Chesser Island Winery
3940 Chesser Lane
Folkston, GA 31537
(912) 496-2916
www.chesserislandwinery.com
[T]here was a number of people in the family that would make homemade wine. But I set about to try to do it a more modern approach using cool fermentations, purchased yeast, and other modern approaches to winemaking. And there’s a world of difference, and that’s not to say people that make homemade wine don't do a very good job of it—they do. But it’s all to the particular taste and my taste that I was focusing on was a drier style wine that focused more on the character of the muscadine than the sweetness of the wine. – Tracy Chesser
Tracy Chesser is an attorney by vocation. Like his forebears, he lives on the edge of the great Okefenokee Swamp, in extreme southeastern Georgia. His great-great grandfather settled in the area in the mid-1800s. His grandfather built a home in the swamp on what is now called Chesser Island. Wine labels from Cheese Island Winery boast an artist’s rendering of that home.
Tracy Chesser and his wife Melinda Chesser make a wide variety of wines, some flavored with local blueberries, others with tupelo honey. The Chessers see their efforts as a boon to cultural tourism, which the Okefenookee hopes to soon catalyze.
One of their signature wines, vinified from estate-grown and other muscadine grapes, is a sparkling muscadine, made in a brut style. Also of note is their Folkston Funnell Bubble, a demic-sec sparkler, sweetened with the barest touch of honey.
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: Tracy Chesser
Date: August 25, 2008
Location: Chesser Island Winery, Folkston, Georgia
Interviewer & Photographer: John T Edge
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John T Edge: This is August 25, 2008; I am in Chesser Island—I am at Chesser Island, Georgia just outside Folkston. And I’m with Tracy Chesser, and would you please tell me your given name and your date of birth?
Tracy Chesser: Yes; Tracy Allen Chesser, August 26, 1968.
We’re sitting here at a table, and in front of us are Suwanee Tawnee wine, a Chase Prairie Rosé, a Bugaboo Blue, and just a moment ago we were talking about Tracey’s motivations for making wine at Chesser Island Winery. And he began telling me—.
Well I mean the motivations were—were twofold; one in the sense being a lawyer and not making anything and wanted to create something, so we started making wine; and the second motivation being to draw attention to this area. We have the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge within several miles of Folkston; we get 400,000 people out there a year and based on the demographics and the studies related to them, the question was presented if they were here and wanted to buy something would they? The response to that was yes. And then the question asked next was—what was there for them to buy? And the response to that was only 12-percent thought that there was anything worth buying. So the wine was done with specific Okefenokee labels to try to promote the area, present the Okefenokee in a positive way to these eco-tourists if you will and to show them there was something worth buying, taking home, and then telling their friends about and then hopefully they would come back down as well. So that 400,000—well they’ve actually done demographics on the swamp or studies indicating that it could handle 800,000 a year. Well to an area like Folkston that would be a huge economic impact and that’s kind of the focus of that and I was trying to present the swamp in a favorable way.
And that idea of presenting the swamp in a favorable way is important to you; you have deeply family roots here.
Sure; the Chessers have lived in Okefenokee for approximately 150 years. There is an island in Okefenokee called Chesser Island that my great, great-grandfather settled on. They homesteaded and then my grandfather ended up building a homestead there that’s still there. And they do tours out there and people that want to go see the way that they used to live years and years ago are able to do that by visiting the area. And that’s actually where my father and all of his siblings—there’s a total of seven of them—were actually born.
Well the whole—the whole goal of the winery again in promoting the area is to also use things that are grown in southeast Georgia. We could have cabernet grapes shipped in from California or—or get them elsewhere but the whole thing was it was homegrown, home-presented and to showcase what we could make here. And what we do is—we do muscadine, blueberries, blackberries and we are experimenting with a new grape called Blanc DuBois.
And the idea of making the range of wines that you make are not hyper-sweet like many of us think of—muscadine and scuppernong being hyper-sweet. Tell me why y’all look toward some wines that are not so sweet.
Well we do cover a gamut of different types of wines; we do have super-sweet wines which are—but they’re finished in a port style so it has high alcohol levels to counter the sweetness as you would expect in a port. We have a middle grade sweetness if you will; it’s the blueberries and it’s for those that like traditional sweeter variety of wines. But we also have our Chase Prairie Rosé which is finished with about two-percent residual sweetness but it comes across a little drier than that because of the acidity from the blueberries and the muscadine. I wanted to present the muscadine as being a fruit that could stand on its own and then I added just enough residual sweetness that complimented the fruit but—but without hiding the muscadine character and I think that we’ve done that with the Chase Prairie Rosé.
We also talked about the—the difficulties of—of rainfall and humidity in—in this climate and growing vinifera grapes as well as others.
Right; the University of Florida is making a lot of inroads with inoculating certain vinifera grapes but the key to that is trying to pick a type of vinifera grape that is an early harvest variety such as the chenin blanc and you know our rainfall or our heavy rain usually comes mid part toward the end of July and it carries through the current day where we’ve had 13-inches in the last three days.
