Our Midwinter Feast, A Must

Buongiorno ~

I write to welcome you to our exciting culinary calendar for 2025, with special enthusiasm of the season for our Wild Game Feast on Friday, the 24th. I truly hope many will be free to gather at Palladio for an evening’s menu you might expect to enjoy only here, celebrating wild pheasant and guinea hen, wild brown hare, elk wrapped in wild boar sausage (in photo), and dessert pastry crafted to mirror the luxurious palate of Paxxito.

For this occasion I have opened the cellar for the extraordinary Octagon 2019, including bottles also to take home at the special price in our recent sale online (now expired), for the vintage heralded by Wine Enthusiast among its Top 100 Wines of the World in 2023. For guests at this dinner, the 2019 vintage will bear the same retail price as our current vintage in the Tasting Rooms, and will then be removed from availability to the cellar, for further aging. All availability of previous vintages is exclusively through Library 1821 at the winery.

Equally gratifying, if not more so for the many partisans of this varietal, I will be presenting Cabernet Franc Reserve in 2 benchmark vintages, separated by 15 years off the vine — 2017 and, in Double Magnum, 2002.

Even the best-traveled palate will rank their appearance on this festive night among the most revealing wine pairings of the year, in parity of lusciousness as well as in rarity.

If you haven’t commenced a diary of wine dinners in your travels, this evening will certainly provide a fabulous foundation. But as you cast your eye over the whole Calendar of winemaker feasts we are offering this year, you are bound to be struck by many dramatic opportunities to revisit our great vintages in endlessly vivid pairings.

With this feast, we conscientiously celebrate our relationship with Winter in the vineyard as well as in the winery. The snowfall we’ve experienced earlier this month, and the return to colder temperatures, have been very compatible with the needs of our soils and vines, and have interrupted our comprehensive pruning program by no more than a couple of days. In the coming week, our extraordinarily loyal vineyard workers will return under their seasonal visa from South America, an indispensable reunion we value more every year.

In the winery, my associates and I are completing our blending plans for the 2023 vintage, and as we rack the new wines into barrels aligned with their specific qualities, we are fortunate to have accepted some 75 new barrels of select French oak from Gamba, our cooperage in Piemonte, with whom we have collaborated every year since the great vintage of 1997.This means, also, the transfer from stainless steel tank of the 2024 vintage will be presented with a superb palette of barrels of several different ages of use (shown at the cooperage, acquiring their medium toast).

We hope you can join us for the Wild Game Feast on the 24th, to mark these auspicious milestones of the new growing season, with culinary creations worthy of our finest achievements in winegrowing —evolved in bottle sometimes through decades of ideal cellaring. Please contact Palladio Restaurant online or at (540) 832-7848.

We look forward to a memorable year of sharing fine wines and feasts in the pleasure of your company.

Cordialmente ~

Luca Paschina Winemaker