Barboursville Vineyards & Palladio Restaurant
17655 Winery Road
Barboursville, VA 22923
(540) 832-3824
www.barboursvillewine.net
As a chef, I take the classic combinations that you would find in Italy and use the products [that are] here [in Virginia]…I always stayed more of the Italian style, more than cooking Italian food. And even Luca [Paschina], our winemaker, he does the same. I mean we do grow European and mainly Italian varietals, but he will only grow varietals that thrive here. – Melissa Close
In the 1970s Gianni Zonin, a sixth-generation Italian winemaker, visited Virginia and decided to plant a vineyard. Most people thought he was crazy and advised that he plant tobacco, instead. But Zonin persisted, recognizing his homeland in the Virginia landscape. In 1976 he purchased the historic James Barbour Estate and rolled up his sleeves. Today, Barboursville Vineyards is a standard-bearer in the Virginia wine industry, having established itself so early as a successful producer of European varietals. In 1998 Zonin’s winemaker, Luca Paschina, was inspired to showcase Barboursville wines with food, and the Palladio Restaurant was born.
Melissa Close, an Alabama native, first learned about Italian food while working with Frank Stitt at his Bottega Italian Restaurant in Birmingham. She was hired as the Palladio Restaurant’s head chef in 2000. Melissa brought with her to Virginia a passion for fresh ingredients and, of course, an appreciation for good wine. The menu at the Palladio Restaurant is a marriage of Northern Italian inspiration and Melissa’s Southern roots. Her Terrina Caprese, for example, is an heirloom tomato and basil aspic terrine served with homemade mozzarella. Melissa is also committed to taking full advantage of Virginia’s seasonal bounty, which includes Barboursville wines.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Melissa Close, Executive Chef, Palladio Restaurant, Barboursville Vineyards
Date: June 18, 2008
Location: Barboursville Vineyards – Barboursville, VA
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on June 18, 2008, and I am at Barboursville Vineyards in Barboursville, Virginia. I’m sitting at the Palladio Restaurant with the Executive Chef Melissa Close. Melissa, if you would please state your name and give us a little sentence about what you do here at Barboursville.
Melissa Close: My name is Melissa Close. I’m the Executive Chef at Palladio Restaurant. I’ve been here for eight years, taking care of writing all our menus and executing everything from the kitchen.
And if I may ask you to share your birth date for the record.
November 19, 1970.
And you are an Alabama girl?
I’m an Alabama girl, yes…Born and raised in Mobile and then I lived in Montevallo and the Birmingham area for about eight years.
Could you give us kind of a short trajectory of your culinary school experience and then where you’ve worked around the country?
I got into doing food as a way to pay rent in college. I was going to be a schoolteacher and realized I was a much better cook than a teacher. And worked for Frank Stitt in Birmingham [at his restaurant Bodega]. It was my first full-service, fine-dining restaurant, and it was the first time I worked in Italian food. And he told me that I should go to culinary school, and I did. I went to New England Culinary Institute as a second career back in [nineteen] ’97. After that, I worked here in Virginia at a place called Clifton Inn, kind of a Southern-style bed and breakfast and then worked in California and San Francisco at Rose Pistola and then in Colorado for a brief period before this job opened in 2000. I’ve been here ever since.
Now if we could talk about your time with Frank Stitt at Bodega, is that right?
Yeah, I worked on and off with Frank for almost two years, kind of where I discovered the passion I had for Italian food and how I kind of really discovered that Italian food and Southern food are very connected. I grew up in Alabama, in Mobile. My mom was born and raised in Mobile, so I’m a third or fourth generation Southern Belle and grew up on Southern—or Southern soul food, so to speak, and kind of learned that Italians eat the same way. And it was a way to do more fine dining food but still stay in the same philosophy of food that I grew up with of opening your back door, and whatever is ripe in the garden, is what you cook with. And Italians do the same. I get the great opportunity to work in Italy every January and that’s—it kind of dawned on me out there. Just one day I went and opened up the door and picked the cavoli, which is cabbage, and made a stew out of it. And I was like, wow, that’s what my mom used to do when I was a kid. So it’s just their philosophy of food is the same. It’ s not adulterated; the food is the food, and it allows you to express the flavor of the food more than express your need to build a tower or make something that’s unnatural out of food. I’m a Southern girl at heart in my food and enjoy showing it through Italian food. And I do put my own flairs, if a little bit of Southern girl shows up. You know, we have braised collard greens on the menu right now and some cornmeal crepes but, other than that, we do stick pretty traditionally to the Italian fare.
