Never before seen!

I wrote this article for today's Patrick Henry Herald, but it got spiked at the last moment because it mentions visiting a winery. So I'm going to put it up here.

Saturday afternoon was clear and warmer than it had been for weeks, one of those afternoons that compels you, not matter what you’re doing, to be doing something. The Midwinter Blues’ Blues Festival (every Saturday in January and February) at Tarara Winery in northern Loudoun County seemed just the kind of bite sized adventure required. I enlisted the aid of sophomore Nichole Recker and Carina Sinclair (in town visiting her brother freshman Jamie Sinclair) and set off for Loudoun wine country.
Tarara is situated a few miles north of Leesburg, almost to Maryland. The drive up is great in February and I’m sure is beautiful in any other season. The vineyards are picturesque even bare of leaves, covering the hills overlooking the Potomac River. It’s at the end of the kind of road makes you question whether or not you’re on the right one. The facilities consist of two main buildings: a bed and breakfast and the winery. A sign by the driveway announced that Tarara had been voted “Best winery in Loudoun County.”
The interior of Tarara is cozy and warm. It contains a gift shop and wine store as well as two different bars dispensing the local specialties. Past this is a room full of round tables for eight. The walls are pleasing warm tones of red and orange and well decorated. The band was ensconced in one corner and around them sat a row of those interested in the music they were playing. Deeper in, the majority seemed more interested in the wine and each other than the blues.
While the term “festival” may have been excessive in describing the single act, one guitarist accompanied by a harmonica, the music was amazing, a skillful fingerpicked guitar style with a wailing harmonica back up. The sets featured songs by Ray Charles, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and older blues greats of the “blind” variety. It was billed as a “delta blues,” but the players also strayed into bluegrass and gospel territory.
“As an old blues player once told me, you should always play one gospel song in each blues set so that you have a little chance of salvation,” said Ray Kaminsky, the guitarist, before playing Amazing Grace. He interspersed his songs with stories, pieces of history and background to the tunes they played. They were perfect blues stories of men who came from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere, including the well known tale of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads.
The musicians definitely looked the part. Ray Kaminsky is a heavyset older man with sandy hair trending towards gray and a shaggy mustache for whom the guitar was obviously a lifestyle. His album “Ghosts of the Blues” won the 2001 Wammie award for Blues Recording of the Year.
“I began by playing folk in the sixties,” he said. “I got tired of playing late nights in clubs and switched to blues about 22 years ago.”
The harmonica player had an equally fitting aesthetic, the magnificently blues name Fast Eddy Galvin and a belt full of harmonicas in an array so vast that only an expert could appreciate them all.
I wanted to ask the staff about the winery; it seemed like a magnificent building. I finally found someone with the Tarara logo on her shirt not actively serving wine, selling wine, or explaining the nuances of wine and asked her how old the winery was, but she explained that they were “too busy to answer questions today.”
I’m sure that if it were not an inconvenience, she would have explained that the land, 475 acres of it, was purchased in 1985 by Whitie and Margaret Hubert who constructed “a winery devoted to the art of producing fine wine with intense flavor and lush varietal character” as a pamphlet I found said.
Sore from being ignored, I wandered back into the main room and ended up sitting with three middle-aged ladies and an empty bottle of 2003 Cameo Blush Table Wine.
“We came here for the wine and there happened to be music, but it’s nice,” said one of them who introduced herself and both Annette Townsend and the designated driver.
“She lives here, we’re visiting,” interjected one of her friends.
“We’re from Illinois,” added the other.
The conversation meandered away from wine and blues and into a great many other things. We were told many times that we are “in the prime of your lives.” We passed a pleasant hour and the women were hilarious, though possibly inadvertently motherly. They made much of the lessons of life experience.
“I thought I was a red wine person. Turns out I’m a white wine person,” offered one as an example of such a lesson.
There is one Saturday left in the Midwinter Blues’ Blues Festival and I highly recommend it. It’s a nice drive, a great location, a pleasant atmosphere, and music that’s enjoyable even to those not accustom to blues. But if you go, talk to the people, because talking to the people is the best part.

For more information visit:
www.tarara.com
www.earbuzz.com/raykaminsky