No. 01 · August 15, 2026 · 5 min read
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Mary, on the floor, in the hat. It's going to become a whole thing and we've made our peace with it.
• She said yes
Mary Watson
is joining us.
She started Monday, August 10, as our Wine Director. We are going to try to be normal about this and we are going to fail.
“Wine is just show and tell, and it's the best example of show and tell, because it's alcohol show and tell — grown-up show and tell.”
— Mary, to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, 2015
Who she is: more than three decades in wine. Certified Sommelier and Certified Specialist of Wine. She has poured at the James Beard House in New York six times. She holds the Gold Cluster of Virginia Award. She has judged Virginia, American and international wine competitions. She has taught more people in this county how to taste than anyone we can name.
She has her own wine. "Mary's Cuvée" — Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Tannat, made with Lori Corcoran at Corcoran Vineyards over in Waterford. It is the wine she took to the Beard House.
The herb thing. This is what she is known for and it is genuinely a magic trick. She hands you a wine. You taste it. Then she hands you a sprig of thyme, or rosemary, or a single black peppercorn. You chew it. You taste the same wine again and it is a different wine. Syrah with black pepper. Cabernet Franc with thyme and oregano. Barbera with basil. She planted an entire herb garden at her last place so she could keep doing it.
She has taught this county to taste. Before this she was Director of the Virginia School of Wine and ran the wine programs at Cookology. She was also the sommelier a few doors down at The Wine'ing Butcher, back before it closed in 2023 — if you have lived in Ashburn a while, there is a real chance she has already poured for you and you didn't know her name yet.
What changes for you: she picks the club bottles starting with September's allocation, she is building the by-the-glass list at the bar, and she is going to run tastings here that we could not have run last month.
Starting this fall, expect a monthly tasting built around whatever she is excited about that week — sometimes a grape, sometimes a region, sometimes an argument about whether Cabernet Franc is Virginia's best red (her answer is yes, and she will make her case with a peppercorn in hand).
What isn't changing: nobody here is going to make you feel stupid about wine. That was true before Mary and she would be the first to say it. Her line, from the same interview: “Wine should be fun. And if it's not fun, I think you're looking at it all wrong.”
Saturday, August 22 · 4:00–6:00 PM. Free, open to everyone, no reservation required. She's already on the floor, if you can't wait that long.
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• Save the date
August 22
Eat, Drink & Meet Mary
4:00–6:00 PM · free · everyone welcome
No ticket, no club membership, no reservation. Come shake Mary's hand, taste whatever she's pouring that hour, and eat something off Sharon's new menu. This is the whole town, invited.
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Brittany, Sharon and Mary, mid-toast. Between the three of them, not much here looks the way it did in the spring.
• New energy
Three women are quietly redoing this place
Brittany, Mary and Sharon are behind the biggest stretch of change this shop has seen since it opened. Brittany rebuilt the business itself — the new website above, the club, the systems you never see. Mary is rebuilding what's in your glass. And Sharon has rebuilt what's on your plate, from the ground up. None of it happened by accident and none of it is finished.
Sharon Smith is our head chef, and she has spent the last few months quietly redoing every dish on the menu from scratch — made in-house, not shipped in and reheated. The pasta comes fresh or as a gluten-free potato gnocchi, there's a dairy-free Oat Milk Cappuccino Semifreddo on the dessert menu now, and the salads and flatbreads flex vegetarian without you having to ask twice.
One to try now: the Summer Market Salad, $15 — mixed greens, cucumber, blackberry, herbed goat cheese, mint, spiced nuts, champagne vinaigrette. The blackberries are doing the heavy lifting and they are on the clock.
Drink it with the Zenato Chiaretto, $18.
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• Six of our top sellers
What left the shelf last month
One from every price range, $20 to $80-ish, so there's a real answer whatever you came in looking to spend. Tap the bottle to order it for pickup.
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• Thirty seconds of nothing
Those streaks are not quality
They're called legs, and people have been using them to sound impressive since roughly forever. What they measure is alcohol. Alcohol evaporates faster than water and has lower surface tension, so the film left on the glass pulls itself back up until gravity wins.
