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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.
Westbend Vineyards
5394 Williams Road
Lewisville, NC 27023
(336) 945-5032
www.westbendvineyards.com
In order to find out what does and doesn’t do well, [in the 1970s], there was no advice. Agricultural authorities didn’t know what worked for Chardonnay and Cabernet in this area because it hadn't been done, so we did do it by trial and error. And to hedge our bets because there was so much negativity, we planted three French-American hybrid varieties, which are wonderful to deal with and not quite as sensitive to weather changes as the vinifera. – Lillian Kroustalis
Jack Kroustalis, who had a career in the food equipment business, and his wife, Lillian, became interested in growing grapes after traveling to other vineyards around the country and the world. In 1972 they acquired some land near the west bend of the Yadkin River and planted a handful of European varietals: Chardonnay, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon. The Kroustalises were the first to plant vinifera grapes in the Yadkin Valley. While they were confident in their new venture, others were not. But Jack’s persistence paid off, and in 1976 they harvested seventy tons of grapes. Initially, they sold their fruit; in 1988 they opened as a bonded winery. Today, Westbend Vineyards is part of the Yadkin Valley appellation, North Carolina’s first American Viticultural Area (AVA), which is now home to more than twenty wineries. And as the industry grew, so did the vineyard. Westbend currently grows a dozen different varietals and produces twenty distinctive wines. One of those wines is a commemorative port, Jack’s Legacy, named in honor of the vineyard’s founder, who passed away in 2006. Lillian remains at the helm of Westbend Vineyards, overseeing the business she and her husband started together almost four decades ago.
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: Lillian Kroustalis, owner
Date: August 12, 2008
Location: Westbend Vineyards – Lewisville, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Tuesday, August 12, 2008. I’m in Lewisville, North Carolina, at Westbend Vineyards, and I am with Lillian Kroustalis. And, ma’am, if you would please state your name and your occupation for the record?
Lillian Kroustalis: My name is Lillian Kroustalis, and I am the owner of Westbend Vineyards.
You and your husband, Jack, established the vineyard here in the [nineteen] ‘70s. Can you talk about, maybe a little bit, your background in North Carolina and how you ended up then here in Lewisville?
Yes. I’m a native of West Virginia, and I came to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when I got married. And Jack was a man of great energy and was always interested in growing things, and we had traveled to areas in the country and in the world that have vineyards and wineries, and he became very interested in starting his own vineyard. And because we lived in Winston-Salem, it just seemed normal that we would do this in nearby North Carolina. And Lewisville, which is just fifteen minutes from Winston-Salem, offered the opportunity because there was land here for purchase. And so we bought the original was just fifteen acres, and he planted sort of an experimental vineyard—a couple of acres of a little bit of this, a little bit of that, planting the vinifera [vitis vinifera, grape vines native to Europe and the Mediterranean] varieties, which at that time was just not done in North Carolina. And so Chardonnay and Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon were unusual for commercial growing. They weren't available. And so we met a lot of sort of obstacles when we tried to get some direction on how to cultivate.
This beautiful Yadkin Valley area seemed to us to be good for that. But there was a lot of negativity out there. So we started planting in [nineteen]’72, but the winery was not bonded until 1988. And it really normally doesn’t take that long, but for us it did because we just had to figure it out and learn by doing, and that’s what we did and it took that long. And there was no push to start a winery. The winery is a great commitment. Vineyards are commitments but wineries are great commitments because they’re expensive, and by the time we got to 1988 we had thirty acres of vineyards. And in the meantime, there at some point in the mid-‘80s, we were growing enough that—and all we were doing with the grapes at that point was just playing and having fun and making hobby wine, but it was the point at which you decide: am I going to continue with this as a commercial effort? And so we decided to offer them for sale, and the vineyards and wineries in Virginia were getting started. Virginia is a little bit ahead of us. So we sold for several years to Chateau Morrisette, which is not too far from here, and by 1986 or so, we decided that we would focus on having our own winery. The people at Chateau Morrisette were very complimentary as to the quality of the fruit and helped us to make up our minds and to get the encouragement to actually start construction on the winery, which we did in 1988.
