Horton Vineyard

I have been drinking Horton wines since a friend of a friend introduced me to them several years back. I haven’t come across many of their wines I haven’t liked, and traveling to their winery from my home 3 hours away had been on my bucket list for a while.
I knew coming into the experience that Horton’s ambiance was rumored to be less than appealing. I was still slightly taken aback by how traditional and dated it was. The photos posted by other Unilocalers are accurate. It’s small, carpeted, dark, with lots of wood. There’s barely any room to sit and relax, and I didn’t see any menu or signs allowing you to order a glass. The exterior of the winery itself was not ultra impressive either. They allowed us to walk around a bit to the back and through the grapevines, but that took all but 10 minutes.
The tasting itself was kind of neat — you picked 10 different wines to sample for a fee, so between my boyfriend and I we chose 20 wines, thinking we’d be «cheating the system» somehow. However, the wine pours were incredibly small. I felt by the time you were actually getting to taste the wine you had finished the glass. It also felt incredibly rushed. With wine, you’re supposed to sit, relax, and enjoy the flavors — not rush through pours while gnawing on oyster crackers to clean your palette.
They did have several wines for sale that I am not able to purchase in my area, so I picked up some bottles and we were given a deal based on the quantity we purchased. I think I only plan on returning to this winery if I am in the area again to do just this. The tasting and the «sights» are not worth it.

Heinous customer service. Couldn’t get a single person to acknowledge our existence and the place only had about 10 other patrons. Better off buying their wine at Total Wine elsewhere in Virginia.

Beautiful location, nice enough tasting room. They have an overwhelmingly large wine list, of which you choose ten for a tasting. It’s tough to cull through the massive list, though the nice gentleman behind the counter did make some helpful suggestions. Overall, we found a few decent wine options, but we weren’t inspired enough to buy any today. The grounds are beautiful, I just wish the tasting bar overlooked the vineyard, opportunity missed.

Horton’s is much better than the“assembly line” at Barboursville vineyard. Better selection of sweet/​dessert wine.

What a beautiful winery. Loved the castle theme and beautiful architecture. The wines were pretty good and had a unique selection. My family and I enjoyed ourselves here and it should have been one of the 1^st wineries we visited but it had been our last on our tour. Everyone was friendly and very nice.

This vineyard is a sweet wine haven. We’ve tried some of their fruit wines as well as some of their dessert wines and they were all pretty good. The only downside to this place is that it seems a bit under staffed. There were only two people there for tastings and operating the register. So needless to say, it wasn’t the best service in the world. But we were really impressed by the lady who did our tasting. She ran around and remember all our wine choices. And there were at least 6 – 10 groups she was serving. Not an easy task to do well. She did an almost perfect job remembering all our wine selections.
If you like a place for them to talk about their wines and tell you the pairings and interesting facts, this may not be the place for you. If you want a place that has a wide variety of fruit and dessert wines, this is definitely the place for you! My favorites here are The Vintage Port, blackberry fruit wine, the sweet concord, and the Eden Apple wine. Their prices are reasonable too. Needless to say, I’ll definitely be coming back here again.

Just down the road from Barboursville, this winery also had a large selection for a cheap price ($ 5). This time the list contained about 30 wines, from dry red and whites to sweet, fruit wines, and dessert offerings. You started with the whites (or wherever you wanted) and marked 10 choices off on your list that you wanted to try. No one actually checked your sheets though, and as you changed rooms during the course of the tasting, you could easily slip in an extra couple if you couldn’t make up your mind. Unique whites included the rkats, with honey and orange notes to it, though the reds were a bit underwhelming. The fortified pear dessert wine was really exceptional, and the port was truly quite good. As a big port snob, that’s saying something — no hint of harshness at all — perfectly smooth, strong flavors. Prices for bottles here were also quite good — another winery well worth a stop!

Amy and Bob were amazing. Very helpful and very enthusiastic about what they do. We came with 13 people for a bachelorette party and the women downstairs were probably the rudest people I’ve ever encountered. They rolled their eyes when we asked for a tasting and one woman even said, «they’re just going to throw it up later.» I’m sorry, but if I’m spending money and you’re working in customer service, you are polite to the guests. I’ve worked in customer service for over 10 years and I would NEVER act the way they did. Needless to say, I would only come back if Amy and Bob were working.

