News

Celebrate!! Our Wine(s) of the Month!

If you’re already a fan of our sweet delicious Concord wine, you must try this trending combo! Fans of both our Sparkling Kelliokee and Concord have been combining both wines, mixed 50/50, to create, “The Okie-Dokie”.

So popular is this creative cocktail, customers often come back to the vineyard to purchase more bottles after sharing it with friends, and watching it disappear!

Save 20% this month when you purchase this combo! Cheers to everything Okie Dokie! 🍷

Spring is in the air bringing friends and outdoor activities to mind. Family and friends are coming to visit and thoughts of “What can we do?” start running through your mind. 

MountainRose offers many fun activities to enjoy with your friends and family. We offer simple wine bar tastings, flight tastings, or personalized tastings. Enjoy a guided wine tasting with an expert leading your experience and a tour of the winery where the magic happens to make your visit memorable.

Charcuterie boards are also available! Call for a reservation so we can have it ready when you come or choose from our in-house selections on hand. You could pack a picnic lunch and grab your favorite wines to enjoy a leisurely afternoon on our patio or pavilion. Play lawn games and tour the vineyards with your guests. Let us make your plans effortless and fun!

We have proudly served fine mountain wine in the beautiful state of Virginia for 20 years!

To mark our anniversary, we created the Limited Edition, Eagle White, featuring our own angel, Brandi Lawson on the label! It has been a great success, and we wish we had more!

Eagle White is an incredible “small batch” sweet & fruity wine from the Chardonel grape. Released in August of 2024, we currently have less than four cases remaining!! 😲

Very fragrant, with apricot and lime on the nose, green apple and hints of peach flavors in a medium bodied wine. The finish is creamy smooth, lingering with a touch of honeysuckle!

$25 while supplies last!! Not available for shipping. Don’t miss this magic! Cheers to 20 years! #finemountainwine

A salad garden is dedicated to anything you’d toss in a salad—leafy greens like lettuce and spinach, plus superfood veggie like kale. Today, we’re focusing on cool-season, spring salad materials. Save money at the grocery store and waste less produce by growing your own salad greens at home. Leafy green vegetables and herbs are easy to grow and take up such little space that you can grow them nearly anywhere! Plus, if you have fresh greens at home, you’ll be more likely to make healthy food decisions since salad greens naturally contain Vitamin A, Vitamin C, beta-carotene, calcium, folate, fiber, and other nutrients.

How to grow a salad garden
Salad gardens are about as low maintenance as they come—plant, water, cut, eat, and repeat!

1. Choose a location
First, choose a location for your salad garden. Leafy greens tend to be compact plants with shallow roots, so you can grow them just about anywhere. Grow a salad garden in a raised bed, a container on your porch, or even a window box—wherever you will be most likely to check on your greens and harvest them.
Leafy greens don’t need much maintenance other than regular watering and occasional weeding, but greens grow quickly, and your salad garden will fare better if you remember to harvest them.

2. Start salad greens early
We have a good selection of lettuce and kale plants at MountainRose Vineyards’ Greenhouse. Lettuce, kale, and spinach are all frost-hardy, cool-season crops that thrive in the cooler temperatures of spring and fall. These plants struggle when summer temperatures soar, and the soil dries out, so get them in the ground early to get several harvests before the weather changes! Sow your greens now- (between two and four weeks before your average last frost.) Sow another succession of leafy greens in late summer to have several harvests before the onset of winter.

3. Direct sow or start seeds indoors
Salad greens are very forgiving—you can usually direct sow seeds in the ground or start them indoors, depending on your personal preference and ability. To get a head start in spring, buy your plants. If you sow seeds outdoors, it’s a good idea to cover them until they germinate. The added protection also helps keep seeds from being washed away by water or wind or eaten by birds and other animals.

Check the seed packet for recommendations on how deep and how far apart to sow specific seeds. As for spacing, plant seeds further apart if you want larger plants, or you can place seeds closer together if you plan to harvest younger leaves more frequently. At MountainRose we usually plant lettuce 8 to 12 inches apart, but a little closer in pots.

4. Plan for sunlight and moisture requirements
There’s an old gardening adage: Full sun for roots and fruits, partial shade for leaves. Fruiting and rooting plants need more sun to be able to photosynthesize more sugars into carbohydrate-rich roots and fruit. Leafy green vegetables can typically tolerate some partial shade since the plants are more focused on vegetative growth than fruiting, especially as the weather warms.

