EPISODE #14 ANNA WANT/CASANEL VINEYARDS & WINERY

This is a fascinating interview because Anna Want, the General Manager and daughter of the founders openly embraces the idea that Casanel has both Norton and Cynthiana vines planted in their vineyard. There is beginning to be a more robust open debate about whether the Cynthiana grape vine is Norton under a different name, or a completely different species of grape vine. I personally, lean toward it is a different species based on the many bottles of Norton I have tasted and enjoyed that have Cynthiana vines listed as the varietal from the nursery they purchased these vines from.

Casanel also is unique in Virginia as they are the only winery I know of who has planted the Carmenere grape and successfully produced a high-quality wine from it here in Virginia. 

The back story as to why the founders Nelson & Casey DeSouza purchase the land that their vineyard was planted on in Northern Loudon County in 2008 is yet another example of the pioneering spirit behind many Virginia wineries. It is a testament to the hard work and determination of one family to make a success out of a Farm Winery. 

Take a listen or read the transcript below.

Thanks for being a listener to the Fine Wine Confidential Podcast. For more information go to www.finewineconfidential.com

Transcript

 EPISODE # 14 CASANEL VINYEARDS & WINERY/ANNA WANT GENERAL MANAGER

SPEAKERS

Fred Reno, Anna Want

 Fred Reno  

Anna, good morning. Welcome to the Fine Wine Confidential Podcast.

 Anna Want  I am excited to be here.

 Fred Reno  Anna Want the General Manager from Casanel Vineyards & Winery is my interview this morning. So welcome Anna. I appreciate your time as I've always like to start right there at the beginning. What was the inspiration for your parents, Casey and Nelson, to buy a piece of land in Northern Virginia and plant your vineyard in 2008? What was the inspiration.

 Anna Want  The inspiration? Well, so a lot of people know Dad, because he's the Brazilian in the wide industry group. There's not a lot of them. He came here in 1962 to this area, there's not a ton of Brazilians. There are a lot more Portuguese. And he has a lot of friends who go back to Portugal, especially in the summer, in the wintertime. And he's been to Portugal 16 times. So, he's gone an awful lot. And when he retired from construction in 2000 let's see, when did he retire? I think it was 2005 2006 he went a little crazy. You know, you go from six days a week, 12-hour days, constant working, to nothing. And I was at Virginia Tech, and he was coming down to class with me, and I was like, you probably need to find something to do. And my mother felt the same way. And he started looking for land. And he knew our first consultant was Kerem Baki at Hillsborough Winery, and he knew his father through mutual friends. They said, if you want to be busy for the rest of your life, grow grapes and make wine. And he thought, oh, how hard can it be? Everybody grows grapes in their backyards in Portugal, everybody makes a wine. It can't be that difficult. I think a lot of it was that romance that he saw in Portugal where everybody was sharing a product. I think coming from the construction world, he loved the idea that he was seeing something from bud to bottle, just like when he makes something or create something. I think that was a large part of it. And then for my mom, it's always been her community. She's always about making a safe place and a happy place where everybody can feel welcome. And Casanel gave her the opportunity to do that and kick them out at six o'clock. She had her time with her people, and then she could se

Fred Reno I know Lucie Morton is your consultant. Was she involved in the beginning? 

 Anna Want  No. She did not come on until my daughter was six months old. I think it was October of 2013 we had Bryan Toy who was at Stone Tower for a bit. He was our consultant in 2012/2013 and he helped us connect with Katell Griaud, who was our consultant from I believe 2013 to 2017. And then we also met Lucie at the same time. And then Lucie was pretty exciting too, because she pulled into the parking lot and she saw Carmenere from the parking lot. Oh my God, you have Carmenere. And that was kind of the first thing, and that really plugged her in. She really appreciated we were a family business. And she said, you know, let's make this vineyard a safe place for all of you to live and to grow up here. And was specifically looking at my oldest daughter, who was six months at the time, and the Carmenere kind of drew her in. And then, as you know, over the last couple years, she's just really gotten absorbed by Norton.

