On Sunday, I went to my first wine festival in Manassas, Va. The Vintage Virginia festival is one of the state’s oldest and longest-running wine festivals and features something like 50 wine vendors, which means you could potentially taste around 350 wines if you wanted to.

While there, I learned a few things about wine – probably more than I ever wanted to know about wine, truth be told – but I still had a good time.

I’m not 100% sure when the festival opened, but we got there a little after opening, judging by the number of cars – or lack thereof – when we got there. As we pulled in, the two parking attendants were arguing. The male attendant was directing people into lines one after the other to create a parking lot of sorts in the big grassy/muddy field.
 
The female parking attendant would then direct the cars to spaces. But, apparently she was having them pull in a tad askew. It wasn’t too bad in my opinion – it wasn’t like we were parking cattycorner, but it was too crooked for the male attendant. So he was yelling at her to keep them straight, to which she replied she was. He disagreed, and while he stopped short of calling her stupid, he certainly implied she was. I wondered if they knew each other. (Married perhaps?)

Anyway, we headed up to the ticket stand. $30, a wristband, and a wine glass later we were on our way. My girlfriend decided that we should start in the back and make our way forward, since we were meeting friends later, we could do the front wineries when they arrived.

As we made our way to the back, we noticed that the field was incredibly muddy. I picked a bad day to wear relatively new (clean) sneakers. A lot of people (yuppies) wore sandals. I was glad to have muddy sneakers as opposed to muddy feet, but muddy feet didn’t seem to bother them. (I would imagine the more you drank, the less it mattered.)

As we made our way to the first few wineries, I noticed something… I know nothing about wine. As the pourers spoke about the wines, I had no idea what they were talking about: “This wine was made in stainless steel; it doesn’t have the oak-y flavor of a wine made in a barrel.” Huh? When we tried the wine from a barrel, I was expecting it to taste like hickory smoked turkey. It didn’t.

As we sipped more and more samples, I realized that I prefer white wines to red wines. But, I do love dessert wines – regardless of color, mainly because they have sugar. Sugar is good. I also learned that 10% sugar is too much sugar while 3% – 4% is perfect.
 
I learned that you can put herbs and spices in wine. We tried one that had a very basil-y flavor. It was the type of wine you could marinate chicken in, or drink with chicken or turkey. It was, however, more expensive than a cooking wine.
 
We tried a wine with chili pepper in it and one with jalapeños in it. I don’t know why anyone would drink those other than to say that they did. They certainly weren’t wines that you would buy. At least I wouldn’t buy them.

I also learned quite a few things about yuppies at this festival. For starters, they come in all shapes and sizes, but they’re predominantly white. If there’s music playing, they will dance, no matter how unskilled they are at dancing. And, they’ll dance as if no one is watching.
 
Yuppie women love sundresses. That’s not to say every woman who wears a sundress is a yuppie, but I’m pretty sure all yuppie females wear sundresses.  Yuppies also wear sandals. Personally, I think sandals are one of the worst inventions. Feet are ugly, period. Even the best looking foot in the world is ugly to me. Thus, feet should be covered at all times. Yuppies disagree. They don’t even care how nasty their feet look, if it’s warm, the sandals are coming out.
 
Yuppies don’t sweat from just standing around. I’ve seen yuppies sweat at the gym, but from ambient heat, they do not. I was sweating like a runaway slave at the festival, but the yuppies were as dry as some of the wines we tried (whatever that means.)

And lastly, yuppies are good people to be around. Even though some were getting sauced, I never felt unsafe. No one was trying to start a fight. I wasn’t worried about getting shot or anything like that. It was a fun experience without a lot of drama or nonsense.