2005 may one day be remembered as a very good year for Wise County.
Besides the several tons and varieties of grapes now ripening on their well-ordered vines near Wise, the potential harvest for Southwest Virginia's economy is interesting to contemplate.
David Lawson, the 27-year-old behind the blossoming of a family winery enterprise with his parents, Ron and Suzanne Lawson, is an entrepreneur who likes to not only contemplate the possibilities, but literally plants and nurtures them until they take root and grow.
MountainRose Vineyards opened for business two weeks ago. David's dream come true has been five years in the making with the initial harvest and on-premises wine making process literally in the bottle beginning last fall.
"I hope (wine making) finds a home (all over Wise County and the region)," he said during a tour of the home-grown business on North Reservoir Road off Pole Bridge Road a few miles from the county seat. "Mine land provides us an opportunity to do something productive afterward."
Until and unless informed, visitors to MountainRose Vineyards would be hard-pressed to realize that four acres worth of vineyards behind the family's wine making facility was once part of a surface coal mine. The operation's old sediment pond now serves as a lovely touch to a bucolic setting already attracting wine aficionados making the circuit of wineries all across the country.
"People every day are coming up here. The more wineries there are in our region, the more tourism will be generated. We now have three or four wineries in Southwest Virginia," he said. "We need more tourism businesses. Agro-tourism, that's our niche. That's really what we're after. Our events are set up for agro-tourism. There are lots of little niche farming starting to come up across the region (like cheese making) and our vineyards, well, we're in niche farming, too."
MountainRose Vineyards has already scheduled an Appalachian Quilt Show for Aug. 13, a Mum Festival from Sept. 9-10, a "pick-your-own" Concord Grape Festival on Sept. 17, the Wise Fall Fling tour of the business on Oct. 1, and an old-fashioned apple butter stir-off with hayrides, pumpkin painting and the like on Oct. 22.
And then, there's the heart of the business: wine making.
Suzanne Lawson retired two years ago as the special education coordinator for the Wise County school division and stepped into a whole new career as her son's "hired help."
"I do a lot of the pruning, put the labels on the bottles, and anything else that needs doing except for how it's made," she said.
Her duties also include hostess and tour guide, ones she carries off with flair.
She reels off the different varieties of grapes ripening on sites at the winery, in Redwine and near Castlewood, and can spell them, too: Vidal, Seyval, Traminette, Chambourcin, Chancellor, Niagara and Riesling.
"David started some of those when he was still in high school. And I said, "?David, you're going to go off to college and I'll be stuck with all these grapes.' When he was at Virginia Tech he did one semester of a work program at a winery in Culpeper. Then he told me, no more engineer. He wanted to be a wine maker. So here we are, and we really are in the wine making business," she said.
Some of her friends have kidded Suzanne about retiring from a plush office job just to go to work as a farmhand, but she has a ready reply.
"I tell them that grapes have never said an ugly word to me yet," she said. "It's nice and quiet work, and you get to enjoy pleasant days. My husband (also a school division retiree) talks about the peace and quiet. It has been a big change. A good change."
Last year's first-ever harvest from the family's vineyards produced about 10 tons of grapes that translated into roughly 1,500 gallons worth of wines. The signature label Sweet MountainRose - described as sweet sipping, nectarine, rose water - honors the family heritage after the Mountain Rose, a sixth-generation shrub rose brought from Kentucky to the family's new homelands in Wise County.
Other wines produced by MountainRose Vineyards' first harvest year are named after coal seams: Dorchester Red (fruity with hints of nut and oak); Jawbone Red (cherry, mint, spice, smooth); Banner White (peach, pineapple, banana, gulpable); and Splashdam White (bursting citrus, rose petal, vanilla).
As tour guide, Suzanne can dazzle visitors with a waltz through the production process from snipping the pods into "lugs" to dumping them into a de-stemmer hopper to fermentation vats to the press to tanks. The small facility contains a dazzling array of technical equipment, but Suzanne says she leaves the actual production management to her son.
"He does the actual wine making," she said. "I just show people around and take care of the tasting bar."
David said 700-plus cases of wines is the result of the first harvest year, and hopes to top 1,000 cases after this year's harvest "and maybe 2,000 will be our first plateau."
Growing grapes on reclaimed surface mines "has its advantages," he said. "The soils have higher mineral content, and the vines are not so vigorous. There's only so much (vine and leaf) growth you want to deal with during the growing season."
Pruning and other tasks to care for the vines requires 150 to 200 hours of "hard work" per acre, he said.
"I study hard on growing grapes on strip jobs. It's something long term. We're still experimenting. We did some ripping on a tractor to loosen the soil to see how that would go. Typically, coal companies compact the soils down too much during the reclamation process. I think you can make a much more productive soil as far as soil aeration to not pack the soils down so much," he said.
"Vineyards and orchards are definitely good post-mining land use. Fruit crops grow really well on strip jobs, and not many people have latched onto that, yet. Wise County was huge once in fruit production, and maybe we can be again."
His initial youthful attraction to wine making is maturing much in the way his product matures.
"The opening of new challenges and to see the product you raise get to the final product, it's just always new and exciting and challenging," he said. "We're still a small-scale family business, and the family-run part is one aspect of the benefits. We always try to get the best quality we can get. We're not there yet by far, but we're getting there."
Getting to MountainRose Vineyards isn't difficult, and a scenic, leisurely drive. About five miles beyond the University of Virginia's College at Wise (Darden Drive past the college becomes State Route 646) turn left onto Pole Bridge Road (State Route 644) for about two miles, then a left on North Reservoir Road (State Route 682) and less than a half-mile farther on, the vineyards and facilities are a can't miss dead ahead.
Saturdays are good tour days, but to arrange tours on other days - and drop-ins are welcome, too - call (276)328-2013 or e-mail [email protected].
Bookmarks