Now when your husband got in his mind he wanted to grow grapes and he wanted to plant vinifera, how did he source those vines and bring them to North Carolina?
Well we had been going to various wine-related meetings and conventions and exposés or whatever you call them and, you know, there were lots of—my husband’s business that actually paid the bills was a food equipment company that gave him opportunity to travel a lot, and so you make connections, and you find sources; and he also had a stainless steel fabricating company, which helped give us the way to do a lot of things. And we found Upstate New York to be not too far away, and the source for our original vineyards. And there are lots of nurseries up there, and they were the source—they imported the vines from France, and we got them the following year.
And was there a lot of trial and error with those first vines?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. This original [plot], which we affectionately call Number One, you can see the sign over there, which is about an acre and a half, had a row of this and a row of that and a row of something else because it was experimental. And there are still some original vines out there, but you just don’t plant commercial vineyards in that way; you plant them in blocks. And in our cockeyed enthusiasm and optimism, we actually planted Pinot Noir here in the Yadkin Valley, which we didn’t plant anymore after that first planting because that grape is not happy here or anywhere else, really, but least happy here. It doesn’t like the humidity and the heat, and there are varieties that are a little more suited to our weather. So in order to find out what does and doesn’t do well, at that time, there was no advice. Agricultural authorities didn’t know what worked for Chardonnay and Cabernet in this area because it hadn't been done, so we did do it by trial and error. And to hedge our bets because there was so much negativity, we planted three French-American hybrid varieties, which are wonderful to deal with and not quite as sensitive to weather changes as the vinifera.
And now when you decided to plant vinifera, was that something that was just like a personal challenge that had never been done before? Where did that come from, to kind of create that challenge for yourself?
Well, you know, as you grow and you make your choices as to what kind of wine you want to drink, and we liked that kind of wine. [Laughs] I know that the Muscadine is a fine Southern varietal that has great history and nostalgia, but we just—that’s not what we wanted to do. The great thing about North Carolina is that it’s so diverse. We have probably the largest winery in the country growing Muscadines on the coast, Duplin—wonderful people. And but then when you get into the Yadkin Valley, which we’re more northwest, the growing conditions suit the vinifera, and so we chose to plant what we liked to drink.
Now if I may, your husband, Jack, passed, but could we talk a little bit about who he was and his history here in the region? And also, Kroustalis is a Greek name, and I want to ask you about that.
It is. It is and he was Greek, and my parents also were born and raised in Greece. Jack was a self-made businessman, who was born and raised in Winston-Salem, and he had, as I said, lots of energies and loved to grow things and never did anything in a small way…We all know the old saying about how to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large fortune. And so you don’t stop doing what pays the bills. Wineries and vineyards are wonderful, but they can be big black holes when it comes to throwing money in them, and so it became a passion—something you enjoy doing and you put up with a lot of inconvenience. We have weather irregularities here, which require that the vineyard be taken care of, such as spring frosts where you lose all of the—the first year we were a commercial winery, we lost eighty percent of our crop because we had this late spring frost in mid-May—unheard of. We weren't prepared. We quickly, the following year, invested in some wind machines, which gave us that—. But these are the ill winds that can befall people who have an interest in being an owner of a vineyard. It’s farming is what it is, so you have to deal with the weather. But Jack was not—I have been quoted many times as saying he was sort of a maverick, which means that he didn’t really care what you were saying. He knew what he was saying, and he wanted to do what he wanted to do, and he did it against great odds. And we do feel sort of like pioneers here. When we started our winery, there were maybe ten wineries in the state. That was 1988. I can't keep up with them now. The last figure I have is seventy, and that’s probably not all of them. I think being told you can't grow Chardonnay in North Carolina is such a foolish thing to say. And grapevines are very vigorous things, and they like challenges, and the more you challenge them, the better the wine is. So here we are, and we have lots of company in the wine business, and it’s really nice to be here at this point in time.
