Charlottesville
Diversions

The Monticello Visitors Center is located off I-64 at Exit 121 along Route 20 south, near the entry road to Monticello. It houses one of the larger (and more commercialized) local information centers anywhere, plus the Thomas Jefferson at Monticello Exhibition and a museum shop. The center offers a discounted combination ticket for tours of Monticello , Ash Lawn-Highland and Historic Michie Tavern Museum .

Monticello
Route 53, Charlottesville

Starting in 1768, Thomas Jefferson designed and built his showplace hilltop home over 40 years, transforming his “essay on architecture” into an amalgam of Italian villas, Rome’s Pantheon and a townhouse he observed in Paris while he was there as U.S. ambassador. Now as then, it is the area’s chief attraction, drawing more than 550,000 visitors a year who wait in line up to three hours to tour the only American house on the United Nations list of World Heritage sites. Go early or late, and you may face only a twenty-minute wait, as we did, from the time you board a bus at the shuttle station until the lineup outside the rear of the house is shepherded inside, 25 at a time.

The 35-minute guided tour of the main floor is an unfolding revelation of Jefferson’s inventive mind: a calendar clock in the entry “museum,” automatic sliding doors, an upside-down mirror, a revolving bookstand, a retractable desk, a contraption that made copies of everything he wrote, a rotating pole to hold clothes, and dumbwaiters for wine at either end of the fireplace in the dining room. Although ahead of his time with skylights and such, his was a house better suited to a bachelor than a family, one of us thought. The tour ends somewhat abruptly outside. Visitors are left to troop on their own around lavish gardens and through the basement passageway past the kitchen to the household service dependencies built into the hillside.

We particularly liked the optional half-mile walk back down to the shuttle station, past flourishing vegetable gardens (said to include nineteen varieties of peas, Jefferson’s favorite, all staked on branches and ready to pick at our mid-May visit). Pause at the family graveyard, where Jefferson ’s obelisk notes his fathering of the University of Virginia and his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, but makes no mention of his presidency. One family gravestone was as recent as 1988.

Back at the shuttle station, visit the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants; plants and seeds are available for purchase at a shop beneath a tent. The primitive Little Mountain Luncheonette serves a variety of sandwiches and salads. Top them off with Virginia apple cider.

(434) 984-9822. www.monticello.org. Open daily, March-October 8 to 5, rest of year 9 to 4:30. Adults, $11.

 Ash Lawn-Highland
1000 James Monroe Pkwy., Charlottesville

The charming home of President James Monroe is dwarfed by its better-known neighbor, Monticello, whose gift shop is visible two miles away up a path from the front door. Thomas Jefferson persuaded Monroe to move to Highland to “create a society to our taste.” Monroe ’s “cabin castle” is very different from Monticello , however. The squawks of resident peacocks could be heard (and their plumes seen) as our small group was led on a guided tour that was both more informative and more personal than the one at Monticello . This cozy white-frame residence with a Victorian addition was a more lived-in and livable house than Jefferson ’s, and locals advise seeing it before Monticello , which they consider so novel and different. Monroe was forced to sell the house because of financial difficulties in 1826. It was bequeathed by one of its subsequent owners to the College of William and Mary, which has completed a major restoration. The tour ends when the guide turns you over to an “herb lady” for a five-minute talk on plants and herbs (we enjoyed her chat about nosegays).

(434) 293-9539. Open daily, April-October 9 to 6, rest of year 10 to 5. Adults, $8.

University of Virginia

 Thomas Jefferson, who designed its buildings, planned the curriculum and was its guiding spirit as “a hobby of his old age,” according to our guide, founded this prestigious university of 17,000 students in 1819. Its heart remains the “academical village” along the Lawn, focusing on the Rotunda – a design rated by the American Institute of Architects as the outstanding achievement in American architecture. Climb the stairs to what has been called the most beautiful room in America – the light and airy Dome Room, with its series of double fifteen-foot columns cleverly concealing a series of bookcases. Free hourly guided tours show visitors the finer points of the Rotunda, a masterpiece patterned after Rome ’s Pantheon. Our tour was led by a most informative graduate student in English. We peeked into some of the 52 rooms occupied by students as well as two-story faculty pavilions along the Lawn and overheard one guide telling prospective students that these fireplaced rooms are the most coveted housing for final-year students who have distinguished themselves on campus, offering heat (stacks of firewood are outside each door) but no lavatories. Piped up one prospect’s mother: “It’s an `honor’ to live in rooms without bathrooms?” Deadpanned the guide: “Yes, they have heat.” Walk the magnificent red-brick campus shaded by ancient oaks, see Room 13 where Edgar Allan Poe resided (a raven is on his desk and there’s a recorded commentary) and admire the gardens framed by serpentine walls throughout the academical village.

