Chick Jacobs Staff writer
WAGRAM - The first thing that hits you is the smell: a rich, thick sweetness, like being swallowed in the scented embrace of your favorite aunt at a family reunion.
Every year, at the end of September, Dan and Tina Smith and the tight-knit staff at Cypress Bend Vineyard find themselves surrounded by the heady scent of mashed muscadine grapes - and the occasional yellow jacket drawn into the process of turning 35 acres of the uniquely Southern fruit into wine.
"They don't eat much," Dan West says as a few of the striped pests hover near a plastic bin full of discarded grape hulls. By the end of Cypress Bend's pressing, tons of the golden-green leftovers will be on their way to Winston-Salem to be processed into health products.
The juice will be beginning a four- to six-month process that will end as wine. It's a skill that folks in the Carolinas have known for generations. Muscadine, or scuppernong, grapes have grown wild in the region far enough back in time to give the first Carolina caveman a hangover.
Sir Walter Raleigh's sailing crew is credited with discovering the grape in the late 1500s, and settlers in North Carolina cultivated cuttings as they moved inland.
By the late 1800s, North Carolina was the top wine-producing state in the nation. Prohibition slashed that production to a home-brewed trickle in the 1920s. After that, commercial production moved to California and New York as North Carolina's sweet wine fell out of favor.
A commercial resurgence over the past 20 years has created dozens of boutique wineries in the state. Now, more than 100 commercial wineries dot North Carolina, growing more than 20 varieties of the grape.
When Smith's Scottish ancestors settled along the Lumber River in the early 1800s, they did not plant grapes on their 1,000 acres.
"If they had, I might have known a little more than I did to start," he says. "When I grew up here, we planted cotton, corn, raised hogs and watermelon."
Dan left the farm in 1964. He and Tina raised their four children in Maryland - but both always planned to come home. In 1994, they did, but Dan quickly learned life on the farm was less idyllic than he remembered.
"We didn't want to do the same stuff I did as a kid here," he says. "Once was enough."
With the help of N.C. State University experts, the couple planted several acres of grapes in 2001, planning to sell their crop to wineries already in business.
"It looked like an easy business," he says. "Plant 'em, let 'em grow, bring in the money. But I quickly learned the money wasn't in the growing side of the business."
By 2004, the farm had become a small winery. Under winemaker Jim McClanathan, Cypress Bend has become known as a producer of quality wines, collecting more than 170 awards in regional, state and national competitions.
When the summer cooperates, each year's harvest at Cypress Bend produces more than 24,000 gallons of juice - about 500 bathtubs full. It's a moderate size for a winery in the state.
In late September, grapes are mechanically harvested with a series of fiberglass "beater bars" that lightly slap the vines. Grapes fall into trailing plastic bins and are hauled by tractor to a processing facility - the "crush pad."
The name hearkens back to ancient days, when grapes were poured into large stone vats and stomped. Feet are no longer involved. Now, the grapes are crushed in gleaming steel machinery connected by industrial hosing.
Grapes are poured in a clattering hailstorm of fruit into a crusher-destemmer. Because the hulls are so thick and slick, harvesters often toss in rice hulls, which allow friction and result in more grape crushing. The machine sorts what is called the "must" - the juice, slimy fruit and hulls - from field dirt, twigs and any small critters that may have hitched a ride from the fields.
The must is pumped into an automated press. It can hold up to 8,000 gallons of product as an air bladder mashes the grape juice from the remaining material.
"What's left isn't quite dry, but it's very slimy," McClanathan says. "You have to get as much juice as you can without getting other things in there you don't want."
This harvest, his last before retiring as Cypress Bend's winemaker, has been a good one.
"Better than I thought earlier this summer," he says. "We like to have a hot, dry summer. That makes the juice more concentrated. We had a cool spell and rain, but it doesn't seem to have hurt."
The aroma of the remaining juice is intoxicating, almost like sticking your head in a cotton candy machine, as it is pumped into 2,600-gallon steel vats to begin the transformation into wine. If all goes well, today's harvest will be ready to pour by Valentine's Day.
"A fitting time to celebrate," Smith says. "And it's still fun, even though it's a serious business. We enjoy growing the grapes, the whole process."
Especially the sweet smell of success.
Staff writer Chick Jacobs can be reached at [email protected] or 486-3515.