Now what about all that did you learn from Frank Stitt, specifically?
Well, he was the one that first taught me to understand true Italian food, you know, beyond the spaghetti and meatballs or getting the scaloppini with a side of spaghetti. And, you know, that’s just not how Italians really eat. And just to see how it traditionally happens and the classic combinations of flavor and the classic way to fix things and to be simple about it and olive oil and salt and pepper and nothing else.
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And so your experience here at Palladio and at Barboursville, it runs parallel to why I’m here talking to you about Virginia wine …Barboursville and Palladio are such a great illustration of a globalized South…And in Virginia as a whole, you have Italians in the wine industry and Frenchmen, and it’s an international scene here in Virginia, and the terroir [the special characteristics recognized in a grape, as a result of geographical and environmental influence] is what makes the Virginia wine Virginian. And it’s the same thing in the food. And so I’m wondering if you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that you are cooking at an Italian restaurant, but you’re a Southern girl and using Southern ingredients and what you really call what you do?
I don’t know if there’s a specific name. We always say we cook in the tradition of Italy and use as much local—but, you know, almost, you know, as I was saying earlier, it’s—if an Italian lived here, they would probably cook the same thing I’m cooking right now. I take the classic combinations that you would find in Italy and use the products here, and of course there are products here that you don’t get in Italy and vice-versa. But you know, I always stayed more of the Italian style, more than cooking Italian food. And even Luca [Paschina], our winemaker, who is in Italy right now and couldn’t join us, he does the same. I mean we do grow European and mainly Italian varietals, but he will only grow varietals that thrive here. You can't grow all of them that he’s used to growing. He grew up in the Piedmont region [of Italy], but if it doesn’t work, he changes the plants and puts in vines. And like Cabernet Franc, which isn't necessarily an Italian grape, is thriving in Virginia as a red grape, and he plants more and more acreage of it every year, and he believes in producing what the land is going to produce. And I think that’s kind of a philosophy of being Italian. And you know you’re not going to try to grow a grape that would grow great in the Chardonnay region of France and grow it in Piedmont. You’re going to grow a grape that grows well there, and he does the same here in Virginia. And it just happens to be that a lot of the Italian varietals thrive here. And that’s one reason we are actually—we’re owned by an Italian family [The Zonin family], and they were just here visiting in 1976, and it reminded them of Piedmont Italy. So they bought 800 acres and put a winery here, and it’s been thriving ever since.
And I read that Mr. Zonin, who purchased the property in the [nineteen] ‘70s, was advised to plant tobacco instead of vines.
Yeah, I’ve heard that. He’ll joke about that story, and I think we actually used to be—I think it was originally a sheep farm here when they bought it, and somebody told him to turn it into a tobacco farm. And, you know, he’s seven generations of a winemaker. I don’t think he could change. But he actually started growing the European rootstocks and grafting rootstocks; a lot of the original wineries here in Virginia that started in the ‘70s bought rootstock from the Zonins that were doing that here, before he actually started a winery. But I don’t think it was too much longer before they started growing grapes and producing their own wine and have been doing very well ever since.
Do you know what brought him to Virginia, initially?
I think friends lived here, and they just came for a visit, and they were looking to expand their organization and their enterprise. And his wife just loved it here, and they thought, why not try a place overseas and they’ve done really well here. And I believe they have fifteen different vineyards throughout Italy, counting this one, and then they also produce a lot of wines at their main headquarters in Gambellara, where they have vineyards all over that get shipped there and bottled under their name. But they have fifteen high-end wineries similar to Barboursville.
Do any of the Barboursville wines make it back to Italy?
Yeah, actually, they do. I was in a little Intecca wine shop one day and was like, wow, there’s a Barboursville Pinot Grigio. And I think a lot of that has to do with, you know, the Zonins have an import/export, and they’ll import some of ours. They don’t sell very well, I don’t think, but we have wines in New York and Chicago. I was actually in New York City, sitting in a sushi restaurant and looked down, and their house wine was our Chardonnay.
