A Short Post on Rappahannock County
Rappahannock County is situated next to Shenandoah National Park in the northern Piedmont. The mountains in winter are ever-present wearing their olive-colored fleece jackets for the cold.
The town of Washington is the county seat for the 7,300 residents. There are more cows than people here. Some call it “Little Washington” to distinguish it from Washington, District of Columbia, which is a little over an hour to the north. It is an easy day trip from Washington, DC and the counties of Northern Virginia.
The big noise in Washington has to be the Inn at Little Washington, the only 3-star Michelin restaurant in the mid-Atlantic or southern United States. (There are only 14 3-Star restaurants in the United States. The closest to Washington are the five in New York City.)
A prix fixe meal at the Inn is $388 per person. Add a wine pairing for $250 and tax and tip and you’re in the $1,050 range for a dinner for two. Patrick O’Connell, the chef and proprietor of the Inn, has built a small empire in Washington. Across the street from the Inn is the slightly more reasonable Patty O’s Café. We dined there and had a great meal served by Samantha and an attentive staff.
Around the corner is a quality bakery which is open early in the mornings for a breakfast treat. You can also tour the Inn’s apiary (Honeybee Apiary), chicken house (Red Star Chicken House), or the formal garden. The Inn has a small number of rooms for overnight accommodations or try the Inn’s Craig Claiborne House hotel.
There are also a number of independent bed and breakfast options in town. We stayed at Drew and Deborah Beard’s Gay Street Inn. Just delightful and fully walkable to and from dinner on any evening of temperate weather.
Rappahannock Country has some nine wineries spread out
within its jurisdiction, most of which we have covered or will be covering in
full in this blog. The oldest winery is Gray Ghost (1994); the largest is Rappahannock Cellars.
On the fervent recommendation of the assistant manager at Quièvremont Winery, Cayetano Ordoñez, we drove ten minutes south on Route 522-211 to the town of Sperryville. This small town straddles both sides of the Thornton River as the river ambles from the Thornton Gap.
Sperryville is home to another great restaurant – the Three Blacksmiths - where a prix fixe meal is only $100 per person. But with just sixteen tables and only one seating a night, the restaurant has a significant wait for reservations. Best to get on a waiting list and be ready to jump in the event of a vacancy.
While you are waiting for your name to come up, walk down Main Street to the Bar Francis, an intimate bar. Or you can have a lite bite at the Black Twig Diner. Black Twig occupies a former school; its dining room is the former gym for the school, a cavernous venue with a stage at one end. The kids band used to play where now jazz and rock and roll bands jam on the weekends.
Or, even better yet, leave town heading north for a short distance to the Sperryville River District where you will find the Marketplace Shops and the original home of the Copper Fox Distillery Company. The river, again, is the Thornton, which is more of a creek at this point.
We met owner Rick Wasmund who opened the whisky distillery in 2005 in an old cider mill. On his recommendation, we tried five whiskeys: Copper Fox Sassy Single Malt Rye, Amaro Y Arroyo Liqueur, Copper Fox Peachwood Single Malt Whisky, Copper Fox Cognac Barrel Finish Single Malt Whisky, and Foxfire Cinnamon Whisky. Kim and I grabbed some cracked leather chairs in front of the Franklin stove and got to sampling. We were joined by the distillery’s cats. Inside of the distillery you’ll find high rafters and plenty of odd corners, nooks and crannies of exposed wood. There is outdoor seating right on the Thornton. None of the whiskeys left any question as to what they were about: the peach tasted of peach, the cinnamon tasted of cinnamon, the sassy sample had sassafras. And the cognac barrel-finished whiskey really carried the cognac flavor. A bottle of cognac is at the expensive end of their product line at $100 at the store.
The next morning we returned to the Marketplace for some coffee at the Firth River Coffee Company and to stroll through the arts and crafts shops. The whole Marketplace was readying for a visit from Santa that afternoon. It is anyone’s guess whether Santa would spend time for a cup of java or hit the Copper Fox for a bracer.
Between these towns and the wineries, Rappahannock County has a surplus of rolling hills and highways that seem to dip and rise like ripples on a pond. Cows are everywhere, and the hay bales are all neatly rolled for winter along the farm fence lines.
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