We have been coming here for years. The most recent time was on December 31, we called around 3:30 while we were in Gordonsville to make sure they were opened. The lady who answered the phone said ‘for a little while’ (not telling a time)… she said ‘well, if you are close by’… this should have been a sign for us.
We arrive and there are several cars in the parking lot, the sign reads 5 pm. We walk in and walked up to the tasting bar where we were ‘greeted’ by a woman telling us we had to pay for our tastings before we can taste. We pay, she walks away, and we stand there for a good five minutes before the other lady acknowledges us standing there. Both women CLEARLY made it out that they did not want to be there, even expressing it verbally! (Talk about customer service). My mother in law tried to lighten the mood to make a nice gesture about it being new years eve and that they could enjoy a glass in less than an hour and they both expressed they were so sick of wine, they didn’t even want to drink. They stopped pouring wine for people to go write on the board that the ‘last’ tasting was at 4:45 and wrote exclamation marks after it.
I’m not sure who hired these women… but we will be sure NOT go go back here anytime soon. We had planned on buying a few bottles, but after the services we received, we didn’t want to buy anything else from them. We went to another vineyard and had a much more pleasurable experience.
Good luck Horton… if you plan to stay in business, you might want to rethink your employees!!!

…only because I had to choose a star.
This winery is absolutely horrific!
They’ve managed to churn out a dozen different varietals and have mastered none.
The staff does nothing but poor one lousy glass after the next and can’t even speak to the wine. Quantity doesn’t mean quality!
Keep driving and head towards Trump and Jefferson Vineyard.
This place isn’t even worthy of a Dr. Seuss pun…

I did my annual return to five vineyards in the area at this time ending up at Hortons at the end of the day and have giving them two stars instead of the one star I gave them last year. And that is only because Bob Downs was the wine server today instead of those two nasty women from last year and the year before. They have not changed the tasting room except for removing a bunch of their T-​shirts that they used to have for sale. It is still dank and dingy. The bathrooms did not smell today. But we still love the fruit wines! This picture that I am posting here of the smashed up pieces of saltine soup crackers just might sum up the experience ! Horton might be represented as you drive up by a nice little castle but the experience inside never leaves you feeling very royal! LOL

Ok, yes — its not the cutest tasting room. However, the outside is beautiful and the staff were friendly. The wine list was extensive and you got to pick any 10 you wanted to try from their WHOLE selection. I thought the wines were varied and a lot of them were pretty good — though I’m no wine connoisseur yet. They ranged from spicy reds to mango and other unique fruit wines. They even had a white chocolate dessert wine that I thought was decent. Also, they sold these great sodas from Grey Ghost that were all sorts of unique flavors like Cotton Candy, Blueberry Gingerale, Sasparilla, Bergamot Lemon LIme, etc. Overall I was not disappointed by my unique stop here, but if you’re looking for the full winery experience this may not be your cup of tea.

