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North Carolina wines? I know what you’re thinking: treacle. Swill for the unsophisticated palate. Or maybe you’re making the same assumption as one august travel publication, that the state’s “dark soil is being weaned off tobacco.”
THAT’S THE DUMBEST THING I EVER HEARD!” says Fred Wallace. Many tobacco farmers, he says, would rather retire on their government buyout than grow grapes. But the grapes that Wallace and his wife, Angie, grow at Creek Side Winery, one of five near Burlington, North Carolina, are certainly home-grown. They dig their own irrigation ditches, do their own planting, even laid the tile in their tasting room. The pruning, the grape analysis and the blending they leave to professionals.
“We’re slow getting there,” says Fred, “but when you do a lot of it yourself it takes more time.” And, he says, it means a lot more. Well, you can feel the love when you taste Creek Side’s 2004 Stoney Creek red, a blend of merlot, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon and mourvedre.
In 1989, I literally had my first taste of North Carolina wine at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. After taking a sip of something that tasted like ammonia laced with sugar, a friend who was visiting from California asked, “Are you sure this is a chablis?” If you had told me then I would be sipping a pleasant red from the 45th of the state’s 53 wineries—which altogether produce 600,000 gallons of wine and 1,000 jobs, and are valued at an estimated $34 million—I wouldn’t have believed it. I thought surely the wine business in North Carolina, which had flourished up until Prohibition, had died on the vine.
Little did I know that just 15 minutes west of my adopted town of Winston- Salem, in the farming community of Lewisville, Westbend Vineyards had been experimenting with vinifera grapes since 1972 and had become fully bonded in 1988.
“We wanted to plant chardonnay, cabernet, etc., which were not grown by anyone in this state,” Lillian Kroustalis recalls. She and her late husband, Jack, had “traveled some,” and he had a penchant for growing things. So the couple bought a tract of land near the west bend of the Yadkin River and began to fulfill their dream, even though heavy hitters in agricultural circles told them vinifera was unsuitable for the area. Wouldn’t they like to try sweeter muscadines? How about blueberries? Anything but vinifera.
By 1990, they were ready to market their wines. Problem was, Lillian admits, “We didn’t know who our market was.” Jack “hit the restaurants,” she says. The winery also held private wine tastings on the estate to get the word out. Today, the 60-acre Westbend is thriving, with medals to prove it. When you taste its oh-so-light viognier, or its Cluett-Davis chardonnay, you’ll understand why. Recognizing that plenty of North Carolinians still have a sweet tooth, Westbend also offers best-selling Pioneer Red. Dry or sweet, the wines are drawing visitors: “It makes you proud that this state is a destination,” Lillian says.
If I came to Westbend a bit late, I came to another Yadkin winery, Shelton Vineyards, in an instant. At a wedding reception three years ago, I noticed a sweating bottle of chardonnay bearing a label with a graceful tree on it. I took a sip. Light. Not too much oak. Not bad. In fact, it was rather nice. So nice that several glasses later I had a run-in with a camellia bush—but that’s another story. I had to learn more.
What I learned in Dobson, an hour north of Winston, is that developers Ed and Charlie Shelton began converting an old dairy farm in 1999 into an elegant, 400-acre gravity-flow winery after they discovered the opposite of what the naysayers had told Jack and Lillian Kroustalis: “A study out of Virginia Tech . . . identified this area as one of the top three areas for growing vinifera grape east of the Mississippi,” says George Denka, the vineyard’s president.
The Yadkin Valley, now a federally recognized viticultural area, possesses a particular microclimate conducive to growing grapes—primarily, 170 to 190 days with enough sunshine so that the grapes actually flourish and about a 25-degree Fahrenheit (14 C) differential between daytime and nighttime temperatures. Furthermore, explains Denka, the sandy, loamy soil, and the rolling hills around Dobson allow the soil to drain properly. The primary obstacles? Humidity, mold and Japanese beetles. But you’d never know it, looking over the 200 acres of lush vines that yield 13 grape varieties—or washing down a pretty little 2004 riesling that finishes dry on the palate.
Now, Shelton has its share of good reds, but for a good “steak” wine, head down the road to Boonville. On a former dairy, then tobacco, farm that has been in the Hobson family for almost 90 years, you’ll find RagApple Lassie Vineyards. Named for the prizewinning holstein that Frank W. Hobson Jr. raised as a boy, the vineyard is, according to his wife, Lenna, Frank’s “Plan B.” The Hobsons, in fact, made the switch from bright leaf, which accounted for 125 acres of their crops, as a way to keep the family farm from becoming a housing development. “If your soul is rooted to the earth,” says Lenna, “that’s 90 percent of the vineyard.” The result? For my money, a chewy 2003 cab.
