North Carolina’s wine industry, much of it in the Yadkin Valley, gets bigger, but viticulturists have much to learn
MOUNT AIRY – Last month, the N.C. Grape Council added the word “wine” to its name and moved from the N.C. Department of Agriculture to the N.C. Division of Tourism. The move indicated a small but significant shift in thinking about the state’s growing wine industry.
Council members asked for the change because they wanted to focus on marketing and tourism, said Margo Knight, the executive director of the N.C. Wine and Grape Council.
“If you can draw a tourist to a North Carolina winery, No. 1, you’ve created a personal experience between your customer and your product,” Knight said. “Therefore, you’ll sell more wine. Therefore, you’ll bring money to these rural communities where the wineries are located and increase tax revenues and have a positive impact on the state.”
In North Carolina’s wine country, at least for now, it’s not all about the wine.
For every dollar spent on wine in the state, four more are spent because of wine, industry officials estimate. And many of those dollars are coming from within North Carolina.
“When you’re in a young wine industry, your market is almost always in your own backyard, so to speak,” Knight said.
Grapes may never surpass the production of such commodities as hogs or soybeans, state agriculture officials say. They are unlikely to replace tobacco, as many people hope, though they thrive in similar soil and climate.
And even though wine may be one of the state’s most enticing ventures in memory, an export wine industry is years away, experts say.
It remains to be seen whether the quality of wine produced here can ever rival counterparts in California, Oregon or other states with better growing conditions, better research and a longer history of viticulture.
But wineries and vineyards in North Carolina – many of which are in the Yadkin Valley – can sell the romance and mystique of wine.
People remember quality
Donna and Mike Rupp weren’t planning to make any stops en route from Pennsylvania to their daughter’s wedding in the Charlotte area last month. But one “wine tours” sign and a highway exit later, they were sipping Chardonnay and merlot inside the 1930s milking parlor that vintner Kim Myers had turned into a tasting room and gift shop.
Myers, whose background is in advertising and graphic art, didn’t know much about growing grapes and making wines 10 years ago. And back then, motorists coming through Interstate 77 and U.S. 421 would have passed the farm, a former dairy, with little care.
But not today.
Laurel Gray Vineyards, which Myers has owned with her husband, Benny, in Hamptonville since 2000, is part of the growing tourism industry that many small towns in the Yadkin Valley are trying to bolster.
To measure the intense interest in wine, look no further than the rapid expansion of wineries and vineyards in North Carolina. The number of wineries has more than doubled in five years – from 21 in 2000 to 50 today, with about another five expected to open by the end of 2005. At least 350 vineyards produce grapes for wine production; many of them are in the Yadkin Valley.
“The state has spent a lot of money marketing the wines that are being produced,” said Grant Holder, a chemistry professor at Appalachian State University. “Now, they should concentrate on maximizing the quality of the wine, maximizing consistency so that those prices that must be charged for North Carolina wines are true reflections of the quality.”
But Holder points out that people associate wine with place. If they don’t like the quality of the wine they drink at a North Carolina winery, they’ll remember. So, if two wineries here make quality wine but two others are having problems, it reflects on the state as a whole, he said.
“People will pay a lot of money for wine if they like it. They won’t if they don’t,” he said.
Consistency in the quality of the state’s wines is one of the bigger challenges the industry faces as it grows, said Gil Geise, a viticulture instructor at Surry Community College. Quality, he said, starts in the vineyard, where some say that about 75 percent of wine-making begins.
Van Coe and his wife, Kathy, can testify that it’s hard to get it right.
Always learning
The Coes run Stony Knoll Vineyard in Rockford.
About five years ago, they decided to plant five acres of grapes on the Surry County farm that had been in Kathy Coe’s family for more than 100 years. Like many of the growers who have ventured into grapes, both of them came from farming families but did not consider themselves farmers.
“Van wanted to do something to preserve the family farm,” said Kathy Coe, who works full time as a registered nurse. “This was the farm I was raised in. It was tobacco when I was growing up. It’s the field I said I would never go back to.”
Van Coe, who works full time running Homeland Mortgage in Dobson, took night classes in viticulture at Surry Community College. His brother-in-law Lynn Crouse, who was interested in becoming a winemaker, took some classes in wine science.
After the Coes spent nearly $600,000 to plant vines on their 48-acre farm and build a winery, the wait began. For some, the wait can be anywhere from five to seven years for vines to fully mature. But the Coes had their first real harvest in October 2004, they said. That’s when the learning really began for the Coes.
“We incorrectly trellised,” said Van Coe, shaking his head.
The Syrah vines that had been planted so carefully in 2001 were too close. Coe put them in at six feet apart, and the vines proved to grow more vigorously than he had planned. He was forced to pull out every other vine on the rows.
“I should have gone with a smaller root stock,” Coe said. “It was painful. You had a growing season on a vine that you had to accept that you had to remove.”
At harvest, he and his brother-in-law overlooked adding a material to some of the grapes used to kill small bugs and fungus, which contaminate the wine.
This fall, Coe said he is taking steps to not make the same mistakes. But with each harvest, as the family members encounter more of the operation, they are learning more, he said.
“So, it’s a moving target,” said Coe, who has pursued a marketing plan for his Stony Knoll Vineyards and makes wine only from the grapes he grows there. “You don’t know what you’re going to encounter next.”
