Originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The American Wine Society “Wine Journal”
In the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, an area best known as the setting for Andy Griffith’s fictional town of Mayberry, a diverse band of upstart vintners is redefining North Carolina wine.
Just northwest of Winston-Salem, home to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, is the Yadkin Valley, where grapes are replacing tobacco as a cash crop and small wineries are honing their craft with European and hybrid varietals, occasionally mixed with native grapes. The Yadkin Valley became North Carolina’s first federally-approved AVA in 2003.
More than three dozen wineries are putting this region on the map, winning accolades in competitions and from visitors. With its clay-loam soil, and hillsides allowing trellised vines to bask in the sun and capture cooling night breezes from the Blue Ridge, the Yadkin terroir mimics some of the best European wine regions, and decades of viniculture research have enabled growers to adapt European vitis vinifera grapes and hybrids to the climate.
North Carolina now has five AVAs, all in the piedmont and western half of the state. But these are the new kids on the block. Visit almost any tasting room in the area and the server is likely to somewhat apprehensively introduce the wines with this caveat: “our wines aren’t sweet.” To understand the context of this warning, it’s necessary to travel east and to the past.
For those who believe a bottle of wine tells a story, one from North Carolina may offer a saga almost as rich as any in North America.
It began in the 16th century with a legendary name. Sir Walter Raleigh – poet, soldier and courtier of England’s Elizabeth I – sent an expedition to the New World in 1584. His explorers landed on Roanoke Island in coastal North Carolina and wrote of a land “so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of the seas overflowed them.” The vines they encountered were muscadines, or Vitis rotundifolia.
Three years later, Raleigh sent a group of settlers to this land under the governance of John White, who soon returned to England for supplies. When White finally made it back to Roanoke Island in 1590, he found no trace of the settlers, only the word “Croatan” carved into a wooden post. The mystery of the “lost colony” has enthralled North Carolinians and others for more than four centuries. Indeed, Andy Griffith, Yadkin Valley’s most famous son, started his acting career as a cast member of the outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony,” which has been performed on Roanoke Island since 1937.
Other settlers quickly followed and began making wine with muscadine and its varietal, scuppernong. Roanoke Island is home to the Mother Vine, a scuppernong shrub that some historians say could be more than 400 years old. With a two-foot thick trunk, it is tended on private land, whose owners graciously welcome photo-seeking visitors. The vine returned to wine production, in some manner, early this century when Duplin Winery transplanted clippings to its vineyards and produced a Mother Vine wine. Duplin, in southeastern North Carolina, is the state’s largest winery and synonymous with the sweet wines that winery staff in Yadkin Valley seem to worry that many visitors may be expecting.
Growing prolifically in the warm, humid southeastern climate, muscadine or scuppernong grapes have bountiful yields that have long induced small farmers and backyard gardeners to make their own wines. Commercial production eventually followed, and North Carolina was a leading wine-making state prior to Prohibition.
But Prohibition’s deep roots were slower to wither in the Bible Belt, where some Southern Baptist preachers still hold that the wine of Jesus was unfermented grape juice. North Carolina’s return to the national wine stage has lagged that of neighboring Virginia, now one of the top 10 wine-producing states and winning accolades that would delight Thomas Jefferson, who dreamed of a thriving American wine industry when he unsuccessfully planted European vines at Monticello.
It would be on the grounds of another famous estate that North Carolina wine began to reinvent itself in the 1970s.
At Biltmore House, the Gilded Age castle built by George Vanderbilt, his grandson planted a few French-American hybrids to see what would happen. He made some wine in the basement, and encouraged by the results, traveled to France to hire a winemaster. The Biltmore Winery opened to the public in 1985 and now claims to be the most visited winery in the United States. There’s an explanation for that: complementary wine tastings are included with the ticket for visiting the castle, which is North Carolina’s top tourist attraction. The estate produces 150,000 bottles of wine annually, with a diverse portfolio, distributed throughout the Southeast. However, only a small percentage of the wines are made from grapes grown on the estate; most of the juice comes from West Coast grapes. The wet mountain climate around Asheville is not friendly to the varietals, such as pinot noir and pinot grigio, that winemakers wanted in scaling up production and diversity.
But Biltmore’s example planted a seed that was ready to thrive in the more hospitable climate to the northeast, just as tobacco farming was falling on hard times. Yadkin Valley vintners of diverse background and experience have taken advantage of their small scale and flexibility to craft tasty wines made with grapes grown in North Carolina.
About the time William Cecil was planting his vineyard at Biltmore, Jack and Lillian Kroustalis were trying out a handful of European varietals on their land near the west bend of the Yadkin River. Persistence and experimentation eventually paid off, and the couple opened Westbend Winery in 1988. It would be more than a decade before commercial construction magnate brothers Ed and Charlie Shelton planted grapevines on land near their hometown of Dobson and began the application process for the Yadkin Valley AVA, the success of which resulted in an explosive growth of wineries in the region. Among the early pioneers was NASCAR team owner Richard Childress, who opened his namesake winery in 2004.
In addition to the home-grown winemakers, the valley has attracted wine-loving entrepreneurs from afar seeking to get in on the ground level of the next big thing. One of the most successful is Jay Raffaldini, a hedge fund manager who relocated from New York to plant a Tuscan-style villa and Italian grapes in valley. The tasting room boasts spectacular views of the Blue Ridge mountains, and the wines, which range from $16 to $52, are mostly blends of sangiovese, montepulciano and petit verdot. The most distinctive taste may be the 2019 Paradiso, a naturally effervescent wine made from sangiovese using the technique Italians call Cal Fondo, which leaves yeast sediment on the bottom of the bottle.
Massachusetts native J.W. Ray has taken a different approach at JOLO Winery, where visitors can sip wine and enjoy a meal while gazing at the knob-topped Pilot Mountain and a pretty pond where Andy and Opie might have cast their fishing lines. JOLO is growing a mix of European varietals, French-American hybrids and some North American grapes. Their signature wine is the $42 Pilot Fog, made from Cynthiana, also known as Norton, one of the oldest American wine grapes. Except for a 100 percent chambourcin – the $36 Crimson Creek – JOLO’s remaining portfolio are blends using cabernet franc, sangiovese, zinfandel, traminette, and vidal blanc.
Shelton Vineyards, the largest winery in the area, has one of the most diverse portfolios, including a Riesling and its Two Five Nine, made from Tannat, a grape popular in the Madiran region of southwest France.
Heading west from Shelton towards the Blue Ridge, a turn on Possum Trot Road, dodging chickens, leads to Jones von Drehle Vineyards & Winery and neighboring McRitchie Winery & Ciderworks. Petit Manseng grows well there, and both wineries produce a single varietal of it. As in the rest of the valley, cabernet franc is popular for single varietals and blends. McRitchie also makes extensive use of traminette.
Because this is an area of small producers with limited distribution, traveling to the region is the best way to sample the wines. The estates are well aware of that, and some welcome visitors with on-site restaurants and even lodging. Most also offer wine clubs for those in states that allow shipping. And for North Carolina residents, the state’s restaurants and wine shops are increasingly featuring Yadkin Valley wines.
