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Interviews and photographs by John T. Edge and Amy Evans Streeter.
Funding for this project was provided, in part, by North Carolina Tourism.
Hinnant Family Vineyards
826 Pine Level-Micro Road
Pine Level, NC 27568
(919) 965-3350
www.hinnantvineyards.com
My family were farmers…The big thing on farming is that everybody is turning them into housing developments because that’s the better way to get money out of it, but we’re trying to build a business that this land will support a business and couple families. – Willard Hinnant
Before Prohibition, North Carolina was the largest wine producing state in the country, and it was Muscadine and it was not anything else. So it’s a good grape. It’s a Southern grape. – Bob Hinnant
Willard Hinnant, a dentist by trade, grew up on a farm in Pine Level, North Carolina. When he inherited the family land, the price for tobacco was low, and he needed another way for the farm to maintain an income. Willard remembered one of his history professors at the University of North Carolina mentioning that he couldn’t understand why the state didn’t have a wine industry, so in 1970 Willard decided to grow some grapes: Muscadines. Unfortunately, though, the price for grapes wasn’t good when they made their first harvest. So instead of selling to other wineries, they simply maintained their small vineyard, selling fresh Muscadines to produce markets, for the next twenty years. But in 1990 things changed. The price for grapes and the growing interest in wine inspired Willard to start making some wine of his own. Hinnant Family Vineyards opened as a bonded winery in 2002, with Willard’s son, Bob, part of the new venture. Together, they maintain the largest Muscadine vineyard in the state.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Willard Hinnant and his son, Bob Hinnant, owners
Date: August 15, 2008
Location: Hinnant Family Vineyards – Pine Level, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Friday, August 15, 2008. I’m in Pine Level, North Carolina, at the Hinnant Family Vineyards, and I’m with Willard and his son, Bob Hinnant, here. And Mr. Willard Hinnant, would you mind introducing yourself for the record by stating your name and your occupation, please, sir?
Willard Hinnant: Okay. I’m Willard Hinnant. I’m a dentist by profession and a grape grower by avocation, I guess, and a wine maker, and I’ve been doing this for about thirty-five years.
Bob Hinnant: I’m Bob Hinnant, Willard’s son. Kind of born into this. I ran a dental lab for twelve years, but I’ve been out in this vineyard my whole life. I’ve been a hobby wine maker for fifteen years and a commercial wine maker for five years now so—. It’s my living.
Now if we could start by talking a little bit about Pine Level because I’m curious about the community here where we are.
WH: Pine Level is a small town, and it has about 1,500 people. This is where I grew up, and the vineyard is located one mile north of Pine Level on land that I inherited from my father. The town when I was growing up fifty, sixty years ago was only like 750 people, so we are in rural eastern North Carolina.
My family were farmers, tobacco farmers, cotton mainly, a little bit of corn and soybeans in those days. And when I inherited the farm, we had a small tobacco allotment, and one reason we went into grapes was to kind of increase the income from the farm. Our tobacco allotment wasn’t huge by any means, and that’s what people primarily made their money farming on….Originally, I inherited fifty acres and since then, over the years, I’ve added about thirty-five more acres adjoining it, and now all the cleared land that we have—seventy-five acres is planted into grapes.
And now you went into dentistry as a profession. Did you purposely do that to not be attached to the family land, or what was that decision when you made it?
WH: Well it was sort of hard to make a living as a farmer in those days, and a lot of people exited to other things, and I thought that was, you know, a better way to, you know, make a living, really.
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So when you inherited the farm, how long from that moment until you decided to start a vineyard was it? You had planted vines earlier, though, just for personal use, is that right?
WH: Right. I inherited the farm in 1958, I had some other family members who were farming, and they farmed it on kind of a share basis up until 1970 and that’s when we—my two sisters and their husbands, we went in a partnership and planted fifteen acres of grapes with the idea that we were going to plant forty-five. But at the time the first harvest came, the bottom dropped out of the grape market, and we didn’t do anything but maintain this for the next twenty years. And then things started to change in the early ‘90s and after the French Paradox thing [the premise that the French have a low incidence of heart disease, even though they enjoy a diet high in saturated fats, due, in part, to moderate wine consumption], with the health benefits of wine, and so the price of grapes started going up, and then we started adding more grapes. And when Bob came into the business, I guess about six, seven years ago, and we started adding more grapes, and now we have seventy-five acres of grapes.
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Y’all are the largest Muscadine vineyard in North Carolina, is that right?