And I don’t know how connected you are to the everyday operations of the vineyard and the winery part, but I understand, too, from reading about Barboursville, that the Italian style of maintaining a vineyard and planting a vineyard, like they plant many more vines per row and per acre and just that style of planting and winemaking is so different. Can you talk about that a little bit?
I would be afraid I would say something wrong. I do know that our viticulturist is actually El Salvadorian, and he’s excellent. And I know that we prune back a lot of our plants and you can even see that from going to other vineyards. Our vines are a lot thinner than everybody else; he tends to prune very early in the spring. He cuts back clusters; he’ll take whole clusters off the vines to produce less quantity but higher quality and—because any plant that produces fruit, the more fruit that’s on the plant, the less quality each piece of fruit individually is going to have. So they’ll actually take whole clusters off the plant at certain parts of the season to let the better clusters thrive and produce a better wine. And so I’m not sure how many plants per row, if it’s more or less, but I do know that we actually thin a lot more than some of the vineyards around.
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Let’s talk about your food again because I enjoyed a lovely lunch here today at Palladio and, as we remarked before, you have the cornmeal crepes filled with broccoli raab and a great tomato basil terrine. Can you talk about those things?
The tomato basil terrine, this time of year, we always run some version of the classic Caprese with tomatoes and mozzarella, and we’ve always made our mozzarella in-house. And every summer I try to think of something a little bit different to do, and I think back to the summer parties at my great aunt’s house, when she always had the tomato aspic and, you know, she’d do it with shrimp or crab in there, but that might be an interesting way. And I’ve taken some local tomatoes and made tomato water and made my own aspic and float heirloom tomatoes in it, and we make our own homemade mozzarella and serve it layered. So it’s still the same flavors, the same textures that you would get in a Caprese, if you were sitting in Florence, but it’s just a little bit more Southern and it’s a little bit more—different.
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How about your clientele and how they receive that and what they expect when they come to eat here?
Actually, most of my clientele is always surprised that I’m a Southerner. A lot of them, if they’ve never met me, expect me to be Italian and are really surprised that someone from Alabama cooks as traditionally as Italian as we do. But we have a very regular clientele base. I have customers that come once a week or two or three times a month, and I would say that’s a good twenty percent of my clients. And then evening time for dinner, we do a lot of special occasions—anniversaries and birthdays. So it’s a slight destination restaurant from Charlottesville being twenty miles north, and a lot of my clients are from DC and Richmond…We have a lot of Italian clientele that come, but I think that a lot of times they’re just more shocked that I’m Southern than not, and then when they find out I’m Southern, I think that’s when they’ll notice more the Southern touches that are in dishes more than noticing the Southern touches first.
Let’s talk about the wine pairings, because you have a wine flight that goes with the pre fixe menu for lunch and for dinner, and can you talk about how you make those pairings?
We do it two different ways. More times than not we create a menu first, since we do have fifteen, seventeen different varieties of wine that we produce here on the property, so we’re more produce-driven—whatever is coming in for the season and we create a menu from there. And then our maître d’, who just actually got his Master Sommelier from Italy this past month, tends to do the pairings from that direction. If we do have a wine that we specially want to show or, you know, feature it for that month, we’ll go backwards the other way, and he’ll say, you know, “I really want,” you know, “the Cabernet Franc is really ready to drink right now. Let’s create a dish for it.” And we’ll go the other way. But it’s generally, the menu comes first, and then we sit down and we always do a menu tasting. We’ll sit down with one or two or three wines that we’re thinking about pairing it with and making sure which ones work best, so it’s a group effort between Luca, our winemaker, and Alessandro, our sommelier, and myself.
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Can we talk a little bit about the history of Barboursville and the connection with—because I was reading on the website that the Zonins are from the area of Italy—the same as Andrea Palladio for which the restaurant is named and his connection with architecture and Thomas Jefferson and all that. Can you speak to that?
Yeah, the Zonins live in the Veneto region, which Andrea Palladio was famous for— in Vicenza, all the statues and all the octagon rooms and columns and the very Palladian architecture, which is where Thomas Jefferson also drew a lot of his inspiration. All of UVA [University of Virginia] is very Palladian, with the big domes and the big columns. And when they created the restaurant here, they were trying to create a way to connect it all. And we also have Governor Barbour, who was a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson’s house—the ruins of the house are here on the property, and Thomas Jefferson designed it. It was one of only three residents that Thomas Jefferson designed, so it was just kind of a good connection of, you know, taking Thomas Jefferson to Italy and bringing Italy back to Virginia and making it full circle of being able to do that international connection of us and Italy.
