We were a little too busy on our actual sixth anniversary, but we took time the following weekend to make our customary return visit to the scene of our wedding.
It was an unusually busy day in the tasting room but when Ellen Moss slipped behind the bar to help out the new guy who was pouring wine, we said “Hi, Ellen!” and she welcomed us with open arms. After we finished the standard tasting, she took us down to the basement fermenting room where Barry was “doing a pump-over,” circulating juice from recently crushed grapes out of the bottom of a 1,000-gallon fermenting tan, into a couple of plastic holding vessels, and back up to the top of the tank. Barry was eager to show us the process and invited us to climb up a ladder and peek into the top of the tank. We chatted with him for quite a while about both the winemaking process and his current architecture gigs—he seemed glad of the company to break up the monotony of winemaking chores.
Then we sat and ate some snacks at a picnic table in the glorious, mid-70s sunshine (the classic October Virginia weather we would have loved to share with you at our wedding—oh that danged hurricane . . .). Nearby, a local flower farmer and floral designer was setting up an arch for the next Moss Vineyards wedding, to be held a few hours later. We chatted with her about her business and she snapped an anniversary photo of us against the vista that you couldn’t see through the hurricane-driven mists in 2016.