 Fred Reno  I know this podcast is about Norton, but I want to touch on Carmenere for a second, because I'm a big fan of Carmenere myself. Personally, I love Carmenere and I don't know of anybody else, at least in Virginia, that's growing or producing it.

 Anna Want  Yeah, I'm not sure I know Jim Walsh tried, like, way back and he pulled it out. I think he tried two or three years and he's like, oh, forget this. I don't know if Doug Fabbioli ever successfully had a varietal, but he came in after us having one. I think we were the first ones to have a full varietal. In 2014 we had a 75% Carmenere, 25% Petit Verdot in 2013 and that was the first time we had it. So, it took a while to produce. It took six years to produce. I want to believe that Kerem recommended it being a very popular grape in South America. He said, Nelson, Brazil, Chile, let's do it. And no one else is doing it. And Dad's all about kind of pushing the boundaries. He wanted to see what we could do differently. Carmenere was definitely one of the wines not being prevalently common in Virginia. 

 Fred Reno  I would recommend highly to the folks listening to this podcast, buy some Casanel Carmenere because it's really stellar. So, let's get back to Norton.  Why plant Norton? How did that happen? 

 Anna Want  Dad always jokes that he only knows three things about wine, there's red, there's white, and there's pink. And he's not very helpful. Also being Brazilian I think his palette, I've noticed with Latin Americans they tend towards more fruitier wines. I think Kerem looked at the Norton and he said, Okay, this is a wine that tends to have a very fruit forward flavor profile. And then when dad started looking into it, and I started looking into it, I'm the historian in the family, I went to VA Tech for history, and I was like, well, let's find out more about these grapes. I found, you know, the fascinating history that Norton has. Dad believes back in 1776 he helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Dad's a very proud American by choice. And he thought, you know, he could see himself egging him on to make wine. And he has this thing, but he loves Thomas Jefferson. He's always been a huge fan of him and his genius. You know, he's a renaissance man, he always pushing the envelope. So, I think dad really connected to that. When he found out that when Jefferson came back from being the ambassador to France and was trying to make wine, and Norton was one of them. He loved that part of the story. And then we all really connected, I think, to Dr Norton. Here's a man who's lost his wife and his son, and kind of drives himself into work. A lot of us do that. Some people stop and a lot of us just working is how we deal with our grief, and something usually beautiful comes out of that. We definitely connected to that part of the story. And I thought it was really cool that's how the Norton came about in Virginia.

Fred Reno Well, your vineyard is eight acres planted in total.  How much is actually Norton? 

 Anna Want 2000 vines, a good chunk. I think Pinot Gris is our largest varietal planting and Norton is a close second.

 Fred Reno  What would have been the first vintage of Norton?

 Anna Want   We planted everything in, I want to say April and May of 2008. And we didn’t start seeing the Norton produce a wine as it took about five years. It took a took a bit more as Norton takes a while to finally establish itself. Once it's in, it's good. It tends to also be a bit of a boom-and-bust crop too, like we'll have a good year with lots of tonnage. And then we have a year where it's okay. Norton has his issues that way. And then now we know we have Cynthiana too. So, we're not sure Lucie’s figured out how much we need to tweak things, because they're all interlaced. It's not like one section is Norton and one section Cynthiana. They're all kind of bunched in there. 

 Fred Reno  Do you know where your plant material originally came from?

 Anna Want Yes, Double A vineyards in New York. So, we got them all from there. But I believe we started making a Rose of Norton first, because a lot of people you know see Norton as a red that can be a little bit intimidating. It looks like it's going to be this heavy, big, bold wine, but it's very acidic. I think our first attempt was doing Rose, and that was very popular. I believe our first Rose from our plants was 2012 and then we did have a still red wine of Norton in ‘13. That did well. Then we went away from that for a bit, and then we've had the Sparks. We've had port. We've done a lot with it. Jenni McCloud from Chrysalis was at our place a couple weeks ago, and she's like, you have five different wines with Norton in them? I said, Yeah. I know she has more, but we have a bunch, so we try to get it and everything, if we can.

