...IN NELSON COUNTY

•July is all about peaches at Saunders Brothers Farm Market in Piney River. If you don’t believe it, consider that the last three Saturdays of the month (July 17, 24, and 31) are declared Eat Peaches Day, Eat More Peaches Day, and, yep, Keep Eating Peaches Day. How can you mark these occasions? Enjoy peaches and peach ice cream on the market’s porch, naturally, and listen to music from local bands. Peachy!

•You have two more chances to spread out a blanket and enjoy the music, food, and superb wines at Veritas Vineyard’s Starry Nights series. New Orleans bluesman Little Freddie King will perform August 14, and local bluegrass sensations the Hackensaw Boys will pop your corks September 11. Tickets range from $15 for lawn admittance to $50 for a full buffet meal and a seat on the deck.

•BlackberrIes are ripe for the picking at Hilltop Berry Farm & Winery near Nellysford, starting July 17 and lasting until mid-August—later if it’s a good year. “And it’s looking like a very good year,” says our inside source. Hilltop’s well-tended patch of sweet, thornless Chester blackberries ($4 a quart) are easy picking any day—and especially at the Blackberry Harvest Festival on August 7.

•It takes patience to make a great single-malt whisky, so let’s just say that the experts at Virginia Distillery Company are busy being patient. The grading for the distillery site in Eades Hollow has been finished, complete with a stream-fed pond that will support trout, and the actual copper-pot stills, imported from Scotland, have been assembled in a warehouse in Arrington. The fruit of all this labor—Virginia-distilled, authentic single-malt whisky—will be bottled in about four years. In the meantime, the second edition of VDC’s three Eades label double malts—each crafted from two complimentary single malts imported from Scotland’s three major distilling regions—have all been awarded gold medals from the Beverage Tasting Institute. We’ll sip to that! 

•Don FairchIld, a.k.a. Mountain Man Collection, forages the backwoods for many of the ingredients in his homemade seasonal jams, including elderberries, wineberries, wild blackberries, and even pears that still grow around abandoned home sites. Luckily, jam fans don’t have to search nearly as hard to find him at the Nellysford farmers’ market. And don’t overlook his other homegrown specialty: mushrooms, including shiitake, oyster, and hen of the woods.

•The historic Pharsalia Plantation in Tyro presents an evening with Joel Salatin (our area’s own superstar farmer) on August 19. Dinner—which features meat from Polyface Farm and fresh produce grown on the grounds at Pharsalia—is included with the $50 ticket, which is nice, since Salatin’s sustainable-agriculture gospel is likely to make guests hungry for some good food.

•The Brew Ridge Trail will be even livelier than usual on August 21, as Devils Backbone Brewing Company in Roseland hosts the second annual Brew Ridge Trail Music Festival. The other three Trail breweries—Starr Hill, Blue Mountain Brewery, and South Street Brewery—will also be on hand to celebrate our area’s growing reputation for world-class craft beers. (In fact, they’ll be pouring 16 of them.) Oh, yes, there’s music all day long too, headlined by Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk.

•We’ve been hearing great things since chef Ben Thompson set up the Rock Barn catering service at the Oak Ridge Estate last year. Thompson is passionate about supporting local farmers, dubbing his business a “field-to-fork” caterer. Only recently, though, did we discover that he is also at the Nellysford farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. So now we don’t have to crash weddings to enjoy his delicious breads, scones, and beef short ribs!

•If you agree that sipping wine and eating burgers is an excellent way to spend a summer afternoon, you’ll want to check out the Birth of Democracy Festival from noon to 4 p.m. on August 28 at Democracy Vineyards in Lovingston, immediately followed by the annual blessing of the harvest. Apparently, that blessing does the trick, since Democracy’s flagship red, Velvet Revolution Reserve 2007, recently won a silver medal from the Tasters Guild.

•One of our favorIte places to drop off this magazine on an early morning is Trager Brothers Coffee in Lovingston. The rich aroma of fresh-roasted, small batch coffee wafting from the back of the renovated farmhouse alone would be enough get us going, but the folks there are also nice enough to brew up a few urns to share with neighbors and visitors every weekday morning. Check their website for directions…or just follow your nose.