Chapter 2: Charlottesville

It was somewhere after the first two hours of driving south, putting DC in my rear view mirror for good, that a smile crept across my face. This wasn't the kind of smile that I had to force through clentched teeth; it was genuine and pretty much unknown to me until I caught it. It felt like a muscle I hadn't used in a while. It's been a rough year.

After taking a week to decompress and sort through a myriad of conflicting emotions, I find myself eager to write. I've thought a lot about what I want to make of this blog and what I am excited to be writing about. The change was so sudden it put me in a state of shock waking up to something so different than the life I've known from the past 12 years. I realized I've grown older. I wonder if I had asked the person I was so many years ago if the man I am now is who they would expect. Change is strange, and the mirror seems to have changed. I'm not sure if I recognize the person looking back at me. I didn't realize how tired I looked.

Mountain air is very good medicine. On my first day I bought a banjo and went hiking, just happy to be somewhere that I hear crickets and cicadas. I had my usual jolts of realization that it is 1:30, time to go to work, then corrected myself with a contented shrug. Life doesn't feel slower here so much as more manageable.

While traveling I really want to focus on the regionality of the places that I visit, framing them not only with the food but the geography of the place. There is a lot going on in the vast country that I love.

The Charlottesville area is one big pleasant surprise. If you were to look at any place on a running scale of zero being "country" and ten being "city," Charlottesville would be about a 4 in my estimation. Tucked about 10 miles east of the Shenandoah valley, there seems to be a frame of mountains that runs north/south. Dotting the countryside are little estates (some named), farms and houses. Main street, which was bricked over sometime in the 1970's, has seating in the middle of the causeway surrounded on either side by a healthy selection of restaurants and bars. This is the first year that more restaurants have closed than opened, leaving you, the consumer, with a variety of choices.

The first thing that I really noticed about this area is the soil. The ability of things to grow is versatile and vast. The produce is really fresh. As in a few miles from where local kitchens are preparing it. I had a house cut bacon with blackberries at Rapture that really impressed me, which is not easy to do. 20 miles from the center of town is wine country, and enough credit is not given to the region. I was speaking with a local sommelier, one of the few in town, who explained to me that the soil here is so healthy and robust that it isn't the optimal growing conditions for wine.

I will be exploring and interviewing farms, chefs, bartenders, fishermen, and a lot of the people that make the Charlottesville food scene what it is.

Right now I'm sitting at Cardinal Point winery, sipping their Rockfish Red with some locally sourced cheese, listening to the things that are alive in the forest and hills. I understand why people arrive here, and more importantly, why they don't leave.

More coming soon.

Stay Thirsty,
The Bar Fight