 Fred Reno  I’m interested to understand what is like in the tasting room when your customers come in, maybe they’ve never had Norton before, and all of a sudden, they're having Norton. How do they respond? 

 Anna Want  I think the grape name is always a signal that this is not like the others. You know, it has a very American name. So, always when people see it on the tasting sheet, they're always like, well, what's this one? It's not as fancy as Cabernet Sauvignon or whatever. You know, what you would typically see, and we tend to always have it on the tasting if we can in some form, whether it's the Sparkling, the red, the port, because it is the Virginia grape. We want to push what Virginia is known for. And as soon as we say it the Virginia grape, people are like, Oh, either they've heard of it, or they haven’t. And like, Oh, we didn't know there are any native grapes in the US. And then that starts us down that rabbit hole. Or if they've had it, sometimes, the reaction is, I don't like it, and it's like wait a minute, wait a minute. So, it does tend to have a bit of a polarizing reaction. Or they're like, super excited because it's the Grape of Virginia, and they're curious and they want to taste it, or they've had it other places, and it's just not their cup of tea, so to speak. We have to kind of convince them, and we've really tried to embrace the fact that the Norton is a fruit forward one and has nice acidity, and letting it be a more acidic red, versus trying to Oak it and change it. And we've had a lot of good responses so that. And when you tell them that, and you tell them there's no natural tannin, and you present that it's a dark grape, the pulp is dark purple, always then they're kind of not as intimidated by it, because it is such an inky, dark red wine.

 Fred Reno  Well, I will endorse the quality of what you produce at Casanel, because the first two years we had the Norton Cup Challenge at the Homestead, which I oversee, you finished in the top four. Two years in a row, you've been in the Final Four. So, this year, maybe a third time's a charm, right?

 Anna Want  Maybe, no, we're happy that it does show so well. We have convinced people that Norton is very palatable. I think a lot of it is color. When they see how dark it is, they're expecting a very heavy oaky wine. 

 Fred Reno  Well, this is going to be fascinating. You touched on it earlier for the audience, this whole thing that Lucie Morton's on this trail she's on. She firmly believes Cynthiana, which has been sold as Norton for years, is a different grape. And she feels like she has the empirical proof and is working with a professor at the University of Missouri to do the testing and the sequencing. And now she's going into vineyards, and she says, you have some Cynthiana in your vineyard.

 Anna Want  She has dragged me out there. She has dragged me out. She's actually gotten my son looking at stuff too. He's my five-year-old. But just trying to figure out the differences, her and I have been trying to kind of pinpoint what it is. For example, Cynthiana tends to have more female like features. We've noticed a few more characteristics. She has more of a sweetheart neckline in her leaf pattern. She has more of a grip to her leaves, almost like fingernails. Like, we're trying to figure out the best way to describe how the differences are to help people learn.

 Fred Reno  Yeah, you've got a fascinating event coming up, and I have got to give you credit for your marketing the idea of this event on the 28th of September at Casanel. “To tell the truth”, modeling it after that, 60s, TV show that I remember watching when I was younger, to tell the truth. So, Lucie is going to take people in the field and show them the difference in the leaves, however you're probably not going to be able to taste anything separate at that point.

 Anna Want  I think we might be able to do some. We'll probably be picking for Spark our sparkling Norton around that time. So, stuff like will be somewhat palatable, more acidic, but yeah, her plan is, she's kind of gone through and she's done about six or seven rows where she feels pretty confident that she's figured out which ones are which. And like I said, we're trying to come up with, almost a hot sheet of what you should be looking for. And you know, we've been fortunate that the Cynthiana tends to lean toward more feminine characteristics, which is great, which makes sense with the name. And the plan is, everybody gets their little, I'm trying to remember the name, the magnifying glass, and they can look at the vine leaves and learn for themselves. Everybody gets their own and she'll take them out. She'll see if people can tell the difference. Help flag things and then our hope is to bring everybody in and we'll taste the wines that we have, and you guys can see how versatile the grape is as well.