WH: That’s correct. We’re the largest Muscadine vineyard in North Carolina. And we’re kind of getting out of land now, so I guess we won't be planting anymore, unless we find some more land. [Laughs]
So being in North Carolina and Muscadine being native here, did your family and the community here have a long history of home winemaking?
WH: We did and actually, the idea to plant grapes, I was in a history class at the University of North Carolina, and my history professor just made a comment; he couldn’t understand why we didn’t have a wine industry in North Carolina, when these grapes grew wild all over the place. So I kind of kept that in the back of my mind, and when North Carolina State was kind of pushing grapes in the late—late ‘60s and early ‘70s and that’s when I decided, well, you know, maybe he was right; maybe we should—it would be a good thing. But that’s when I kind of got my interest in it.
And then, at that time, were you kind of hearing things about other places in the state that were planting vines and—?
WH: Well the industry grew real rapidly in the late ‘60s—’69, ’71, ’72—because there was a winery that was offering like $400 a ton, which in those days you could—you know, if you ran the figures, that came out to a lot of money. So [Laughs] a lot of farmers jumped into it. And like I say, we did too, and about ’74 about the time everybody really started getting them producing, they dropped the price on them to $150 a ton and then we sort of stayed in, and we sort of started selling fresh grapes to grocery stores and we packaged them in clam shells, and we sold a whole lot of our crop to grocery stores as fresh product. And that kind of helped us survive. And the grapes—there was about 3,500 acres of Muscadine mostly in eastern North Carolina in the mid-‘70s, and they dwindled down to about 350 acres until in the early ‘90s. And then since then, the early ‘90s, it’s back up to about 1,300 acres, I believe, right now.
And so you for a couple decades there were just selling the grapes and not producing wine?
WH: Right. We basically tried to package and sell all we could fresh, because that was a lot more money in it than it was selling to a winery. But whatever we had left, we always sold to the wineries. And mainly Duplin because we were actually stockholders in Duplin also.
Bob, you were telling me earlier the story behind that, being stockholders.
BH: I don’t know what year it was, but they [Duplin Wine Cellars] needed grapes, but they didn’t have any money. So Dad traded them the grapes for the stock in Duplin Wine Cellars, which we always were trying to make sure we always had a place to sell our grapes, so we wanted Duplin to grow. That way, all the grape growers in eastern North Carolina would have a home for their fruit, and this worked out. I mean, they have been the driving force in North Carolina, as far as the Muscadine grape processing in the last decade or more, and they’ve actually gone up here lately. The nutri-ceutical industry is trying to do something with the skins and seeds, and I mean I’ve heard of prices ranging from $550 to $800-$900 a ton now, when I can remember when it was $250. And it really wasn’t worth your time to go out there and, you know, you were just breaking even, really. But it’s changed a lot. We were selling our fruit to not only Duplin, but other North Carolina small wineries and seeing them do good with it, so that’s what really put the bug in my head to start a winery here. I think Dad had always wanted to do it, but he had always had brothers or sisters or partners that were not really interested in it. And his last partner, his sister, Freddie, she—she got out what, five, six years ago, maybe seven years and that’s when we got the ball rolling on the winery. And we’ve done real well. We started out the first year in this building here, and we did 1,800 cases and I believe the next year was what, 3,000? And then what, 5,000? And now I think we’re going to do what, 15,000 this year?
WH: Right.
BH: And so we’ve had big growth, I mean much better than we ever expected. But you know, the—along with growth comes a lot of expense, so we’re growing, but we’re spending everything we’re making, you know, just to put it back into the business, you know. I mean stainless steel is through the roof, but you’ve got to have it and but I mean we’re happy. I mean three years ago, we were bottling by hand; now we’ve got a bottling line that will do 2,500 bottles and hour. We were on a learning curve, but we were having to learn too fast, you see. And I mean I did not go to school to be a wine maker and when we decided to do this, I visited Post Family Vineyards in Arkansas and made friends with them, and went down to Florida and visited Jeannie Burgess at Lake Ridge and George Cowie at Chautauqua, which is in DeFuniak Springs, and they helped me that first year. I stayed on the phone with them all the time, and that’s really what got us going, really, those guys. And nobody would really help us here in North Carolina because they thought we were going to compete against them, which we are, but we’re still good friends with everybody.
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So how do you explain that high demand for Muscadine wine?