Frank Hobson grew up on his land. Amy and Michael Helton, two art teachers who took a notion to start a winery after honeymooning in France in 1996, came upon their 51/2-acre Hanover Park Vineyard another way: “We’d just get in the car and drive around,” says Amy. They found a dilapidated farmhouse in Yadkinville, uninhabited since 1963. Up until then, their dream had been “idle speculation.”
How did they suddenly become winemakers? “No big deal,” Michael says. “I was an artist.” Drawing on his creativity— and years of construction jobs from his college days— he fixed up the house and began poring over information— coffee-table books, textbooks, trade journals, syllabuses from the University of California, Davis, among others, experimenting time and again, realizing that making wine is in some ways like cooking. All that homework paid off: Hanover Park’s first vintage, a 1999 cabernet sauvignon, won a double gold medal at the North Carolina State Fair, silver in international circles. Friends who had questioned the Heltons’ endeavor apologized. The one restaurant that had rejected their early offers of bottles came a-begging, while others, including Paris’ Violon d’Ingres, heaped praise on them.
“My first year when I made wine,” Michael recalls, “I had one goal: I do not want to be an embarrassment to the winemakers in the community.” Not to worry. Just pour me another glass of that 2003 Michael’s Blend, please.
Tar Heel Terroir
At press time, some 53 wineries made up North Carolina’s growing wine industry. For more information about visiting them and buying wines, go to www.ncwine.org.—N.O.
Michael, though, had a mentor—Steve Shepard, then at Westbend. Some call him “the godfather,” as he’s been instrumental in luring into the state “co-petitors,” as he calls them, winemakers who spur each other on to make good wines. These days you’ll find Shepard in Mocksville, home to Ray- Len Vineyards & Winery, owned by a retired Sara Lee Apparel executive, Joe Neely, and his wife, Joyce. Shepard signed on when the Neelys approached him in 2000. “What have I got myself into?” he remembers thinking. But starting “literally with nothing”—no grapes, no equipment—was just the sort of challenge he relished. “Nothing” in 2000 leaped to 10,000 cases in 2004—70 percent from grapes growing on the lovely, rolling slopes of RayLen. Still, says Shepard, “If I stood on a street corner in Winston-Salem and took a poll, I bet only 60 out of 100 would know” that there are wineries and vineyards practically in their backyards.
Maybe, but as I was sipping Shepard’s knock-your-socksoff 2003 red called Category 5, I noticed a fellow toasting his friends. Emblazoned on his sweat shirt was a “3,” the car number of late NASCAR great Dale Earnhardt. Stock car racing and wine, it turns out, pair well together, as a trip to barbecue capital Lexington proves. Childress Vineyards is the brainchild of NASCAR team owner Richard Childress, who took an interest in wines during his racing days in California’s Sonoma Valley. What would it take to make world-class wines in his home state?
The answer came from Mark Friszolowski, a winemaker who had had a successful career at Long Island, New York’s Pindar Vineyards before joining Childress. “I said, ‘Sure, you can make ’em,’” recalls Friszolowski. “But it’s also marketing and selling them. Because people think it’s a joke. They’re like, ‘North Carolina wines? C’mon.’” Friszolowski had heard it all before in his native Long Island and knows that such prejudices, even in the Bible Belt, do change. “Part of it,” he adds, “is Richard’s name. ‘Richard says it’s OK. It must be OK. We trust a guy like Richard, because he’s a homegrown guy.’”
Loyalty pays off: Childress’ 2004 syrah sold out in four months, and its Classic Blush (for first-time wine drinkers) is flying off the shelves. Friszolowski knows that it takes several passes to create a good vintage, but he’s proud of his 2004 pinot gris and cab franc and the viognier, which caught the attention of a French wine importer. “I’m flattered by the fact that a French guy can actually say, ‘That’s pretty good.’ That’s a boon for us,” he says.
Speaking of Frenchmen, I recently revisited Biltmore Estate and met Bernard Delille, who left the south of France to work at the estate in 1986. “We made mistakes,” he admitted after I told him about my first glass of N.C. wine. “We are still making mistakes. We won’t know for 50 years what North Carolina grapes can do.” The western part of the state offers challenges, he says: The nights are cooler, there are winter and late spring freezes, and in recent years overly rainy summers. Biltmore has had no choice but to import grapes from outside North Carolina.
Twenty years’ worth of trial and error rests in my hand in a flute of the Estate’s blanc-de-blanc. I hold it up to eye level, watch the bubbles dance against the candlelight and look across at Delille. It’s his turn to challenge me. “Il faut critiquer,” he says—you must be critical. I take a sip and feel that exhilarating tingle that only a sparkler can produce. “Félicitations,” I say. Congratulations.
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At last report, Sky Senior Editor Nancy Oakley was lost in the wilds of her home state tripping over camellia bushes while searching for more wines.
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