Daniel Vineyards 2007 Port from West Virginia

Regular readers may know I’ve been living in West Virginia for the past few months for my day job. When I first moved here, I promised to explore the local wine industry and report back with my findings.

Well, to date, I’ve only written one post on The Forks of Cheat Winery, and my project could easily be reckoned a failure. But I want you to know that my lack of posts on WV wine wasn’t because I was lazy or, even worse, not drinking wine. I just haven’t really found much worth writing about. Most of the wine available in local stores from WV is country wine, made from fruit other than grapes. And I decided long before I came to Morgantown that if I was going to drink alcohol not made from fermented grapes, it was going to be moonshine, dammit.

But since I’m leaving to go back to Austin on Wednesday, I had to try one more wine from West Virginia before leaving – and I decided to try the best I could find. So where to go? The gigantic Kroger down the street, of course, which does indeed have the best selection of WV wines around.

I quickly found the women who buys wines for the store and asked her for a recommendation. Since everything she suggested was sweet (perhaps a foreboding sign), I went with her top recommendation, which was a 2007 Port from Daniel Vineyards. Being spoiled and having tasted delicious twenty-plus-year-old Ports, I was suspicious of this wine, but I paid my $18.99 for my half-sized bottle and drove home to partake.

As a Port of the 2007 vintage, this wine was beyond young. There was plenty of sweetness, but none of the complex caramel and burnt sugar flavor that mature Ports offer. Instead of being dark and mysterious, this Port was bright and obvious, and its sweetness was mainly in the form of (slightly tart) cherry jam.

The Daniel Vineyards 2007 Port definitely wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t buy it again. At $20 a half-bottle, there are plenty of amazing wines to be drunk. It was, however, the best wine from WV that I had while here. So goodbye, Morgantown. You’ve been good to me, and I will remember you fondly.

Check out these related posts:

1. Wine adventures in Morgantown, West Virginia
2. Tasting West Virginian wines from The Forks of Cheat Winery
3. Tasting Cupcake Vineyards’ Award Winning Wine with Winemaker Adam Richardson
4. Great Chardonnay, old vine Zinfandel, and Pinot Noir from Davis Family Vineyards
5. Food and wine pairing: oysters with Champagne, Prosecco, and Cava