I think it goes along with the French Paradox and, you know, just yesterday I met a guy whose family doctor is recommending North Carolina Muscadine red wine to their patients. And these people are going home and, you know, they may drink a six-ounce glass a night, and it just adds up. You get 100,000 people doing that, then the demand, you know, gets bigger and bigger and bigger it seems. You know, in the world market it seems like Muscadine wines are cheap compared to you know Cabs, Merlots and all that but that—that was—that price was pretty much set by the bigger wineries, you know. If you go out in the grocery stores and try to, you know, put your price two dollars higher per bottle, then they won't buy yours; they’ll buy the cheaper one, you know. But we’re pretty tickled.
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Do y’all have a wine maker here, or do you do that?
BH: I do that and Willard. We’re both wine makers. We do it all.
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So when you started making those first wines, what were you wanting and trying to achieve in making Muscadine wine?
BH: We just didn’t want to make a bad wine, you know. I think we were more scared of making a bad wine than we were of making a good one. I mean, you know, but like I said, we had good help. I mean we—our first year we—we got our grapes in right and added the right amount of sugar and fermented them to dryness and then back—you know, we back-sweeten. We ferment everything to dryness, you know—bone dry—and then we add different—we’ll blend wines and add different amounts of sugar to give them different flavors. And we’ve just been lucky. I mean we’ve made some that were better than others, believe me, but I really think now in our fifth year, I’ve got it completely figured out.
And we talked earlier about the popularity of Muscadine wine with all the health benefits, but do you think that is the biggest push in the industry right now, or is it still just this demand for a North Carolina wine on one hand and also something that’s a sweeter wine that people in this area have taste for, maybe?
WH: They say it’s something about the sweetness of it. If you grew up in the South and you grew up on sweet tea and Pepsi Colas or Coca-Colas, and so I guess people just have a sweet tooth; they like things that have some sugar in it. And I think, especially new wine drinkers, they, you know, if you hand them a Cab [Cabernet] or something like that that’s stringent and bone dry, they just don’t like it. And so I think in the South, it’s a tradition on the sweetness that has helped Muscadine sell, really.
Do you think that there’s like a future of North Carolina wine and Hinnant Family Vineyards that you can turn people’s taste to the sweet wine who are used to drinking the—the drier vinifera [vitis vinifera, grape vines native to Europe and the Mediterranean] grapes?
WH: I think there’s just a big market out there for people who just don’t like the drier wines and I think that’s what the Muscadine people are doing; they’re just filling that market.
BH: I don’t think you can take somebody that’s hooked on Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Zin [Zinfandel] and switch them to a Muscadine. They’re kind of purists. I mean we call them wine snobs, but you have people that just turn their nose up at Muscadine. I don’t know why because it’s native, and that’s what their grandpa used to make these grapes out of, but the best I’ve heard, before Prohibition, North Carolina was the largest wine producing state in the country, and it was Muscadine and it was not anything else. So it’s a good grape; it’s a Southern grape, and I think what you’ll see is it getting into western states and northern states because they can't grow it there. And I’ve had people come from where—Ohio, one crowd from Arizona and I mean they come here to get the juice, you know, and I think you’ll see it grow in popularity. It’s just unique; it’s fruity, sweet, very aromatic, and that’s the best way I can describe it. I mean we’ve got a few grapes getting ripe out there now, and I was out there eating them the other day and I hadn’t had them in a year, so I was just like my God they’re so good, you know.
Do you still sell just the grapes?
BH: We’ve got fifteen acres, maybe, of the larger varieties of Muscadine, some of Tara, Triumph, Summit, Supreme and Nesbits that we pick—handpick all of those and package them and sell them in twenty-pound boxes. Most of those go to fruit stands. We’ve got fruit stands that we set up in different towns and sell the grapes, and we have big wholesalers come in from the farmers’ markets and buy them, and we have a really big U-Pick operation that it took thirty-five years to get it this way but you’d be amazed at what—you know, there will be 150 people, 200 people out here on a Saturday, kids, Ma and Pa, everybody just walking around with buckets and picking those grapes.
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Do you have an idea if you have a lot of people who come through here and had never had a taste of Muscadine wine?
BH: Yeah. A lot of them have never tasted it, and they like it. You know, a lot of people from New York, you know, you have all that Niagara Concord, so they’re used to sweet wines, you know, and then they come in and try the Muscadine, and they just love it. But it’s the people that are die-hard dry wine drinkers that do not like what we make, but we do make a fairly dry white Muscadine and a fairly dry red Muscadine, and we’ve got, what, three acres of Norton. We grow Norton here; it’s a Native American grape. I think they found it growing wild somewhere up near Richmond in the 1800s but it makes great wine. It’s the closest thing we can make to a full-bodied Cab [Cabernet Sauvignon] or Merlot, and it’s done quite well. We haven’t won a gold in any competitions, but we’ve won two or three silvers with it, and it sells very well in the tasting room.
