A Trip to Seven Springs Farm & Vineyard
I visited Seven Springs Vineyard on a cold grey early afternoon in February. Of course the place was deserted. I was greeted by Jamal Williams in the tasting room. He’s the 20-something Instagram monitor, bartender, and overall guardian of his family’s retail outlet on the farm, a shop that is (admirably) open six or seven hours per day through these decidedly off-season months. The building looks new. It has a large wooden deck and scattered cafe tables. On a sunny day in warmer Covid times it could be a pretty decent place to taste wine and hang out with friends.
Marice Cohen Ferris told me that Seven Springs Vineyard existed. Every few years my thoughts circle back to indigenous grapes of the American southeast. It's a thought-groove that I’ve yet to fully explore. I make a living discussing and dissecting (and selling) European terroir, but every place has terroir. It’s easy to argue that our home region has a very rich and distinct terroir, and that it remains an under-explored asset. The heady flavors borne of our rich soil are snubbed, discounted, and widely ignored, and that’s a shame.
As a child I knew that my grandmother grew muscadine grapes, and made them into wine. She also fed them to her pet deer. As a teen I’d see native grapes growing in the wild while hiking around empty eastern N.C., an alien place that I landed for a scant two years pre-college. Vines seemed everywhere, in parks along the Neuse, in trellised arbors behind the homes of tobacco farming families whose children were my fleeting high school friends. Post-college I toyed with the idea of making scuppernong grappa. It seemed that the variety’s intense exotic swirl of aromas would impart the resulting distillate with character akin to the best firewater crafted in northern Italy from the pomace of Moscato, Gewurztraminer, Friulano. But I didn’t have the nerve to push forward this notion. Now I know some amateur distillers, but the desire to create has evaporated. In middle age I’m content to evangelize about the farming of others.
I’m starting to think again about the fields and cellars of North Carolina. It’s a place I’d like to hype.
Seven Springs Winery is new, though the same family have farmed its land for over two decades. They have livestock. It’s clear from my conversation with owner Preston Williams Jr., that he feels the virtue and the value of being able to work outside for a living. When I visited, he was in the middle of a small construction project, remodeling the interior of a building that is adjacent to a rolling field of vines that the family planted in 2017. We talked about vine maladies, plowing, weed management, and biblical references to wine. It was an enjoyable conversation. I hope locals in Vance County are slowly finding this place.
Before strolling down to meet Preston Jr., I’d tasted through their wares with his son Jamal. He’d asked me if I was a journalist. It was barely after 1pm, and I was taking notes into a mostly filled grey notebook. My reasons for being there were obtuse. I gave Jamal the backstory, as much as I had one. Curiosity is a powerful catalyst. And I was feeling a strong desire to support something that seemed good and necessary in my home region. The rusty bands of transnational food distribution seem particularly fragile in this moment. I’d felt them wobble since the early days of the pandemic. I saw the unthinkable: the unstoppable flow of 3,000+container capacity megaships, more small cities than boats, could cease. The supply chain could break.
I never thought I’d be trapped inside America’s borders by a plague, unable to see the farmers whose working lives brought meaning and inspiration to the last decade of my life. But it had come to pass, and everything now appeared preposterously flimsy. We’d built an inverted house of cards, stacked on the head of a pin.
It’s hard to explain motivation when your thoughts are still in motion, nebulous. Investing my time and emotional energy in places close to home. Some of the nonsense of 21st century life had been exposed. Further unraveling feels not possible, but inevitable. So, what are sustainable food systems? What is our community?, What do we want it to look like?
About that tasting: of their vinifera wines, my favorites were the Chardonnay and Merlot. The former was clean and varietally correct, refreshingly low-ish in alcohol, with subtle orchard fruit aromas. The latter was also clean, berry scented, amiable. Even better were the three indigenous grape wines Jamal poured. I can’t really pick a favorite between the Fishin’ Creek red Muscadine wine, and the Ridgeway Passion white wine that Seven Springs make from Carlos grapes. Preston Jr. and family display craft, and mastery of technique in the cellar. I’m anxious to see what happens when their extensive plantings of 4-year-old vines reach young adulthood, and that fruit becomes the core of these bottlings.
I rushed back to the triangle. Directly to The Pig in Chapel Hill, to acquire the spicy meaty accompaniments these wines were screaming for. The Fishing Creek red was perfect with the crispy Vietnamese-style pig’s ears on Sam Suchoff’s daily specials menu, while the sweet fruit and lychee/elderflower aromas from Ridgeway Passion gave an order of cauliflower tacos added dimension and weight. I’d skipped lunch in anticipation of this feast, and it didn’t disappoint. Epic, memorable, built around N.C. barbecue, and N.C. grapes.
It’s fun to taste new things from our northern backyard. The trip to Norlina is fascinating. You’ll pass close to Soul City, a 70’s utopian experiment that was dragged down to bitter reality by nefarious external forces, specifically Jesse Helms, and more mundane challenges. It’s a place that every North Carolinian should spend a day reading about, and maybe visit. I feel like today, even more than before, we need to be on the side of the idealists. Big, positive dreams may save us.
From I-85 to the farm, fallen down buildings litter the barren winter landscape. An abandoned American gas station retains its rusted sign and wall-length flag mural, while trees have long since pierced the structure’s walls, roof, and windows. Vance County has the beauty of agricultural decline that I found so compelling as a teenager wandering the flat fields and forgotten towns from Goldsboro to the coast. It’s a place that deserves better, and seems to wait suspended in time for its next act. I hope family farming can harness the fertility of this place and use it to bring to prominence flavors that our collective ancestors built up, layer by layer, across centuries.