Is there ever a time that you have to kind of justify the fact that there’s an Italian winemaker here in Virginia and what means or no?
I never had to. I mean Luca may have had to justify it to someone, but we actually have a very large Italian community here. I’ve been surprised at how many Italians I’ve met in Virginia, especially closer to the DC area, also. But Luca actually met the Zonins in Italy. They sent him to do a three-month consulting job and he, like I was saying earlier, grew up in Piedmont, and one reason the Zonins bought this property, they were here in ’76 and they were like, “Wow, this is just like Piedmont in Italy. I bet you could have a winery here.” And he came and fell in love with the place and also fell in love with an American woman, and he’s never left. And he’s been here for fifteen years or so now and been our winemaker ever since. He was supposed to be here for three months and been here for fifteen years. And Luca is a staple of our community. He’s very adamant about agricultural—staying in Virginia and, you know, just kind of businesses helping other businesses out. He’s in the forefront of all—you know, he’s at town meetings all the time. He’s always in—looking out for the best of farmers and people that are in the agricultural business, and he doesn’t do it just for his benefit here at the vineyard. He does that because it’s the benefit of everybody in Virginia and the business and the wine industry as a whole. And so he’s definitely part of the community and very accepted in the community. I don’t think anybody would ever question him being here, Italian or not.
So Luca and Barboursville Winery in general are advocates and supporters of the Virginia wine industry?
Yes, and very much advocates of eat local, buy local, sell local. We try to deal with as many local people as possible…It’s just second nature for us here, and I think it’s second nature for Luca because he knows—I mean even in just a smart business way, if he keeps business here in Virginia, people are going to come to him and, you know, and it keeps his business happy. So it’s reciprocal amongst other businesses around, and I think it’s important, you know. I think it’s long before the Green Initiative and, you know, just doing this I think that’s been the way of life in Virginia for hundreds of years, and it’s I think just kind of started being noticed.
So speaking of the winery specifically and just its scale and its age. I mean it’s really established itself here since 1976, and it’s one of the larger producers of Virginia wine in the state. Can you talk about some of the wines and where they go and what they’re like?
Oh, I will try my best. I know which ones I like, so those are easy ones for me to talk about. Like I said, I think we have fifteen or seventeen varieties, everything from we do a Sparkling Brute up to the heavy Nebbiolos and everything in between. We have a couple of sweet pink wines; we also have a very classic Rosé; we produce a Sauvignon Blanc, a Pinot Grigio, two different Chardonnays. We do both a stainless steel and an oak Chardonnay, a Viognier. Am I forgetting any whites? Then we also have out of the reds, like I said, we have two sweet pink wines and one dry sweet pink wine, the Rosé, which is my personal favorite for summertime. And then we do a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Cabernet Franc, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, and our premier wine, which is Octagon, which is similar to the Bordeaux blend that we do and that’s kind of Luca’s baby. When he first started producing it, he only produced it in years—and still really only produces in years that grapes are at highest quality…But so we produce all ranges, you know. If you like some type of wine, we probably produce something that’s similar to it, and they’re all vintage driven. We produce all our grapes here on the vineyard. We don’t buy any grapes. We don’t do really any blending to make our wines taste the same from year to year. You can taste a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from 1998 and then one from 2000, and you can tell the difference of what the weather was doing and how the grape was different. I like Old World wines and being owned by an Old World wine family and Luca being trained in Piedmont, that’s, I think, the best way that our wines are going to shine. And we let nature shine just as much as our winemakers.
Can you talk a little bit more about Barboursville being so vintage-driven because with its history in Virginia and opening in 1976, they’ve had some time to create some older vintages and what that means on the statewide scene and how that differs from what other people are doing?