 Fred Reno  My own personal experience with Norton early on, yours is one of the wines I liked young more than others. And then I realized some time ago when Lucie and I were talking about the Cynthiana thing came into the picture, I started to realize, oh, that's why Casanel, and also DuCard which is one of my favorite Nortons when it's young, tend to be more elegant in their youth, because there's a blend of Cynthiana and Norton. And Horton Vineyards in 2023 listened to Lucie and they kept certain rows of vines which she said were Cynthiana, and what were Norton separate, vinified them separately, and bottled separately. I was lucky enough to be gifted a half bottle each of the wine in November last year before the wine finished. It wasn't even through any of its chemical movements, but they didn't Sulphur it for me. They gave it to me right out of the tank, and I took it home, put it in the refrigerator right away, then opened them that night and tasted. The Cynthiana was this more elegant expression, and then the Norton was just this big brute coming out of the bottle. What was left I put back in the refrigerator, came back to them the next night, tasted them and then blended the two from what was left, and the Cynthiana just calmed that Norton right down.

 Anna Want  I think that is key for us, because now that she's kind of explained everything to me, I do think we have a benefit, having both. And kudos to Horton that they were able to do that. Um, I'm hoping we just hired a new on-site winemaker, Diego, who's with us this harvest, and he's excited to meet Lucie. He's from Chile, so he's got some Carmenere experience. It's exciting, but he's really excited about the Norton of all the grapes that we have. He's really interested in learning about it. I'm hoping, between him and Lucie, this class on September 28 we'll get some more things nailed down, but it will be interesting to see too, as we experiment more if one of those grapes lends itself to being better for the sparkling, if one of those grapes lends itself being better for the port and so on and so forth. But I think it'll take us a couple years to get all that under our belt and start to experiment, but we are excited to be a part of that with her.

 Fred Reno  Well, when I was interviewing Todd Kliman recently for the podcast, Todd is of course, the author of The Wild Vine, the real, true story of the Norton, he said something at the end that I turned into a little sound bite that I found fascinating. When he was talking about Norton, he went into this whole sort of analogy about the mid 1800’s to late 1800s and he started talking about literature and Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and how that eventually evolved into the novel and American literature was able to evolve. And he was talking about Jazz. Jazz wasn't really jazz then, but all these things, these forms of artistry, were able to continue their journey. In the case of Norton, prohibition happened. Yeah, destroyed. It. Just destroyed all the East Coast wine growing. And he was making the point. What if prohibition had never happened and Norton had been able to keep on that journey, and we hadn't lost all that institutional knowledge, all those growers, all these people, everybody who knew what to do. He was saying that he thought that Virginia and Missouri would be revered wine growing regions today, because people would point to them and say that's where it all began, and we would have evolved. And now Norton is really just beginning to evolve again, isn't it?

 Anna Want  Yeah, I was trying to figure out how many of us actually produce Norton. So again, you know, we're working with Chrysalis and several other producers to create that Norton trail. The Norton Network is a brand-new thing. We just announced that we were part of that in July. I'm looking forward to that. So hopefully Lucie’s event will be kind of a kickoff for that. Her event is on September 28 and she's talking about the differences between the two, and then October 18 to November 11. I believe we're all going to be pushing Norton in our tastings and our flights and doing some events. I'm hoping to do some tours and do some barrel tastings and things during that month. It's kind of nice that we're all in one place now. I'm probably wrong, but I think there's like 18 to 20, and that's not a lot of producers in Virginia in the grand scheme of things, I think we're close to over 400 wineries, but not a lot of us are growing Norton. 

 Fred Reno  I'm a contributor to the Norton Network, as you may well know, yeah,

 Anna Want  I knew you were a part of it. You have to be.