Norm Oches builds and designs vineyards in the Yadkin Valley. In his experience, the Coe family’s steep learning curve is typical.
“It’s a relatively small industry. So, a lot of people have an interest in doing this all by themselves. So, everybody relearns everything,” Oches said.
Growers say they need to be able to turn to viticulturists for help with these issues. Though agricultural-extension agents working in each county stay in close contact with vineyard owners, it’s not enough, said Joanne Crater, who owns Buck Shoals Vineyard in Hamptonville with her husband, Terry.
The N.C. Department of Agriculture has planted vines at its research station in Reidsville, but Myers said that it doesn’t apply to her Laurel Gray Vineyard in Yadkin County.
“I would like to see research plots at several vineyards scattered about. We are considerably different here in the Swan Creek area. The soil’s different,” Myers said.
Growers want access to current research that is specific to their region. In the state’s young wine industry, such specifics are in short supply.
Some efforts are now under way to change that, however.
Appalachian State University is making plans to open a wine services laboratory next spring. The university has requested $1million in federal money to set up equipment and hire personnel, and more money has been requested from the Golden LEAF Foundation. Surry Community College is also making plans to open a viticulture research center.
“There’s not a lot of natural collaboration that goes on in the farming community. You tend to be very competitive and secretive without a lot of saying so,” Holder said.
“Everybody is basically in the same boat. They have to share the ideas and tips they come up with,” he continued. “It’s all very new here…. It’s not terribly easy to grow a vinifera grape here. What do you have to do to get that grape that has sugar and color that is going to make a quality wine?”
Careful attention needed
Grapes can grow anywhere, Giese said, but their quality depends on a complex set of variables, including soil type, rainfall and temperature.
Sure, California and France have oceans to moderate their temperatures, he said. And North Carolina grapes are prone to fungal diseases because of humidity and rainfall. But with careful attention, grapes do well here.
One big piece of the puzzle for North Carolina’s wine industry, he said, is figuring out which types of grapes grow the best here.
“What we really need is a signature grape,” said Giese, who came to Surry County from the University of Arkansas. “You think of Oregon, you think pinot (pinot noir). Napa, they grow cab (cabernet). It does really well. What grows well here? That’s still the question.”
But because rainfall and humidity force growers in North Carolina to harvest grapes early at 21 or 22 percent sugar – rather than the ideal 24 or 25 percent sugar – the answer to that question may be to breed a whole new variety, possibly one that thrives in wet conditions.
But would it be accepted?
“The problem is the wine-drinking world wants particular wine-drinking varieties,” said Andy Walker, a viticulture professor and grape breeder at the University of California at Davis.
Walker, who has visited the Yadkin Valley, said that the region’s growers would always have to compensate for the early harvest of grapes, either through viticulture techniques or in winemaking and blending.
“Learning that is going to be the tricky part,” he said.
Though the majority of grapes in the United States are grown in California, Washington, New York and Oregon, grapes are grown across the country, even Minnesota and South Dakota, Walker said.
“In California, where grapes are harvested at 24 or 25 percent sugar, the tannins and flavor compounds change at that time and lead to better quality and more balanced wine styles,” he said.
Combination of factors
Mark Rosse, a chef and owner of the Louisiana Purchase restaurant in Banner Elk, has been making wine lists in the state for his restaurant and others from Greensboro to the coast. Very few North Carolina wines make the list, he said.
He looks for terroir- a French term encompassing the value of the fruit, soil, climate and practices of a particular place. He also considers identity. He said he doesn’t want five chardonnays on the list that taste exactly the same.
“North Carolina has an identity crisis, and there is the quality and price ratio,” Rosse said. “I have seen the quality level jumping. But there has to be more. There has to be a wine at some point that jumps out and says this is what North Carolina is all about.”
Some of the wineries have won regional and national awards. The Wine Report Magazine last year named Shelton Vineyards’ 2003 riesling as one of the country’s best “50 Forbidden Wines.” It was the first North Carolina wine to appear on such a list.
For his part, Walker says that North Carolina’s focus on developing a local market and following for the state’s wine is OK.
“You won’t have the same flavor profile and the same quality as you do in California,” Walker said, referring to the fact that harvest in North Carolina comes much earlier. “The question is how do you solve that problem? Look at growing conditions or do you plant other varieties?
Some say that North Carolina should not be comparing itself to California, with its $1.9 billion in annual farm wine grape sales and $45.4 billion in revenues to wine and allied industries.
“North Carolina can’t be Napa, and Napa can’t be North Carolina,” Giese said.
And the same goes for France.
“The French only have 1,000 years on us, and California has 200 years,” he said.
Giese likens the industry in North Carolina to a teenager.
“Right now, we’re just getting the hang of what we’re doing. Eight or nine years, when the vines are in longer, you’ll see a change in quality,” he said. “So, right now, we’re doing it, but we’re growing.”
• Sherry Youngquist can be reached in Mount Airy at (336) 789-9338 or at syoungquist@wsjournal.com
|
N.C. |
Va. |
Cali. |
N.Y. |
Oregon |
Gallons produced annually: |
600,000 |
762,000 |
560 million |
40 million |
1 million |
Number of vineyards: |
350 |
262 |
4,000 |
1,000 |
709 |
Acres of vineyards: |
1,350 |
2,360 |
481,266 |
1,602 |
13,700 |
Economic impact: |
$79 million |
$95 million |
$45.4 billion |
$420 million |
$1 billion |
