North Mountain Vineyard & Winery
In Maurertown, Virginia, near Interstate 81 between exits 283 and 291. North Mountain was opened in 1998 by Brad and Krista Jackson Foster. The mountaintop site has been farmed since the 1700s. The winery was put up for sale in late 2018 for $2 million.
Wine. Tier II. All wines are from the property’s vineyard. North Mountain offers a pair of unusual varietals from Austria: Gruner Veltliner in white and Zweigelt in red. Tastings are $1 per wine and can be few or many depending on you.
Setting. One star. Expansive lawns and picnic area with great views over the surrounding mountains, fields, and forests. Plenty of seating. Occasional events include Chili cook-offs, wine dinners and live music. For hikers, the winery is by the Tuscarora trail.
Stories. West Virginia goes its own way. For the first century and a half after Europeans arrived in Virginia, settlement was limited to the East of what came to be called the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. The economic model of large plantations, mainly tobacco-based, functioning with slaves, was centered in Virginia’s Tidewater, and to a lesser extent Piedmont. Only in the early-to-mid 1700s did some, mainly Germans, find their way into what would become West Virginia. While there were few Native Americans living in the area at the time, the area had become a hunting ground for the Iroquois, and with the subsequent advent of the French and Indian War, the adventurous few Europeans here met with frequent native resistance. The settlers that reached into the mountains and beyond were small, subsistence farmers, without the resources to acquire large amounts of slave labor. As conflict receded after the Revolutionary War, more similar settlers came – many Scotch-Irish joining the earlier German arrivals. Frequent tensions arose between them and the landed gentry of the East, which controlled the Virginia State government after 1776. These tensions came to a head with the Civil War. In 1861, delegates from several counties in northwest Virginia voted to secede from Virginia, which itself had voted to secede from the Union. This was the first state to separate from another since Maine was separated from Massachusetts. The counties were admitted to the Union in June 1863 as the state of West Virginia. Great North Mountain today makes up some 50 miles of the border between Virginia and West Virginia.