than on the Virginia wine industry.)

As another bit of information that may be useful at some point, in these situations I suggest pointedly reading about and getting experience with wine styles from elsewhere in the world that are widely known and are useful as reference points, even if one prefers to begin with the local produce. This was a topic of discussion on this newsgroup (or rather its immediate predecessor*) in the late 1980s, such as in message advised, almost as if it went without saying, that the budding US wine enthusiast, especially in California, should naturally start with California wines. I (a native northern Californian and wine enthusiast) countered with other perspectives on this, from which an unexamined buttumption in favor of beginning with one's local producers is not without drawbacks. These can include orientation to the world of wine through styles that are atypical (e.g., should the Hungarian-born enthusiast always begin with Tokaji?), or, especially in the new world, trying to discern what is general or timeless in wine from a local industry changing fast. Even information, of the meaty and useful sort for beginners, is harder to find in evolving wine industries (though they produce rivers of words, certainly) compared to wine industries in regions with a few centuries' experience. (For such reasons, my own early wine education in the deliberately avoided focusing on my own, very vibrant, region.) Events later (1980s-90s) underscored in California the hubris of insisting on re-inventing things worked out successfully elsewhere.**

I haven't looked at Wine for Dummies yet, but additional tried and true books about wine -- introductory and in-depth reference both -- have been recommended by many knowledgeable people on this newsgroup, in recent years and going back to its origins in the early 1980s. (Anyone interested can therefore find much more information on that topic by searching archives than by asking again, by the way.)

Cheers -- Max

-- Notes:

* Before the middle 1990s this newsgroup's traffic was part of rec.food.drink (RFD). RFD was the new name in late 1986 (when all newsgroups were re-named) of net.wines. Net.wines was a spinoff in February 1982 from the cooking newsgroup net.cooks, created a month earlier by my friend Steve Upstill (and motivated only partly by an excess of fresh pasta on hand). The renamed version of net.cooks operates today as rec.food.cooking (RFC). All of these newsgroups are reasonably well archived in early years and in recent years, though poorly in the middle period, in public archives at groups.google.com and elsewhere.

** This refers to the disastrous promotion to the California wine industry of the inadequately pest-resistant AxR-1 root stock hybrid and the subsequent revisitation of the phylloxera pest onto California, later called a billion-dollar debacle. It compelled widespread re-planting, the more poignant because native North American grape types had earlier imparted resistance to this native pest into European vine crops in the nineteenth century.