Beyond the Muscadine: The Evolution of North Carolina Wine – Charlotte Magazine

On a drizzly August day, I leave Raffaldini Vineyards & Winery and wend my car through fields and rolling hills with cattle, ripe corn, Tyson poultry houses, and beehives. The back roads lack nearby Interstate 77’s many “Vineyard Tours” road signs, each with a list of winery names and exit numbers. But shortly after I turn onto Old U.S. Highway 421, my GPS and a small, unpretentious sign confirm I’ve arrived at Laurel Gray Vineyards—one of more than 200 wineries in North Carolina.

Most of those have popped up in the last two decades, a resurgence that harkens back to a century ago—but with a key difference. Before Prohibition, North Carolina produced more wine than any other state. But it was made exclusively from muscadine grapes—most from a native subspecies, scuppernong—which produce wine that’s intensely fragrant, fruity, and sweet. “People who love muscadine wine love it,” Laurel Gray owner Kim Myers tells me. “People who don’t care for that flavor just assume that all North Carolina wine is that flavor.” 

But in recent years, the state’s winemakers have explored numerous grape and wine varieties, which have multiplied along with the vineyards and wineries. Muscadine wine still has a strong foothold, but vintners have proven that the state isn’t beholden to its indigenous fruit. Mark Hoffmann, a professor and small-fruits researcher at N.C. State University, estimates that muscadine accounts for about half of the wine made in North Carolina today. The rest, including Laurel Gray’s, is made from hybrid or single varieties of the common grape, Vitis vinifera, from all over Europe and beyond.

“North Carolina is one of the few places where you can drive to two or three wineries and get an entire portfolio all in one day,” Hoffmann says, “from the sweet muscadine wine, to a French-American hybrid, to a Bordeaux-style red wine.”

But winery owners like Myers say they still battle the state’s wine stigma. “I think when people hear that there are other wines besides muscadine in North Carolina, they kind of have the connotation of being homegrown—a made-in-a-garage kind of thing,” she says. “And people think, That’s not going to be good. But we’re making some really world-class wines here, of all kinds, that can stand up against wines from anywhere in the world.” 

Raffaldini Vineyards & Winery’s tasting room is designed to look like a Tuscan villa.

It took a while for North Carolina’s wine industry to rebound after Prohibition, when people typically got buzzed on cheap, quick-to-produce moonshine. It would be almost two decades before 10 Onslow County farmers planted 25 acres of scuppernongs and established the state’s first post-Prohibition winery in 1950. A few others followed suit, including Jack Kroustalis, the founder of Westbend Vineyards in Lewisville, the first to plant Vitis vinifera vines. By 2000, North Carolina had 21 wineries. 

By then, the once-booming tobacco industry was shrinking, which helped make room for wine’s return. Demand for tobacco waned until 2005, when federal quota and price support programs ended. Farmers had to find other ways to pull money from their soil.

In 2002, a group of pioneering winemakers in the Yadkin Valley petitioned the U.S. Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to designate the region—which includes all of Wilkes, Surry, and Yadkin counties as well as parts of four others—as the state’s first American Viticultural Area. The Treasury recognizes 269 AVAs as areas with terrains and climates conducive to grape growing; more than half are in California.

Today, North Carolina has more than 200 wineries, 400 vineyards, and six AVAs. (A petition for a seventh, around Tryon in Polk County, was pending as of September.) All the AVAs, and most of the wineries and vineyards, are in the Piedmont and mountains. Yadkin Valley, approved as an AVA in 2003 and just a 90-minute drive from Charlotte, remains the largest.  

“The western part of North Carolina is a little bit cooler and has less humidity than the eastern part,” Hoffmann says. “The further you get into northern and western North Carolina, the better the conditions get.” Grapes thrive in lean, loose soil and require far less organic matter and nutrients than other crops. To counteract North Carolina’s wet climate, winemakers use a process called “appassimento”—Italian for “withering”—to dehydrate grapes before fermentation. The resulting wine tastes like it could be from Napa or Tuscany. 

Employee Thomas Ponce (above) navigates grape racks, which Winemaker Chris Nelson (below) loads. Each rack holds roughly a half-ton of grapes that the team dries in a process called appassimento (“withering”).

Most of North Carolina’s growing roster of wineries fall into one of two camps: those whose families have farmed here for decades; and outside investors who come here to avoid the competition and land prices of places like Napa Valley. 

In the mid-1990s, after about a decade working on Wall Street, Jay Raffaldini decided to create an alternative source of financial security for his family that didn’t depend on the stock market. “I’m from an Italian family and began drinking wine at the dinner table when I was 7,” he tells me over the phone from one of his three homes. “So if you have money and you love wine, there’s one of two things you can do: have a fancy wine cellar or start a business.” 

He wanted to keep working in New York, too, so he ruled out the West Coast. In 2000, he hired a Napa Valley consultant to help him select from 62 North Carolina properties. They settled on a 102-acre plot in Ronda, about 70 miles north of Charlotte. Raffaldini Vineyards & Winery harvested its first grapes in 2003 and opened to the public in 2005. Today, you drive around the final curve of the road that leads to Raffaldini to behold hills striped with grapevine rows and an enormous Tuscan-style villa perched atop the highest hill.

Laurel Gray is only a 10-minute drive from Raffaldini, in Hamptonville. The terrain is the same, the grapes similar. But instead of a colossal villa with wrought-iron gates, Laurel Gray has a classic red barn and a modest house-turned-tasting room with a white picket fence. Myers and her husband, Benny, opened Laurel Gray in 2001 on land they say has been in their family for 10 generations. In 1773, King George III and Queen Charlotte of England gave their former gardener and Benny’s ancestor, Joseph Myers, 400 acres of land in Yadkin County to thank him for his dedication to the throne. 

Raffaldini Vineyard Manager Jason Krug and his team harvest sagrantino grapes.

More than two centuries later, as Benny was retiring from the tobacco industry, he and Kim wanted to ensure the family land was of value to future generations, including their two children. Before they planted their first grapes in 2001, they hired a Napa Valley consultant and enrolled in Surry Community College’s then-brand-new viticulture and enology program. 

“That first year,” Kim recalls with a chuckle, “we walked along and laid our textbook down on the ground under the vines so we could look at the pictures and try to make our vines match.” 

Their vines took off, and the business has grown steadily since. Today, they produce seven French wine varietals, plus blends, under the Laurel Gray label and operate The Yadkin Valley Wine Co., which processes grapes for other vineyards and labels.  

“I can already feel the public awareness and perception of North Carolina wine starting to change,” says Brianna Burns, hired by the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services last year to market North Carolina wines. She’s worked with state wines—including as an educator and in a wine shop—for almost a decade, and she says quality has surged. “I used to buy North Carolina wine for the shop, and back then, there were about three that I’d recommend,” Burns says. “Now, I could recommend at least 75.”

Kim says she’s encouraged by the open minds and palates of younger imbibers. “They’re very experimental. They’re drinking crazy, wild beers and vodka with all kinds of flavors. That’s really great for the industry, because they’re willing to say, ‘Let’s go try these new places. Let’s see what they have to offer.’”

Later, she poses the question she asks all who scoff at N.C. wine: “If you go to a restaurant, and you don’t care for its food, does that stop you from ever going to another restaurant?” 

TESS ALLEN is the associate editor.