 Fred Reno  Well, I completely believe in it, and it's pretty exciting to get people thinking about Norton and going, Oh, what is this? Because if you've had the benefit, but most people haven't had the benefit of tasting a Norton that has 10 years bottle age on it Right, right? And what a difference that it just opens your eyes dramatically to what this wine could be. I guess, relatively, it's bulletproof, they say.

 Anna Want  But there are issues, it gets kind of finicky about things. 

 Fred Reno  But with sustainability becoming a thing here for the future, and its cold hardiness and its lack of need to spray consistently.

 Anna Want  Yeah, we barely spray ours.

 Fred Reno  I think Norton's going to find a place, not just in Virginia, but around the country, in other vineyards as well,

 Anna Want  And that was something we were talking about, I'm talking about with Diego, because Diego has worked in New Zealand, France, California, Oregon, and Chile, so he has a pretty wide range. And I said, I think the biggest thing, you know, we all need to grasp is we don't need to copy anybody else, right? Don't have to copy California. We don't have to. And I think it's just trying to get away from that mindset of trying to replicate other wine regions because we need to get a Virginia, to our Virginia microclimate, Virginia tasting palette out there, so people appreciate what Virginia does. I think Missouri has done a better job of that than us at the moment. 

 Fred Reno  You really have touched on something that came into my mind some time ago. When I started this podcast, I began to realize we still talk about Norton fin Virginia as a varietal. There's not a terroir story that's associated with it. And I think the next evolution is to understand what the best terroir is just by way of explanation. I always talk about terroir. I think of it as a three-legged stool. Essentially, there's climate. Climate influences all agriculture, no matter what. So that's number one, two, site selection, that's elevation, soil and other factors. It's all that. And then probably the third component is large, if not larger. It is what I call the hand of man. What you do with that resource once you have it in the cellar, and that's your terroir story. And I think we have to start to talk about Norton like that. So, people start to think about it, because right now they just think about it, to your point about being polarizing way I don't like that variety.

 Anna Want  Yeah, they will do that. Like, we had to do some trial and error at Casanel. We originally had it in VSP, vertical shoot positioning, and it didn't do well. It's, it is, like, America large and big. It likes to have lots of space. It's kind of funny how it mimics that. But the leaves are four times the size of vinifera, and the clusters are very different. So, we went to a six foot high canopy, and we have the fruit up high, and we've allowed it to grow more like a bush. And there's a lot of things, Lucie and then Jose, our vineyard manager, who's been invaluable for us. Been with us for, oh, my goodness, 14 years, and he loves those babies more than anything, and he's been very good. The Norton and the Carmenere going up high was his idea. He and dad trained everything to go up a little bit higher, help it get more airflow, get more sun, so the Norton is happier when it has a little bit more room. That's something we've realized with it, and then, like the last two years, with the heat, it's been interesting to see, you know, the vineyard is really struggling with the big temperature changes. We can go from 60 to 94 in one day in Virginia, and that's when things start to go really wrong in the vineyard, is when we have those extreme temperature shifts in September and October, when we're close to harvest. Norton, so far, like I said, it's doing pretty good, but it also tends to regulate itself, like I've seen it when having a really good winter, it tends to that following, you know, harvest year, it does really well, because it's okay in the winter and so on and so forth. I'm trying to be a little bit better at keeping track because I love data, so I'm trying to keep track a little bit better about if the weather is affecting our crop size too.

 Fred Reno  Well, I mean, this summer's is the hottest summer I can remember my entire life anywhere. 

 Anna Want  Yeah, our vines, knock on wood are doing really well. And we have some drought stress areas. We have a lot of rocky soil, being in Clark's gap in the Catoctin Mountain. So, some of our, especially the Pinot Gris, it's in a really rocky spot. They're struggling. We can tell they're not so happy while the Norton has been fine. It doesn’t seem to be having any issues. So, we'll see. It will be curious to see if the weathermen who are usually wrong, and don’t get much right, and hopefully they're wrong again about they are predicting a strong hurricane season. 