I write this review with bitter-​sweet awareness that Horton Vineyards, located outside of Charlottesville, VA, pioneered Virginia’s wine industry by introducing not only the Norton grape, native to the state and presumed lost after the prohibition, but also Viognier, as a successful flagship variety for Virginia. Both of these accomplishments are reinforced by the trial-​by-​error plantings that Dennis Horton planted throughout his career, starting in 1983 — experimenting successfully with VSP trained vines and isolating the best type of grapes and terroir for Virginia’s wet summers. I would argue that Virginia is 6^th in the national ranking of quality wine producing states because of Dennis Horton’s early pioneering efforts.
That legacy only contributed to our disappointment, however.
The winery appears to be set in an old church, with a beautiful tower and a bright red roof guiding us down the long dirt road, escorted by row after row of lyre-​trained vines. Once inside, the feeling that a Sunday school class might suddenly appear around a corner is strengthened when you enter a type of vestibule-​area. There is a short, industrial carpet with a wooden coat rack along one wall, a glass display of upcoming events, and a photo, circa 1996, of the Clintons drinking what the caption proudly exclaimed was Horton Viognier at a state dinner.
The main tasting hall contained two barrels of different oaks that a sign encouraged us to smell to discern the difference in aroma, which contributed to different flavor profiles. Behind the counter, approximately 250+ bottles with different labels, all Horton wines, displayed past vintages and varieties. Along the wall were even more bottles displayed on shelves, no two alike.
A sleepy-​eyed wine pourer provided our group with a wine list with over forty wine options, telling us to choose twenty — about 15 more than most standard wine tastings allow. He misinterpreted our confusion by exclaiming that he couldn’t allow us to sample any more than that for safety and sobriety reasons. The options includes some popular Virginia wines — their viognier, a petit manseng, the Norton, a cab franc — and then about ten different whites and reds had creative names like «Monster Red» and «NV Niagara» which were essentially blends of different varieties. The art on the labels was as varied as the different selections.
All in all, it is better to do few things well than many things poorly. None of the wines really wow-​d us, and most tasted the same. The viognier and cabernet franc were both exemplary Virginia wines, however when we considered purchasing a bottle we noticed they were cheaper in our local Safeway — the markup for visiting the winery was about $ 5 – 10 higher than their retail value.
That is really the thing — Horton Vineyards, after years and years of success and accolades, doesn’t need to drive sales from their winery because they sell more wine to supermarkets than any other local winery in the state. They can afford to make fifty different sub-​par blends, hoping to cater to any variety of undiscerning customer, because they’re big enough («Horton Vineyards» is well-​known throughout the state) to support sales. By contract, most wineries rely on creating a «destination winery» to draw customers and hope they buy wine to drink on-​premise and maybe take a few bottles home. They neither have the production means, nor the license, to sell their product elsewhere. When you have the ability to produce enough wines to sell straight to the supermarket — a rare accomplishment in Virginia, who cares about driving customers to the source?
Similar to the Judgement of Paris, which put California wine on the world state, when the Clintons were drinking Horton Wine at a State dinner in 1996 it was a very telling sign to the world to watch out, Virginia wine is on the rise. The state now boasts over 230 wineries, some of them quite good — Barboursville Vineyards, Linden Vineyards, RdV, and Sunset Hills all make excellent and critically acclaimed wines. For ambience, Trump Winery and Barrel Oak steal the show in the «destination winery» category. Would the success of these modern and flagship vineyards have been possible without the groundwork that Horton laid out in the 1990s? Maybe not, but where once Horton dominated a brand-​new market in Virginia, they now seem content to let their legacy lead, with quality trailing behind.
When I asked the wine pourer at Horton Vineyards what plans they had for Labor Day weekend, traditionally, a very high-​trafficked holiday for the wine-​tourism industry, he looked taken aback by my question and said that they were open. Like a former child actor at an audition, for now, that may be enough.

Worst winery experience I’ve ever had.
To be fair, the wines we tasted ranged from Ok, to pretty good, and the vineyard out front was well manicured and lovely. Everything else about the place was awful.
The tasting room looks like a bad replica of a Tudor Manor house. Just not very well done. The interior looks like a really cheap Greek restaurant. Not well done at all.
On to the tasting: They have 43 wines to choose from, and you pick ten. Thankfully we’re pretty wine knowledgeable, but I imagine for someone who isn’t, this would be terribly intimidating.
Sidebar advice to management: Pick the wines you want to feature and pour them. A significant portion of the problem is how overwhelming the number of wines the lady behind the bar had to keep track of. Here’s the other piece of advice to management: Have more than one person scheduled to pour on a beautiful late summer Friday afternoon. Pull people out of the warehouse if you have to because what happened next is completely unacceptable.
To taste ten wines it took one hour and twenty five minutes from the time we got pour number one until pour number ten. That’s not counting the approximately five minutes we waited at the register to pay before the tasting (the couple in front of us left. I don’t know how long they were there). Nor does it count the twenty minutes it took to get the first pour – some of which is on us as we decided what we wanted to try.
So think about that. 85 minutes to go through ten wines. That’s eight and a half minutes between pours. To be honest, the last three pours went (relatively) quickly. Twice we waited over fifteen minutes between wines.
I will never be back.

The wine was good but the experience was the worst I have ever had at a tasting. No conversation or education. The British woman that helped us was texting on her cell phone the entire time. Very disappointing and seems to be a common theme. Avoid if you want a good time.

Virginia has a ton of cute boutique wineries. This is not one of them.
Horton is one of the largest Virginia operations; you chose your tastings from a VERY extensive list. Being a red wine guy I concentrated there, both fruity and dry selections, with some desert wines thrown in.
Sadly, I didn’t especially like ANY of them. Most were drinkable, but Horton is definitely a mass market operation, not a place for wine connoisseurs. If you’ve had VA wines in local restaurants there’s a good chance you’ve already had something from Horton, either made with grapes from the impressive vineyard or a wine made specially for that restaurant (during a meal at Skyline drive I had a glass of red that I’d never heard of; I asked afterwards who made it and wasn’t surprised it was from Horton).
I wish I could find my pictures of the place; yes the building is pretty, and walking in it’s hard not to be blown away by the sheer variety of wine available. But as some other reviewers noted, I’d agree that it would be better to concentrate on the quality than quantity.