Do you have an idea of how long it was after you planted your first vinifera wines when there was another person or collective that planted vinifera?
Yes. Now Biltmore [Estate] is in Ashville, and they have been around a long time, too. And they were growing, but they started their vineyards, I believe, in the early [nineteen] ‘80s. Don’t quote me…But late ‘70s, maybe, early ‘80s. Biltmore’s elevation is pretty high up there. It’s a beautiful place. But sometimes it’s a short growing season, and vinifera wants, you know, as with all grapevines, you need a window long enough in the spring—it has to warm up early enough and then it has to stay warm late enough in the fall to get a good ripening season. So I know they had a few fits and starts with their vineyard, as far as being able to harvest their own, you know, but it’s a huge winery. They do many, many thousands of cases of wine a year. I think some of that is purchased; some of that is grown. We are the original oldest winery in the Yadkin Valley growing vinifera, so Biltmore was doing it. We were doing it. We are two of the very oldest.
Now in the Yadkin Valley, after us, we started in ’88, it was 1999 until the next one came along because we were low profile. We didn’t come out with, “Here we are,” grand openings, no, uh-uh. We didn’t because we were unsure about what we were doing [Laughs] and hopefully looking for public acceptance to this North Carolina vinifera. And we got it; we got it a lot. We got it from Robert Parker—big, big name. We’ll never forget that one. That was big. Spectator [Wine Spectator magazine] is also good. These are national acceptances that gives you credibility. We don’t need it so much anymore. We did it a lot in the beginning. People were not real quick to accept it. I mean I’m saying like the North Carolina grown vinifera. We had to do some things like go out with blind tastings, where our wine was put in a paper bag along with a couple of well known California ones and let people choose, not knowing what they were choosing. And it worked. We didn’t win them all, but we won quite a few. And so slowly people began to accept. And then, of course, when you have the numbers we have now with the growth in the industry, it’s really a good thing. People starting their own wineries and vineyards today have the help of the Grape Council, our Agricultural Extension people have been trained to know what Chardonnay grapes actually are and what they might need. We have a beautiful Surry Community College in Dobson, North Carolina, not far from here, which has a Viticulture and Enology program. How great is that, that aspiring wine makers in the state can go there and stay here? We don’t have to be bringing everybody in from out of state. That’s not bad, but what we want is a North Carolina grown industry.
And I think still, though, outside of North Carolina and the South, people are still really surprised to hear that there is a wine industry here. And what do you say to those people today?
Well we can just look back at the history. You know, if we go way back, North Carolina was very early on growing grapes and had a wine industry. That, of course, was before the Civil War and those grapes were the Muscadine. And there was a lot of wine being made in the state. After Reconstruction, wine did not get started again. For whatever reason, the vineyards weren't replanted. There was more of an industrial revolution that was not wine-focused and so—. But with the emerging of North Carolina as a wine producing area that’s producing the vinifera, that has been a little more difficult. But I think the East Coast has always had a problem with that. We all know that, and even Upstate New York, you know, you hear people saying, “Oh, they grow those Concord Grapes. They make sweet wine.” Well, so. You know, we have a lot of different palates in the country, and [Laughs] I think we have a very diverse wine-growing region. This whole country, from east to west, there is a winery in every one of these forty-eight states. I say forty-eight because I’m not sure about Hawaii and Alaska but—. So regional wines are good. People who visit a region should go and taste what is growing there. Regional restaurants should be supportive of regional foods and wines and, you know, you get the best of what’s local.
Speaking of local, in the wine industry now there’s a lot of talk about terroir [the special characteristics recognized in a grape, as a result of geographical and environmental influence]. What do you say about North Carolina Yadkin Valley terroir?