 Fred Reno  How close are you to, or have you started any kind of harvest at this point?

 Anna Want  Yeah, we're starting harvest next Tuesday or Wednesday. We'll be getting the Chardonnay off for our white Spark, our sparkling Chardonnay, and then our Gris is probably that week after Labor Day, that’s when we'll start bringing in Pinot Gris. So, we're getting there. It's almost time and we were lucky. A lot of people said they were two weeks ahead. We still seem to be pretty much on track. I think the heat kind of stalled things a little bit, slowed things down, which is not a horrible thing either, but the vines are happy and healthy. We'll take that. Adam is always amazed. Adam is our consultant winemaker. He's been with us since 2021, and he's always amazed at how happy the vines are in our little spot. We have a really good airflow, good drainage and so forth. 

 Fred Reno  That's really good to hear, by the way. It is clever how the winery was named. I should have mentioned this earlier in the podcast. Casanel folks stands for basically your mother and your father's name, right?

 Anna Want  Yep, Casey and Nelson and mom would always joke when he was in trouble. It became the house of Nelson and all his fault. Yeah, that was a combination. Dad's very much of that generation, where everything has meaning and combination, they have another company, that's Nelka. So that's Nelson and Kathleen. My mom was Kathleen, but she went by Casey, so they always like to have things, to have a story

 Fred Reno  That's pretty clever. Your fathers still involved?

 Anna Want  Yes, and he is 82, still kicking and I swear this keeps him young. He and I both have no problems talking. Obviously, we're chatter boxes. We're extroverts. And the great thing about Casanel is you meet new people. I love that. That's my favorite part of the job. Is meeting new people all the time and sharing stories and history. It's absolutely my favorite part. And for Dad, it really is too. He loves talking to people and going on tangents and getting passionate and all of those things. He's traveling a little bit more, and he's doing things, but he's still very involved. My mom passed away, unfortunately, three years ago, so she's no longer with us, but she's still very present in the spirit of the winery for sure.

 Fred Reno  I'm sure that's true. Well, as I've challenged every Vintner, who's going to be the first vintner here in Virginia to put Norton in an outsized bottle.

 Anna Want  What kind of bottle? An outside bottle like a Magnum?

 Anna Want  Oh, a Magnum. I don't know, or a three-liter bottle by hand. I don't have that capability yet.

 Fred Reno  How about a nine-liter bottle? Will we live long enough for it to mature the taste it?

 Anna Want  I hope so. Like I said, the history is fascinating. It won best wine. When was that? 1870 in France? 1873 Yeah. It has this ability to do really well over time. And I met the gentleman who's producing the movie for Lucie. We were featured in that too. And I think it's Odyssey of the Forbidden Wine, is what it's called. Hopefully that's coming out soon. Lucie, get that out. But he was talking about how there's this whole black-market with Norton, because Norton exists in France and in Europe and other places, but it's a hybrid.

 Fred Reno  There is some Norton in France? 

 Anna Want  Oh, yea for sure. Norton was grafted to everything after the phylloxera outbreak in the 1860s Yeah. So, it exists, it's there, and there are wineries, I think that do a Norton. Lucie said that it's like a whole black market. I'm fascinated by that. I would love to learn more. But, I mean, I remember when Katel came to work for us, She's like, what is this grape? Why is this here? This is not a vinifera. And, you know, she had to kind of test herself. And Adam was, he's originally from Ontario, and he was with Boxwood for a very long time, and they do mostly vinifera. So, when he came to us, he's like, Okay, what do I do with this thing? And I said nothing. Just let it go. And that's been the hard part, I think, for winemakers, is just letting it kind of shine and do its own thing.

Fred Reno You know, the more and more institutional knowledge that is shared, which is the beautiful thing about the Norton Network. There's an opportunity now for people to actually just share information and see what may work best for them. 