I absolutely love their wines, however I felt they could add some outside seating and really make this a great place for people to enjoy. The grounds are beautiful and they are really missing out with getting people to stick around and enjoy them.
I enjoyed my tasting, they allow you to pick 10 wines of your choosing from a list of 80. I loved that. Allowed everyone in our party to taste what they enjoy. Liked that they are pet friendly.

After seeing Horton at several wine fests and seeing their wines in local stores we were really looking forward to seeing their vineyard, operation and learning how they can make such a HUGE variety of wines and do it well and for a low price…
Driving up, the outside was really pretty, like a castle! Upon entering, the tasting room was in an odd area and split in two with whites being at a kitchen bar and reds being at a table in the other corner of the room.
The lady giving white tastings asked if we wanted a tasting and sent us to the register to pay for the tasting, which was fine, but we did find it odd that she only sent us over there after asking if we were paying cash or credit???
We came back with our receipt and a different lady was giving the pouring. She simply poured wines, she never explained a single wine, explain how it was fermented, explained anything about the vineyard, winemaker, etc. And when I asked a question, like residual sugars in a wine, she said they add nothing to the wine, it comes with natural sugars. Which is not the right answer. She was more interested in drinking her coffee than being at work, pouring wines that day.
So, then we went over the red pouring guy… he was a little more enthusiastic about his job and actually explained 2 of the 6 he poured for us.
In all, we were able to go to a winery with soooo many wines, pay, get a tasting and leave the parking lot all in 20 minutes! How’s that possible!!! They should have done more to keep us there, encourage us to buy and enjoy their wines, explain their wines, etc.
Clearly they bottle and case so many thousands that they don’t seem to care about the few that they can sell in the tasting room on the weekends.
Also, they make way too many wines to perfect each one. Many we tasted were mediocre at best. It’s best to scale back and make ¼ of what they offer, but ensure those are great, rather than just ‘ok’ or worse.

It is what it is and nothing more — sweet fruit wines, mostly bland whites and reds, with a tasting list consisting of dozens of wines that is too confusing for wine novices.
I came into Horton with low expectations considering the terrible reviews on Unilocal.Horton is just outside of Barboursville (our GPS took us up someone’s driveway, so just drive along Route 33 until you see the sign). The interior of the tasting room is large and open, with tasting bars along most of the walls. Upon entering, you approach the tasting bar and are handed a long list of wines to try. For $ 5 you can try up to ten — mark them on your sheet and you’ll bounce from bar to bar.
I’m not a huge fan of the unguided wine tasting, especially if you’re new to wine tasting. It’s important to have wines in a certain order. Allowing customers to bounce from dry whites to fruit wines to bold reds to dessert wines is crazy, as the taste of wine changes significantly with what you’ve had in your mouth before (har har). I decided to try three whites, a fruit wine, and six reds. None of the whites I found particularly good — Black Cat Chardonnay, Petit Manseng, or the Sweet Concord (which is actually a sweet red). The Mango fruit wine tasted like… mango juice (I don’t know what I was expecting). Horton redeems itself a bit with the reds — the Norton, Pinotage (South African wine with a unique flavor), Syrah and Petit Verdot were all fair, with only the Perit Verdot and Norton coming close to being my favorite.
Overall, of the wines I tasted I found them all decidedly underwhelming. I’m not the biggest fan of dessert wines and fruit wines, which seems to be Horton’s main draw, and the whites were below average and the reds unremarkable. Horton would also be better served by coming up with 2 – 3 defined tasting lists that allow the flavors of its wines to build upon each other, instead of allowing people to jump around. With better wineries so close by (Barboursville and Reynard Florence), feel free to skip this one.

I first learned of Horton at the Virginia Wine Festival then I took a trip to their vineyard slightly north of Charlottesville.
Their main trademark is their selection of fruit and dessert wines. They have several different fruit wines (raspberry, peach, pear, strawberry, and more) as well as a few types of chocolate wines. My favorite is mixing the raspberry and white chocolate wines – it tastes exactly like raspberry cheesecake!
Horton has a TON of wines. Anything you can think of, they’ve got it. Their list is two entire pages long. Their wine is also reasonably priced.
The awesome thing about their tastings is that you get to pick 10 of their many wines. Whichever 10 you want!
My only complaint would be that the staff running the tastings weren’t super friendly.