Well, and actually, this year was the first year that a vintage wine won the Governor’s Cup, which was our 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon and it kind of started the trend of people keeping library wines. And a lot of it, I think, with the newer wineries, you know, because, of course, there’s not much wine left from the ‘70s or ‘80s from here, you know, when you’re a small winery and you’re only producing 2,000 or 3,000 cases of wine. You’re almost having to sell all those wines just to be able to survive. And once you get established enough to be able to start putting back a couple pallets of wine to be able to age properly and to be able to bring them back out, it’s, I think, something that’s going to benefit the Virginia wine industry. And you’re getting a lot more older wines that are showing well in competitions here in Virginia and around the country and in the world. And I think it will make Virginia much more comparable to being compared to California or Oregon and even Europe, you know, to be able to show that wait, not only can we make good drinkable wines right now, here’s our Pinot Grigio from last year. Yeah, it’s great, but look what we have in the cellar also. And it just shows that we have sustainability as a wine industry here in Virginia.
Can you talk about maybe what lies ahead in the future for the Virginia wine industry?
I think it’s going to get better and better, you know. It’s done nothing but for the last thirty years to do that and I, you know, I think California had to start somewhere, too, you know. We just happen to be a number of decades behind them, and I think that with the amount of winemakers that are here now, and I think we’re up to 225 vineyards in Virginia now, and you know, some of them are producing world-class wines. And I think it’s going to become—you’re not going to just say, “Hey, that’s a California Cabernet. What about this Virginia Cabernet?” I think it will eventually become more of a household type of wine industry than it has been in the past.
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As a chef, can you kind of describe what it means to you professionally to be in a place where you can source some local ingredients, and you have the wine that’s made from just steps from your kitchen door?
It’s like heaven, you know, and—and my job prior to this, I was in Colorado where the growing season is like six weeks long and I really—that was the first time I was landlocked, you know. Growing up in Alabama, I mean Birmingham, you know, is a little inland, but it’s not Colorado landlocked. And then, you know—and then I’ve lived out in San Francisco, which is, you know, the Mecca of, you know, outsourced farmers. And then to move to Colorado, I was just really kind of at a loss. And you see a lot of things from boxes from Ecuador and Peru and you know, just—it kind of got a little glum in a way. And then as soon as I moved here and realized, ‘Wow, I’m back,” and you know, and it’s just—it’s great. And then, you know, also to be able to—“Oh, I need cooking wine. Do-da-do,” and you walk right over to the bottling line and ask Francesco, “Hey, I need cooking wine.” And he’s like, “Here you go,” and it’s as fresh as you can get it, so—you know. And we’ve got a garden here on property, too, so all our herbs are right out the door. So I mean you could self-sustain right here. You know, if we had a few cows that we could milk, we’d be all right so—. But yeah, it’s an amazing opportunity, you know. Not every chef gets that…The amount of produce I can get, the amount of you know—even pork and beef and chickens and eggs and milk and cream and cheese and all the products that are available here in Virginia, the wine that’s available here.
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It seems like right now is kind of like the perfect storm, the perfect combination of people being educated about wine, being educated about food and really being experimental and taking chances and being open to new things. But then that, coupled with the fact that Virginia winemaking is now of an age where it has established itself and it is ready to say, you know, “Look, here I am and this is what we do well,” that it’s just everything here is just ready to really open up.
I think so. I mean I could easily see that somewhere in Virginia could easily turn into the new Napa Valley. And I hope so. You know, I mean, it’s there. There’s, you know, with [Washington] DC so close, there’s educated palates, and there are people that are willing to try. And, like you were saying, you know, I’ve been shocked over the eight years. My first couple years here I was like, “Run rabbit? Nobody is going to eat rabbit.” And then you put rabbit on the menu, and that’s all you sell. And you’re like, “Wow, you know.” And, you know, there’s just been things that I’ve put on the menu before that I really thought nobody would try, and I’ve been very shocked at how willing people are to try things and how much they enjoy them after they do…And so I think that we’re lucky here, and I hope that it’s like this all over the country. And I mean I know it is in the bigger areas and, you know, the culinary Meccas of San Francisco and New York and Chicago, but I’m just real happy to see it happening here, and I hope that it does turn into something but I hope it stays humble at the same time, you know. That’s one thing I do like about Virginia and I like my fellow colleagues and the chefs in restaurants around here and other winemakers, everybody here is humble. And you know, you don’t really seem to get a lot of egos in the way, and you don’t get a lot of, “My wine is better than your wine.” It’s more of, “Hey, how did you do your wine? That’s really good. Taste mine.” And it’s just a lot more camaraderie, and I like that about Virginia. I think that’s part of the Southern genteelness of being in Virginia.
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