Family-owned Linville Falls Winery fulfills a lifelong dream.
by Ross Howell Jr. | photographs by Richard Israel
Jack Wiseman, the 93-year-old founder of Linville Falls Winery, eases back in a patio chair.
“My grandmother Ida showed me how to make wine,” he says. “It was just part of our heritage.”
He reflects for a moment, then smiles at his granddaughter, Jessica Boone, who runs the winery.
“Remember that Christmas we rode up on the hill to talk?” he asks. “How old were you?”
Behind us rises a steep ridge with rows of vines, its southeastern exposure capturing every ray the sun offers. The patio overlooks a gentle slope and pond. Beyond the pond is a hillside dotted with Fraser fir trees.
“Were you 13?” Jack persists.
“I think I was in high school,” Jessica responds. “Maybe … 15.”
Jack Wiseman, founder of Linville Falls Winery
It was “a rare conversation between generations,” Jack recalls. He and Jessica drove a golf cart to the ridge above the slope where the vineyard grows now. At the time, the slope was covered with Christmas trees.
When they reach the crest, Jack stops the cart, and the two of them watch as workmen down in the valley carry trees from the barn to waiting cars. He tells Jessica how he’s going to plant grapes and have a winery with a real winemaker and a real tasting room. He can see it all in his mind, and he tells her the family is going to run it. He knows Jessica will understand because ever since she was little, she’s been so smart.
But she wasn’t listening.
“And she usually does,” Jack says.
The two of them look at each other and laugh.
“Maybe I was thinking about a calculus test,” Jessica says.
“Or a boy,” Jack says. He smiles and nods.
“But here it’s turned out, just exactly the way I had hoped,” he says.
New and old traditions
You’d think on a chilly March day, the winery would be empty. But a couple is sitting on deck chairs down by the pond and a group chats at another table. A few people stand at the bar in the tasting room, sampling flights.
Jessica tells me the real action is behind the scenes.
“We usually have two rieslings on the menu,” she says. “We do a dry and a sweet, but we’re sold out of both of those.”
Linville Falls Winery grows not only German varietals, but also a selection of hybrids. One is seyval blanc, a grape developed in France more than 100 years ago.
“Seyval blanc performs really well here,” Jessica says. “It’s the sweetest white wine we have, but we’re sold out of it, too.”
On my visit, a lot of the energy at the winery is focused on getting last year’s estate harvest into bottles by May, when business really picks up.
“We’re still processing,” Jessica continues. “Sometimes the wine decides it doesn’t want to be ready quite as fast as you’d like.”
Some of the red wines at Linville Falls Winery are made from grapes sourced from the West Coast. But Jessica is pushing hard to get more grapes from nearby wineries.
“Everybody brings in a California red or an Oregon pinot noir for their customers,” she says. “But I feel like it’s my duty to showcase North Carolina wines.”
And Jessica is very hopeful about an experiment she’s trying.
“Pinot noir is my red of choice,” she says. “I’ve got a little test vineyard of it growing. It’s a sensitive grape, very temperamental.”
Jessica planted her first pinot noir vines two springs ago. Last year, they produced a few clusters of grapes.
“The sugars measured in a way that was positive,” Jessica says. “We have an interesting microclimate here — cool nights, but direct sunlight all day.” The conditions are ideal for pinot noir, but it will take three to five years for Jessica to assess the viability of her experiment.
“People tell me it can’t be done, but you don’t know till you try,”
she adds.
You’ll also notice several fruit wines on the Linville Falls list when you visit.
“They’re my grandpa’s thing,” Jessica says, nodding in Jack’s direction. “He grew up around the old-time moonshiners.”
And those old-timers used all manner of fruits to make wines and brandies.
“Every Christmas, Grandpa has these Mason jars with fruit all around the house and gets us to taste them,” she adds.
Ever since Jack opened the winery in 2012, blueberry wine was on the list. Now, there’s also blackberry wine and a strawberry dessert wine.
A favorite among the fruit wines is “Jack’s Cherry Bounce,” his take on a recipe dating back to George Washington, who’s said to have carried a canteen full of his wife Martha’s recipe when he crossed the Allegheny Mountains in 1784. The drink’s reputation was burnished in the 1800s by Rutherford County moonshiner Amos Owens, aka “The Cherry Bounce King.”
Jack’s version is plenty bouncy, all right — sporting an alcohol content of 18%.
A winding journey
Since Jack’s Tuscan-style winery fits so naturally into the landscape, you might think this all just happened. But his journey has taken the twisty turns of a mountain road.
He was raised by grandparents outside Crossnore, not far from the winery. During the Korean War, Jack served as a U.S. Army medic, from 1952-53. After his discharge, he had a six-year stay in northern California, where he worked in a U.S. Navy shipyard as a sheet-metal machinist — and got his first experience selling Christmas trees for a friend who trucked them down from Oregon.
Oh, and Jack ran a little moonshine in stills he’d built using government stainless steel.
“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?” Jessica quips.
He even built a still for a French brandy-maker who was testing Napa Valley wines. In fact, he got to know several winery owners and winemakers.
“The wine world just fit my narrative,” Jack says. “They’d share ideas, treat you like family.”
Eventually, Jack moved back to North Carolina to look after his aging grandparents and court and marry the love of his life, a girl from Crossnore who’d moved to Charlotte.
When he was laid off from his sheet-metal job in Charlotte, a friend got him interested in the janitorial-services business.
“That’s where I got my first taste of mop and broom,” Jack says.
He grew the business over time until it had more than 300 employees. All the while, Jack was running the roads between Charlotte and Avery County, buying as much farmland in the mountains as he could and planting Fraser fir seedlings by the thousands, even though his own family told him it would never work.
At its peak, his Christmas tree business was selling 300,000 trees a year. Then the recession hit. Cutting back operations and financing from his own pocket, Jack kept his business going when many others could not.
And then he focused on what he enjoys most.
“I’ve always loved grapes and wine,” Jack says. “They just kind of stuck in my head.” SP
