Wine Tasting · Downtown Charlottesville
Taste widely downtown
before you'd reach the first vineyard
five minutes' walk from the Downtown Mall · 434-293-3663
The Monticello Wine Trail is a beautiful afternoon. But if what you want is to actually learn your palate, the fastest classroom in Charlottesville is a chair at Tastings: open bottles and weekly dinner flights, in the room where every bottle was tasted by the man who bought it.
Half glasses served together, left to right, in list order. Comparison is how palates get built; the lineup changes weekly with the newsletter.
Every bottle in the room was chosen by the man in the kitchen. Raconteur is in the job description, per the author of Thomas Jefferson on Wine.
Virginia bottles Bill has championed since judging the early Monticello Cups, beside Burgundy no tasting room in town can pour.
Since 1981
The Wine Club of Charlottesville started here.
Bill founded it in 1981, and it met for four decades: winemakers, vineyard owners and importers presenting flights over his European-influenced plates. Its living continuation is the winemaker dinner series — Barolo verticals, White Burgundy nights, Virginia portfolios with the owner at the table.
The dinner archive →“It is a list to have fun with, not to be intimidated by.”
— the house wine list, introducing itself, August 2000
Planning a vineyard day anyway?
Start or end it here. Taste downtown to calibrate what you like, then drive the trail knowing what to look for; or come back for dinner and drink the region’s best at five dollars over shop price. Either way, no one has to be the designated palate.