SHOPPING

The Downtown Mall. Charlottesville ’s historic district, especially the Courthouse area and Market Street , surrounds its downtown pedestrian shopping mall. Main Street and its cross streets have been closed to vehicular traffic. The result is a pleasant, tree-shaded brick walkway interspersed with planters, benches, whimsical cutout figures, countless sidewalk cafés and frequent directory signs as in enclosed shopping malls. Although major stores have been lost to outlying malls, specialty shops and restaurants have remained (or emerged), and this is one downtown that appears the place to be on a nice day. Good for browsing are such shops as Palais Royal (French linens for bed, bath and table), the outstanding Signet Gallery, O’Suzannah advertising “contemporary art and soul,” and The Cat House boutique for cat lovers. A wide variety of American handcrafts are displayed at Quilts Unlimited. More handcrafts as well as creative women’s fashions are featured at Vivian’s. April Cornell, a women’s and girl’s clothing store, is among the Shops at April’s Corner. Leather-maker Charles Pinnell produces alligator belts and English-style chaps for sale in his shop at 51 East Water St .

More Shopping. West of downtown at 416 West Main St. is Main Street Market, a complex of gourmet shops, including Albemarle Baking Co., The Seasonal Cook, Gearhart’s Chocolates and Feast! College types gravitate to The Corner, an area of shops and restaurants centered along West Main Street between 14th Street and Elliewood Avenue , near the university. Upscale shops are concentrated at Barracks Road Shopping Center, where you’ll find Laura Ashley and Talbots as well as such local prizes as the Happy Cook kitchen shop, the extraordinary Plow and Hearth store, and HotCakes, a nifty bakery, café and gourmet-to-go shop.

If you love browsing through unusual grocery stores, don’t miss Foods of all Nations at 2121 Ivy Road . Everything Indian, Mexican and Indonesian, for example, is here. So is a huge selection of wines, takeout salads and sandwiches for picnics. If we lived in Charlottesville , we’d be here every week.

Wineries

Wineries. Thomas Jefferson failed in his effort to cultivate grapes for wines at Monticello , but he would like what has been accomplished in Virginia in recent years as it goes after the title, “ Napa of the East.” Charlottesville bills itself as the winemaking capital of Virginia , claiming seven wineries in Albemarle County – considered the most promising wine-producing region in the country after the Napa Valley – and a dozen more in the surrounding area. Especially picturesque is Oakencroft Vineyard & Winery, whose colorful red-barn winery occupies a stunning site between a farm pond and mountains in estate country just northwest of town. Owner Felicia Warburg Rogan started with a self-taught female winemaker, giving hers the distinction for nearly a decade as the only winery in America to be run by two women.

Gabriele Rausse, described as “the sage of Virginia wines,” is the legend behind Jefferson Vineyards (formerly Simeon Vineyards), just up the road from Monticello . You can sample quite a variety (from chardonnay to merlot to cabernet sauvignon, $16.95 to $26.95) in a tasting room with an outdoor deck. Across the street at 1330 Thomas Jefferson Pkwy. is BRIX Marketplace, a wonderful country store where you can pick up sandwiches, salads, pastries and espresso for a picnic between Monticello and Ash Lawn.

The most ambitious winery, emerging nine miles south of Monticello in an area called Carter’s Bridge, is Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard, which deep-pocketed philanthropist-socialite Patricia Kluge and her new husband William Moses plan as the biggest and best in Virginia . Twenty-year resident Patricia, who’s involved in every detail, started in 2002 with the Kluge Estate Farm Store on her 1,300-acre estate, where visitors can buy “a fantastic game pie or pâté pastries made by my chefs – foods that complement my wines.” (Her first from the 1999 planting was a limited-edition Bordeaux-style “2000 New World Red,” 298 bottles selling for $495 each, and a brut-style sparkling wine for $35.) Local wine consultant Gabriel Rausse and Frenchman Michael Rolland helped with her 2003 planting of 150 acres, making hers the largest vineyard in the state. Construction was to start in 2004 on a $5 million winery center and restaurant at 100 Grand Cru Drive , near the entrance to her 70-room Albemarle House. The ex-wife of German-born billionaire John Kluge, she envisioned it as “a Georgian-style and rather French-ish, magnificent building, like a restored ruin, with a dome of brass.”

An unbelievably scenic, mountainous route west of town leads to Afton Mountain Vineyards in nearby Afton . Former NBC News producer Tom Corpora and his Japanese wife, Shinko, produce stellar chardonnays, gewurtztraminers, cabernets and pinot noirs in the $10 to $18 range. Theirs is an unusual venture, combining state-of-the-art equipment with ancient technology – a gravity processing system and a unique, 100-foot-long wine storage cave. Their showroom offers wine tastings plus gourmet picnic foods that can be eaten in the tasting room or on tables outside. We took home a $14 chardonnay to recapture the memories of a picturesque and true place.

Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003.

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