It's my birthday, I can wine if I want to!

For a final family birthday celebration we headed to Charlottesville.  Pippin Hill was our first stop.  What a beautiful place.  It was raining in Richmond when we headed out, but just overcast by the time we got to Pippin Hill.  The clouds hung just above the mountains and the gray skies made the red buds and budding green leaves of the trees stand out beautifully.  Having all that as your first impression, nothing else could really matter, oh but it gets better.  The tasting room beckons you in and the owners knew just what they were doing when they built it  - even the rest rooms (ok, I can only speak to the ladies room) were cute!  When you walk into the tasting area, the view overtakes you and the bars for tastings, I love it when someone gets in right – the customers doing the tastings get the view.  So often the tasting bars have the patrons with the backs to the view and the employees are the ones who get the view.  Not that I have any problem with employees having a nice view, but happy customers buy wine – that’s all I’m saying.  Did I mention that they serve lunch?  Oh they do.  Because we had a large party (7) we had called ahead to see if we needed reservations.  They assured us that if we came early enough in the day, we should be okay and should be able to get a table together.  We arrived a few minutes before 12 and they were able to seat us all together, but I would think that as the weather gets better, it will become more of a challenge to get a table inside.  They do have lots of outdoor seating and we were tempted to head outside to eat, but to do so we would have had to sit around small tables and we decided we wanted a real dining table for our group.  The tastings are a flight of white or a flight of red or both and if you are dining with them, you just go up to the bar on your time and the wine consultants will take you through the flight as you are ready.  This made the experience so relaxing.  The tastings are generous, you could sip on the first while waiting for your meal, have 2 more during the meal, then enjoy the last dessert wine while enjoying the chocolate cupcakes and Meyer lemon and olive oil pound cake – so good and so good was all the food!  I cannot think of a better way to spend the day – well, that was until the bus full of, what we deduced was a sorority group, pulled up, then the ambiance changed, but oh well, we were almost ready to leave by that time anyway.    We went on to visit Delfosse and Sugarleaf.  I have written on both of these before so here I will only say that they took very good care of our large group and they are both as beautiful in the spring as they were in the fall and winter during our previous visits.