Keswick Staff is back at the winery again this year, crafting fine wines as we did in 2008. Last year's project was so successful that it seemed only logical to continue our endeavour to be the only hotel/resort in America making proprietal wines from start to finish.

2009 was a little different however. We opted to do Viognier as our white wine instead of Chardonnay. This decision was ad hoc, as the team was at the winery one day when some gorgeous Viognier fruit arrived from the Roanoke area. Perfect timing! We crushed the grapes on the spot.

As red wine we did Petit Verdot again, sourced from the same vineyard as last year. This gave us some consistency we felt as well as the ability to manipulate the juice to see if we could make it superior to 2008's  great Petit Verdot.

We will be bottling the 2008 Petit Verdot at the end of November and the 2009 Viognier perhaps as early as December if it continues to be as pretty as it is right now.

Why wait?