Sabin Wine Journeys

September 23, 2025.   Imagine you are on a curvy country road.   Forest all around.   You are ascending.   You know you are ascending by the push of your body into the back of your seat, by the strain of the car engine on the hillside, and eventually by the pop in your ears from the altitude.   You are in west Fauquier County near the town of Linden.   Soon you emerge from the forest and immediately recognize the regimented rows of a vineyard.   You are at Fox Meadow Vineyard and Winery.   Park your car above the tasting room, and you may see all different shades of blue and mist as you look back across a range from the top of Blue Mountain.   There is teal in the foreground, azure for the far mountains, and haint blue for the sky. Fox Meadow began in 2003 with Dan and Cheryl Mortland as owners and Tom Payette as the esteemed consulting winemaker.   Fox Meadow had great success in the early 2010’s, winning best red wine at the 2011 V...

February 1, 2025.   Morais Vineyards and Winery is a surprising outpost of Portugal off Route 17 in Bealton, Fauquier County.   José Morais opened the winery and wedding venue in 2011 promoting traditional Portuguese wines and winemaking.   His daughter, Linda, is now CEO.   Their winemaker, Vitor Guimarãis, is from Portugal - born and educated - and has been with them since the beginning.   Drive through the newer part of the vineyard adjacent to the road, and for the moment, drive straight ahead past the round tasting room into the courtyard a typically stark-white Portuguese villa which serves as a large wedding venue.   The main building, – ballroom, bar- and smaller outbuildings buildings host over 100 weddings a year.   It’s like a little village.     Our focus, however, is on the wine and we came back to the tasting room, a round stand-alone building with a cone-shaped roof, reminiscent of the roofs in Algarve.     ...

February 1, 2025.   Mitchell Harrison knew he was hearing something unusual.   A dairy farmer in rural Fauquier County, Harrison was listening to his HAM radio in the early 1940’s and overheard police radio transmissions – from Berlin, Germany.   Harrison informed the Government.   Shortly after war broke out, he got one of those offers you can't  refuse and sold the whole 700 acres of his Vint Hill Farm to the U.S. Army.   Rumor has it that Vint Hill Farm sat on top of a massive deposit of iron ore that acted as a natural antenna for broadcast reception.   By 1942, the Army established a major signals intelligence site at Vint Hill from which they could intercept Axis radio traffic.   Supposedly one such transmission detailed the Nazi’s Normandy fortifications and proved useful to the Allied Invasion on D-Day.   Through the next decades, Vint Hill continued in the spook world as an intelligence station until its functions were transfer...