 Anna Want  I remember when Julien came out, it was when Katell was still with us, Julien came out, and he had tried our wines, and he was shocked we did a sparkling wine out of Norton. He's like, this is pretty cool. And he did really like our still wine, I know he mentioned us on the podcast that he was on. Thank you, Julien. But it I think that's part of the key, is having everybody get together and share that knowledge. Katell was always really good about that, and she had excellent notes. She's still teaching people years from now, and it's just getting it out there. I try really hard whenever I’m off site or something where it's not necessarily going to be known, to bring it, to try and get people to be excited about it. And like I said, we almost always have it featured in some shape or form in our tasting, because it's important for people to have that chance to try it.,

 Fred Reno  Well, I'm trying to do my part with my podcast to get the word out there about Norton and it's been received very positively. I've been encouraged by the response I've received and the comments I've gotten from some of my listeners about Norton. It's America's Grape Yeah, it's Virginia.

 Anna Want  Embrace it. Embrace it, yeah. And I think that's dad's whole thing. He's just like, you know, why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we try to push something that's from here, and, like you said, with climate change and everything going on, we do need to try to push the vinifera and the native hybrids, because I think that is going to be our saving grace down the line, if things continue weather wise the way they have been.

 Fred Reno   And there's a lot of misinformation, as you know about Norton out there. I've called them out a couple times on my podcast. I'm still waiting for the changes. But Wine Searcher, which has a website, you know, it's good for finding out where you can buy wine anywhere in the country. But they also have an educational platform on their website, and it's really well done. But they say Norton was discovered in Missouri. That is completely false, as we all know.

 Anna Want  Somehow it got there, but it was not originally from there. It is their state grape. They're more ahead of us than we are. I remember when people were pushing around the Viognier being the state’s grape. I'm like, No, luckily that didn't happen. And I know, you know, if we can get the Virginia Marketing Board to push it more like there's a lot of avenues, and I think the Norton Network is finally going to get some of that out there too.

 Fred Reno  Well in the expression of Norton in Virginia versus Missouri, because I I do have Stone Hill Winery from Missouri in my cellar, and they make wonderful wines, and I've had other examples from Missouri and Illinois for that matter, but the Virginia example is far and away, much more expressive, bigger, richer. And I'm just starting to wonder Okay, how much of this other Nortons is Cynthiana in these states that was sold to them as Norton?

 Anna Want  Yeah, and that's one of, I think, Lucie’s big frustrations, because, you know, we're getting to the point our vineyards now since planting in 2008, so everything's about 16 years old. We're going to have to start replacing vines soon. You know, start doing some upkeep. And she's like, the question is, where do we buy it from? Because so many of the nurseries are just not paying attention and grape cuttings aren't cataloged correctly, which, again, like you said, it's misinformation. They think Norton's all the same, and it's not so. You know, we'll have to see if that gets addressed too.

 Fred Reno   Anna, I appreciate your time this morning, and I want to again, put a plug it to the folks who are going to listen to this before your September 28 event.

 Anna Want  Yes. So, we have two different tickets for that. There is a $75 ticket, which includes the class, and you get to spend the time with Lucie who is a fascinating person. She's one of my favorite people, and it's just so much fun to hang out with her. Joyce Rigby from Boxwood's going to be hanging out with us too. Joyce will be here. Cool. Yeah. Joyce will be there. Adam McTaggart, our winemaker, will be there. I will be there for all that counts, and we're excited to do that. So, the $75 includes the class and the tasting and a personal charcuterie board. And then there's also a $150 ticket for people who want to sponsor the movie. That will get you a line credit in the movie to help push the Odyssey the Forbidden Grapes when it comes out and I think they're very close to the finish line. I've just been trying to help them to get through those last bit of production costs and figure out how to get it, and the plan is to do a viewing of that at Casanel when it's finally available. So, I'm super excited about that.

 Fred Reno  Cool, that would be great. Absolutely great. On that note let me thank you Anna for sitting for this Podcast and good luck on September 28th and for the 2024 Vintage.