Salad greens do best when they receive between one and one and a half inches of rain per week, just a little more than average garden. Try to maintain a consistent watering schedule especially if plants are in pots!
What to include in your salad garden

When you grow your own salad garden, you can cater your garden to your tastes and preferences! The options are endless: you can grow everything from chives to lettuce in your salad garden. Some suggestions are lettuces, including gourmet blends, spinach, Asian greens such as Bok choi, kale, herbs like basil in pots, chives, parsley, and even onions. A few edible flowers such as pansies, nasturtiums, Mexican marigolds and chive blooms are great as well.

Growing your own salad garden can be a fun and rewarding experience and is a great way to take back your personal health! Whether you’re looking to save money, eat healthier, or live more sustainably, growing your own salad garden is a great way to achieve your goals. What are you waiting for? Get out there and start gardening. Check us out at MountainRose Vineyards if you need plants or help getting started!

~Edited from a Seeds n Such post

When we opened our doors for sales in July 2005 at MountainRose Vineyards, we had only one sweet white wine.  Sweet MountainRose was a great hit and before long we made Pardee Red which has remained our best-selling wine overall.

The numbers tell a big part of this story both locally and worldwide. Sweet wine is now a $1 billion industry in the U.S., according to Nielsen. It makes up about 13% of total wine sales and grew 8% in 2019.

The pandemic spurred an increase of more than 22% in overall wine sales, and sweet wine sales rose a whopping 40.1%, according to data from NielsenIQ and IRI’s National Consumer Panel.

Sweet wines can often be an entry point for new wine drinkers. One in three new wine consumers start with sweeter wines, according to the National Consumer Panel. But that doesn’t mean more experienced wine lovers should shun sweet.

“The biggest misperception I’ve seen is dismissing wines that have sweetness as not being quality wine,” says Dennis Dunham, director of winemaking at Oliver Winery & Vineyards in Bloomington, Indiana. He says that sweetness is just another attribute of wine, like acidity, tannins or body.

Scott Carney, master sommelier and dean of wine studies at Institute of Culinary Education in New York City says it requires real skill to make high-quality sweet wine. MountainRose Vineyard’s winemaker, David Lawson says, “You must start with the best possible fruit”.

We think we have some of the best semi-sweet and sweet wines anywhere. We have won numerous awards, but don’t just trust the experts. Try them for yourself and see! Stop by anytime and try, before you buy!

Sales include the famous Pardee Red, Concord, Sweet MountainRose, Eagle White and “the most famous of all- Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. No, NO! That’s a Christmas song! Get Mrs. Claus’ favorite, Autumn Gold and other sweet wines on sale this week for Christmas gifts….or for yourself!

How do we know when it’s time to pick our grapes? The most important day of the year is the day we pick because it determines the kind of wine we’ll make from those grapes.

We start with our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste. We want our grapes to be rich in color, not green. A ripe grape will crush easily, but not be shriveled. A ripe grape is plump, thickly juicy and smells good. It’s a balance between sweet and tart. We also look for ripe seeds, which are brown.

It’s good to use our senses but it’s also important to measure. We measure sugar content, pH, and acidity level. Grapes are mostly water and sugar that will ferment to make wine. Brix is a term used to measure the sugar content of grapes. Brix is measured in the field with a refractometer.

When we think we are getting close to the desired Brix, we take a hundred berry sample and check it in the lab with a hydrometer. After checking sugar, we check the PH in the lab. You may remember pH from high school science class. It’s a measure of free hydrogen ions. As our grapes ripen and the sugar rises, the pH will usually rise, too.

Grape juice is full of natural acids, which lend important qualities to wine. Every time we measure Brix, we also measure acid levels. In a way, they’re opposites; as the Brix goes up, the acid levels go down. If they go too low, then the wine may be flabby.

Our results should fall within certain ranges for Brix, PH, and acidity. When our grapes get close to those ranges, we go pick a sample.  We sample about 100 grapes from both sides of the vines, high and low, in sunny areas and shaded areas, and pick from different parts of each cluster. We squeeze our juice into a cup and take our measurements. If they are within our desired range, we pick on the next best available day! Finally, the grapes are ready, the day is cool and sunny, and hopefully, you are here. Let’s go pick!