Dave McIntyre wants you to pay attention.
At least to what you are drinking.

“All the time, people tell me, ‘I had a great wine the other night!’ When I ask them what it was, they say, ‘It was ... ummm ... white, I think.’ I hate that!”

McIntyre pays attention, and, in turn, lots of wine lovers pay attention to him. His writings on wine and food have appeared in The Washingtonian, Wine Enthusiast, The San Francisco Chronicle and a large assortment of other publications and websites.

Currently McIntyre blogs at DrinkLocalWine.com and his own dmwineline.com. He writes the weekly wine column appearing every Wednesday in The Washington Post’s Food section.

“I’m a (now recovering) journalist with a fascination for wine and food,” he says. “I took a lot of self-study and (burp!) research and combined my profession and my hobby to make a sideline. I’ve been lucky to be fairly successful at it, with articles in a variety of publications.”

HOW DO YOU THINK FOLKS OUTSIDE VIRGINIA VIEW THE WINE INDUSTRY HERE?
 Outside Virginia, I think it is widely viewed as a novelty still. That was changing, I believe, as social media such as DrinkLocalWine.com and other blogs and web sites paid attention. However, I fear the “White House Gate Crashers” have done the industry a disservice, as they have been described as “the face of Virginia wine” in some media reports. I’d rather think of Mary Watson-DeLauder in that wonderful vine gown as more representative of what Virginia wine is all about—serious yet playful and above all, honest and natural.
 
WHAT FACTORS DO YOU CONSIDER IN PAIRING WINE WITH A DISH?
I like to balance weight, acidity and particular flavors. Heavier foods need either heavy wines or fruity, medium-weight wines with enough acidity to cut through the flavors; salty or acidic foods love crisp white wines. One of my favorite triggers is ginger—it loves pinot noir! (Oops, sorry, that’s not a Virginia-centric answer!) I’m becoming increasingly intolerant of high-alcohol, low-acid wines, though a lot of people love them.
 
NAME THREE THINGS FOLKS SHOULD CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING A WINE?
Other than the food pairing considerations I mentioned above? Well, price is always going to be a factor. I think customers are increasingly aware of environmental concerns, as sustainable, organic and biodynamic wines are increasing in popularity. I tend to frown on wines that are in those impossibly heavy bottles. I’d rather pay for wine than some marketing person’s false idea of prestige. They should also look for new wines similar to ones they’ve liked; if imported wines, they should remember the name of the importers so they can try others from that portfolio. Is that three things? Sorry, I was never good at math.
  
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES TO THE VIRGINIA WINE INDUSTRY?
I’m going to climb on my soapbox here; far be it from me to tell winemakers how to make wine or run a winery, but here goes from my outsider’s perspective.

1) Virginia wine should be made exclusively with Virginia grapes. Virginia wine cannot establish a market identity so long as people can shake their heads and say, “Good, must be made with California juice.” Believe me, people do say that. The law should be changed to prohibit use of out-of-state grapes, or at the very least to require honesty in labeling.

2) Expand distribution. Get the wines into D.C. and Maryland, especially. Capitalize on the “eat local” movement by courting sommeliers and converting them into locapours.

3) Wishful thinking here, but stop imagining that your Cab Franc is Cheval Blanc and charging accordingly. Focus on value. People still complain, “Yeah, the wine’s OK, but it’s too expensive.” In rare instances, with the top wines, that’s unfair and blind tastings like my “Judgment of DC” feature in the Post last summer can prove it. But too often the complaint is justified.

4) Get the word out through social media—blogs, Facebook, Twitter. The Millenniel generation is discovering wine and they are not relying on the Mainstream Wine Media to tell them what to drink. Forget about trying to get 90 point scores from Wine Spectator—it ain’t gonna happen until they’re forced to acknowledge regional wines because they’ve taken over the market.

I’ll put in a personal plug here: My Dallas-based buddy Jeff Siegel (aka “The Wine Curmudgeon”—a great blog) and I co-founded DrinkLocalWine.com last year because we felt the growth of regional wine is revolutionizing the American wine industry, but the story was being missed by the MSWM.

We’ve done two “Regional Wine Weeks,” when we’ve recruited bloggers and wine columnists to write about their local wines and then linked to them on DrinkLocalWine.com. At the behest of the Texas Department of Agriculture, we even held a conference in Dallas last August that brought bloggers from across the country together to learn about and experience Texas wines, including a live Texas Twitter Taste-Off.

(Editor’s Note: The second DrinkLocalWine.com conference was held in late April in Northern Virginia.) 
 
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE GRAPE (OR TWO) GROWN IN THE STATE, AND WHY?
Viognier and Cab Franc are still tops, but I applaud Virginia’s vintners for continuing to experiment with others. I’m excited about Albarino and Sauvignon Blanc. I know Petit Verdot has its detractors as a stand-alone variety, but I took a bottle of Michael Shaps’ 2005 PV to that DrinkLocalWine.com conference in Texas, and people were astonished by it. By the end of the conference, people who had never or rarely tasted a Virginia wine before were coming up to me and saying, “Please do this in Virginia next year.”
 
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF VIRGINIA WINE?
I think American consumers are going to become more aware and accepting of “local” wines—i.e. not from the West Coast. This will redefine our image of “American” wine, even if California continues to dwarf the rest of the country in production. Virginia (and New York) are well poised to lead that movement. Virginia benefits from proximity to D.C. as a major tourist draw—that’s why I say Virginia wine needs to cross the Potomac. Even with the stupid distribution laws in this country, it shouldn’t be as hard for wine as it was for Lee.
 
WHAT DO YOU THINK THOMAS JEFFERSON WOULD THINK OF VIRGINIA WINE TODAY?
I think he’d be proud. But he would be miffed at all the journalists who still feel like they have to start an article on Virginia wine by talking about Jefferson’s failures as a vintner. The story is no longer Jefferson. The story is (Dennis) Horton (of Horton Vineyards), (Jim) Law (of Linden Vineyards), (Luca) Paschina (of Barboursville Vineyards), (Jenni) McCloud (of Chrysalis Vineyards), (Michael) Shaps (of Virginia Wineworks), (Chris) Pearmund (of Pearmund Cellars), and an increasingly large crowd of others.
 

Three to try
Are you kidding? I probably just ticked off a whole bunch of people I admire by leaving them out of my answer to the previous question. 
         

For more articles, see the Summer 2010 issue of Virginia Wine Lover magazine.