Well, you know the terroir is your soil, your weather, your—what makes this place unique and North Carolina has historically been agriculture, and this part of North Carolina, being rolling hills, lends itself to vineyards because of the sloping terrain, and this year our weather has not been gentle. This year we’ve had very hot weather. We’ve had rain coming down in torrents or no rain at all. But we’re not unique in that aspect. I don’t think we want to be compared so much with California, which we all know is the Garden of Eden. Everything is great there, except they do have earthquakes and they do have—but growing seasons tend to be, maybe, more uniform. Here, our wines reflect the vintage year, the growing and that—and the terroir is, you know, I mean, you have good years and bad years and when we do them well, we do a very good year. We know what grapevines need. They need a terrain that is gradually sloping so that the roots cannot be bogged down in our beautiful clay. We can do that. We need rainfall in the spring. We need a certain elevation. I think our terroir, with the soil reflecting the quality of the fruit and the weather conditions, I think it’s good. I mean otherwise we would never have been granted our AVA, our American Viticultural Area designation, back in, I believe it was 2003—gave great credibility to our region here and I think that’s what they look at when they decide whether or not to give a designation. So I think the customer, the general public can determine for themselves whether they like a North Carolina grown Chardonnay, as opposed to one grown elsewhere. Vive la difference.
Now let’s talk about your winery here now, and the property has grown considerably since you first started.
Well, actually, you know what we have is a little cluster of buildings here because we did sort of move out. We started with this building that is the tasting room building, and our tasting room was in a small room with a small tasting bar. We could accommodate fifteen or twenty people in there, and we were really crowded. We stayed in that area until 2000. And, by then, the word was out that Westbend was here, and so were other North Carolina wines out there and the press was paying attention. Our visitors were growing daily, so we had to then move our tasting room into the room that used to be the private party room and that’s where we are. We grew but we didn’t change the building; we just moved the tasting room into a bigger place. We’ve extended the patio that we’re sitting at this moment; this was done in 2003. We had the patio, but it was small. Now it’s under the pavilion. We opened up the parking. You have to accommodate your visitors. You invite them to come. You want them to be comfortable when they’re here. We now have twenty wines on our wine list because we’ve added blends, and we have two Chardonnays and we have several blended wines. We have a great dessert wine. We’re also currently making a port. We have a sparkling wine, which is brand new. So our visitors have increased, and our retail operation has grown increasingly over the past, I’d say, five years.
Our state very generously allowed us to pay for DOT [Department of Transportation] highway signs. They gave us the right to do that, and that was a big factor in increasing the visitors we have. When the person in his car sees the sign out on the highway and knows that you’re just, you know, a mile or two away that—that’s big. And I think that’s what we really want to do. Our distribution is important across the state because we want it to bring people here. We are available all across the state of North Carolina. We have a distributor who handles the entire state. And that’s important because we want people to know about us, but this is where we like people to come because we’re proud of what we have. Westbend, I think, shows that it’s been here a while. Our vineyards are mature. Good wines are made from mature vineyards. I think someone said, “Good wine is made in the vineyard.” It also requires a good wine maker in the winery. But the vineyard is the focus of what we do at Westbend.
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You mentioned that you have twenty or more wines. How many grapes are you growing on the property?
Well, different varietals, there are at least twelve. We have sixty acres. There are about twelve or thirteen different varietals growing out there, and so you make more than—so we have the Pioneer Red is a blend. We have a Carolina Cuvée, which is another red blend. So you do more than one thing with—you don’t just do a varietal. For instance, if you have Merlot, you might use that Merlot in a blend. We have a Vintner’s Signature, which is a Bordeaux blend of three different red grapes. The Pioneer White is a blend; it’s Chardonnay, and then it’s been sweetened with a little bit of [Whispers] Muscadine. And so we have a wonderful dessert wine, which is called Lilly B, which is a late harvest, and it’s named after my granddaughter. We have a Port, which is a commemorative Port; we may not do another one. It’s called Jack’s Legacy, and it was named after my late husband…We had a commemorative year, thirty-five years in 2007. We had a big thirty-fifth anniversary celebration here, and that wine was done to commemorate the thirty-fifth year of production, and it was named after him. We have a lot of great wines.