What made y’all decide to plant a Norton grape?
BH: The dry wine drinkers coming by here, and we didn’t have anything dry enough for them, so—. We wanted to grow it; we didn’t want to buy it. So it was really the only variety that we could grow in this hot, humid weather down here. Plus, you know, you’ve heard of Pierce’s Disease, haven’t you? Yeah, it kills anything that’s European or vinifera and so—. We do buy some Chardonnay from the western part of North Carolina because we can't grow that here, and you’ve got to have a Chardonnay in your wine room. You know, everybody wants it, so those are the only two non-Muscadine wines we have besides—we do a blueberry, a blackberry, and a strawberry, which people like that, too, they really do.
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So what has, in a bigger sense, being employers and being a little industry here in Pine Level, what has that meant to the community for y’all to be here and grow as much as you have?
BH: Well when we first told them we were going to do this, we met with some trouble. They didn’t want to let us do it, really. This is the Bible Belt, and this is a dry town and they wanted to put us on—they wanted to restrict what we did; they wanted to control it. But as time has gone by, they’ve seen that we’ve really beautified the place…But it’s been a benefit to the town, and now everybody is proud of it and we pretty much now, when we go ask for something, they do it for us because we’re pulling a lot of people through this town, and they’re stopping and buying gas and they’re going to the hardware store up here and different things, so we think we’ve definitely been a benefit. And I think they were worried that we were going to have a bunch of drunks running around out here in the beginning, but it’s just turned out real good.
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So what do y’all say to the folks who still today in 2008 don't realize that there’s a wine industry here in North Carolina and also that Muscadine is so big?
BH: Well they need to look at the stats. I think we’re, what, number ten in the country now—top ten in the country, as far as wine production and sales. And, you know, it’s just like Virginia was next to us, and I never knew Virginia had such a huge deal, and they’ve got over 100, don't they? So but we’re growing and it—you know, there is going to be a shakeout just like everything. You know, everybody that comes in is not going to be able to hold on, but you’ve got a lot of little, you know, mom and pop’s operations starting up, and we were just lucky when we started this that we had what—how many acres? We had fifty acres of grapes out there, you know. And I don't think we could have come in and bought the land, planted the grapes, built this building and made it work, if we hadn’t already had a big crop out there to sell to bring in income in other ways other than wine. And I think, you know, we’ve already heard that there’s several—not several—two or three wineries for sale in western North Carolina, but it’s a capital-intensive deal. It costs a lot to get the grapes in and then as—this wine equipment, it’s all stainless steel. Most of it comes from Italy and the dollar is weak, and the Euro is strong, so you’re paying double for it, you know, and as you grow, then you have to keep buying more and more of this stuff. That’s what we were talking about earlier; we basically are putting everything back into this winery. And it costs a lot. It never stops, actually. It’s never going to stop. If we grow, we’re going to have to spend money. But you know, on the flipside, instead of buying one pallet or two pallets of bottles now, we’re buying truckloads, and you’re getting better pricing on that and sugar and corks and labels and all that. But it’s turned into a volume thing now, you know. We love for people to come to our tasting room and buy our wines here but we’re so—we’re such big growers, we have to go, you know, outsource through distribution to get into these grocery stores. The money is not as good that way but you just, typically, large volume is when you sell it. I think we’re selling, what, 700 cases a month to the grocery stores? Yeah. And then we sell about 3,000 to 4,000 here, so it’s pretty good.
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So what’s the future of Hinnant Family Vineyards?
BH: Hmm, just to continue to grow. You know, we were growing forty percent or more there for a while. This whole economy and the fuel prices and the mortgage market and the election coming up has slowed things down. If we can just continue to grow, that’s what we want to do. I’ve got a three-and-a-half-year-old son, so I don't know. Maybe we can just keep it going until he can get old enough to come in here. That’s a long time. [Laughs]
Well and Mr. Hinnant, do you hope and foresee that this will all stay in the family and carry on your family’s tradition here in Pine Level?
WH: Well that’s our plan. You know, we want to make it so it’s a productive business that can support two families and Bob can pass it onto his son and that they’ll be able to make a living doing it. The big thing on farming is that everybody is turning them into housing developments because that’s the better way to get money out of it, but we’re trying to build a business that this land will support a business and couple families.
BH: Yeah, and keep the farm and make the farm grow because before it’s all over with, there’s not going to be any. I mean there are very few, especially around here, you know. So this is just a nice place, it really is.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