Lord Kelvin's brother worked this out in 1855. More legs means more alcohol, or more sugar. That's the entire message. Ask Mary about it and she will tell you the same thing in a nicer voice.
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The W&OD. Forty-five miles, two million people a year, and officially the skinniest park in Virginia.
• Around the block
Loudoun things worth knowing
Loudoun wine is younger than you are. The county's first commercial bottle was a 1984 Riesling out of Willowcroft in Leesburg. Lew Parker, who made it, is still making wine there. Forty-two years and the county now grows 867 acres of vines — nearly a fifth of Virginia's entire crop.
October is Virginia Wine Month — started by Governor Baliles in 1988 and the longest continuously running one in the country. We'll do something. We don't know what yet.
27 Loudoun wineries medaled at this year's Governor's Cup, taking four Best-in-Show and 32 golds. Honest asterisk: for the first time since 2019 no Loudoun wine made the twelve-bottle Governor's Case.
Bluemont Fair is Sept 19–20. Ten dollars at the gate, free parking, no dogs. This year's poster theme is "The Bears of Bluemont," about which we have questions.
Lovettsville Oktoberfest turns 30 on Sept 26. Stein hauling and wiener dog races. We did not make that up and we are not missing it.
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• From the journal
The two we wrote this month
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• Not a small update
The old site looked like it was built in 2011, because it was. This one does the things a wine shop's website should have been doing for a decade — and everything Mary and Sharon are doing now has somewhere to live.
✓ Book a table without calling us during dinner rush
✓ Sign up for the club in one page, not an email back-and-forth
✓ Find that blog post again without scrolling forever
✓ Hours, events, the club, the menu — one place, not three
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Ten minutes before we unlock the door. It does not stay like this.
• On at the shop
August into September
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• Members only
Three clubs. Mary picks them now.
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AWS Club
$50 · a red and a white
For the curious.
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All-Reds
$50 · two reds
You know what you like.
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Big Red
$80 · one serious red
Go big once a month.
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✓ Up to 15% off everything under $100, every day
✓ Members-only tastings, starting with September 6
✓ Bottles held at the shop with your name on them
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• The game
No cheating. Answers are at the bottom, which is the whole point.
1. Amon Amarth · 2. Amarone
3. Sepultura · 4. Nerello
5. Nightwish · 6. Sassicaia
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About a million per glass. Somebody counted. Twice — the first count was wrong by fourteen million.
• Did you know
Three true things
The dent in the bottom of the bottle does nothing. Not quality, not age, not pressure. It's a leftover of hand glassblowing that survives because it looks expensive. Plenty of superb German Riesling has no dent at all.
"Reserve" on an American label means nothing legally. No federal definition, no aging requirement, no rules whatsoever. In Spain and Italy it's regulated. Here it means somebody liked the font.
Your red wine headache is probably not the sulfites. A glass of red has about 20mg. Your own body makes roughly 700mg a day unprompted, and white wine has about the same as red. UC Davis researchers now suspect quercetin from the grape skins — and they're the first to say it still needs testing on actual humans.
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• Word of the month
Ullage
UH-lij, noun
The empty gap between the wine and the cork. Small in a young bottle. In a forty-year-old bottle a big gap means air got in, and air is the enemy. Auction houses price on it. You can now look at an old bottle and say something devastating about its ullage, and be correct.
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That's the month. Wednesday through Saturday, kitchen 4 to 9, bar until close. Come in next week and say hello to Mary — she will absolutely make you taste a herb.
Brittany & Alan Alexander
Owners, Ashburn Wine Shop | Bar & Bistro
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Answers: 1. Band (Swedish, Viking-themed). 2. Wine (Veneto, dried grapes, expensive). 3. Band (Brazilian). 4. Wine (Nerello Mascalese, grown on the side of a volcano). 5. Band (Finnish). 6. Wine (Tuscan, and it started an argument in 1968 that Italy has not finished having).
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Ashburn Wine Shop
44050 Ashburn Shopping Plaza, Ste 159, Ashburn, VA 20147
This issue went out to our newsletter list on August 15, 2026.
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