What year did your husband pass?
The spring of 2006.
And so how has it been to take the helm of Westbend Vineyards?
Well, you know, I’ve always been here, and I have a lot of help. Jack was always more involved in the vineyard. He came around into the tasting room occasionally, but he did administrative work and, as I said, he retired from his business in 2001 and—actually, it was 2000. I’m sorry. No, it was 2000, and he was here not all the time anyway, because he was working the other job. So I always just felt because my calling seemed to be the tasting room, and so there you are with the people, and you’re the one that they see, but—and I have lots of help. I’m not saying I did it all. I didn’t. I never have. But I was just the public face, so to speak. My son is here now [Alex Kroustalis]. He works with us, and Mark [Terry] is our winemaker and general manager. So, you know, I just sort of went into it as—I did it anyway, so I was continuing to do it. It gives me a reason to get up in the morning, so I’m glad to have it. Westbend is very important to me.
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And now if I could go back to your Greek heritage a little bit more, where in Greece is your family from, and where was your husband’s family from?
My father came to this country when he was like fourteen years old, and he came from a very, very poor area in the mountains of Greece. And he left home, literally, because there was nothing there for him to eat, and he came to New York City and lived there—well, he went from his hometown and worked somewhere in Athens, until he made enough money to get on a boat and bring him to New York City, and then he worked there for several years until he made enough money to go somewhere else. He went to a small town in West Virginia because he had an uncle there, and so he stayed there because it was a place of opportunity for him and he had relatives there. He went back to Greece to get married, as the custom was then, and he met my mother because it was arranged that he should meet her. And her family was from the central part of Greece in a little town called Arta, and somehow my father’s brother knew her family and so they were sort of brought together. It was an arranged marriage. My husband’s family was from the town of Karpenisi, which is in the mountains area, nice—beautiful town. I’ve been there. And then, of course, his father and mother were in Winston-Salem, and he was born there.
Did your families bring with them a home winemaking tradition from Greece?
Not really. That’s not really—you know, I think everyone in the villages of Greece made wine anyway, but I didn’t grow up hearing that, and I don’t think Jack did either. I think it was just his passion to do it here because he was just that kind of person. He met challenges at every turn, and he liked to drink wine and wanted to grow a vineyard.
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Now what would you say is the future of Westbend?
Well, we’re looking to the future. I think we see ourselves as we have a big responsibility here. People look to Westbend. Back in the early days [we] helped a lot of people get started in this business because, at that time, there wasn’t anywhere else for them to go. They wanted to plant a vineyard. They didn’t know where to go to buy wine grapes. They didn’t know where to get stainless steel tanks. They didn’t know—because it was difficult not having a source, where now there is that. There are lots of organizations out there to help prospective vineyard owners, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. So we feel sort of like we’re a cornerstone of the industry, and we’re here, looking to the future.
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Well is there anything that we haven't touched on here in our discussion that you want to make sure to add about your experience in the wine industry in North Carolina?
It’s been a wonderful, wonderful experience for me, and I look back on it with great affection and have met the most wonderful people that I never would have had the chance to meet, if I had not been a part of this industry. It’s been life-changing for me, and it’s a tremendous commitment to become a part of this sort of thing. And you go through rough stages, for instance, as you know, I mentioned losing eighty percent of the first crop that we were even a commercial winery. That would be devastating because there you are and, you know, you’ve started this winery, and you’re paying a winemaker. You are full of optimism and no, not going to happen this year; the crop is gone. So these are obstacles that can be overcome. People should do it. It’s worth the commitment.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