So if you’re dealing with a bunch grape then you’re going to be fighting the different mildews—downy, powdery, bunch rots, and thracknose at a much higher level and it’s going to be a lot more difficult to control when you do have higher humidity and rain in the area. July down here is high enough humidity but it’s not as bad as it is during the later summer, so we’re able to control that with a spray program that occurs about once or twice a week.
And did this come out of a long fascination with wine itself or where—where did this come from?
Well I mean there was a number of people in the family that would make homemade wine. But I set about to try to do it a more I guess modern approach using cool fermentations, purchased yeast, and other I guess modern approaches to winemaking. And there’s—there’s a world of difference, and that’s not to say people that make homemade wine don't do a very good job of it—they do. But it’s all to the particular taste and my taste that I was focusing on was a drier style wine that focused more on the character of the muscadine and the sweetness of the wine.
And if—if that’s your modern approach tell me about the historical kind of antecedents to yours within your family, other people in your family made wine?
Yeah; they did and I can't tell you how many times somebody has come up to me and they tell me how I’m supposed to make wine. And I—I always listen to them but it always involves burying the wine, and they say what you do is you get this five-gallon carboy and you put some muscadines in there and you put five-pounds of sugar—no more, no less—five-pounds of sugar. You shake it up, bury it; you bury it for three months and you go dig it up. So you know there’s a story or process that involves burying the wine. I’m usually probably going—I’ll listen to them and give them the respect of hearing their story but I probably won't incorporate that in my winemaking.
What does the burying do? I mean what’s—?
Well they didn’t have cooling units back then, so the burying allowed the wine to ferment at a cooler temperature and out of direct sunlight and they were using clear carboys. They didn’t have colored ones back then, so any time you have heat and light and being imposed upon wine you’re probably going to end up with a bad product. So it was buried to keep it cool and keep it out of the sunlight.
Would you walk me through the—the range of products that—that y’all produce?
We produce a—a rosé that’s finished. That’s the Chase Prairie Rosé. It’s a combination of 90-percent muscadines and 10-percent blueberry. The blueberries is what gives the wine the nice rosé color that it has and the blueberry skins is actually a very good fruit to retain the color component of the rosé. Most wines that are made in the rosé fashion it’s difficult for them to stay that color. And because it’s so light and usually the bottles are clear, so they’ll fade to a brownish tint over time—not the Chase Prairie Rosé. That’s held up very well over exposure to light.
Next in the sweetness category on the distilled wine side is Bugaboo Blue. That’s 100-percent blueberries; it’s made with fruit that we source from around the Okefenokee. They’re all rabbit eye variety blueberries. And it’s finished a little sweeter at around four-percent residual sweetness and that’s for those that don't want a real dry wine but don't want a syrupy sweet wine, and the blueberries have a very nice flavor to it.
Moving up on the sweetness level we have Suwanee Tawnee and every one of these is named after some aspect of the Okefenokee and they carry a story on the bottle. And then you have the sparkling wines…
Okay; the sparkling wines—we are as far as I know the—well I wouldn’t—I can't say that anymore. North Georgia has got an individualist making some methode-traditionelle Champagne or sparkling wine. On the—the most driest level of our sparkling wines we have Okefenokee Brute. It’s 100-percent muscadine and it’s actually finished on the lower end of sweetness for the brute sparkling wine. It’s .8 percent residual sweetness and moving up from that we have Jackson’s Folly—no, we have Billy Bowlegs Blue. It’s again 100-percent blueberry; it’s at about four-percent residual sweetness and it’s a red sparkling wine so you’ve got to be real careful with that when you’re celebrating with it. And moving up a little bit further we have Folkston Funnel Bubble; that is a combination of the 100-percent muscadine sparkling wine and honey that we source from around the Okefenokee. It’s usually a galberry tupelo blend; it adds a nice little complexity character to the wine. And then we have another one that we’re going to be releasing soon which is Fox Fire Cuvée Rouge—Fox Fire Cuvée Rouge; it’s a combination of muscadines and blueberries and it’s finished in an almost brute but on a lower end of the demising level.
And your fruit, we started talking about that—you grow how many—how many acres or what’s the—what’s the parcel of fruit grown here?
We have 40-acres here; not all of it is planted in fruit. We have a large portion of it in blackberries and in blueberries and Muscadine and a couple acres of Blanc DuBois. There’s another section of property across from our house that we get some blueberries from as well. We source a lot of the blueberries from other growers around the Okefenokee because if you look on some of our labels you’ll see product of the Okefenokee. If that’s on there that means we got all that fruit from around here and when I say around here, I’m talking about the Okefenokee—there’s about a five-county area that the Okefenokee sits in. And we try to promote the area by buying fruit from those growers.
And tell me how your winemaking has evolved from your first attempts until now. You seem very confident in where you are now. Where—where did you start out?
I started out with five-gallon carboys and I think the first year we made wine, we made 12-gallons. 1999 — we made 12-gallons and it kind of grew from there and right now we produce about 2,000 cases a year.
And when you started out in ’99 with those few cases what were you making?
Blueberry—it was 100-percent blueberry. We were growing blueberries; we had a bumper crop one year and rather than just let them fall off the bush we decided to harvest them and see what happened with the wine.
And was that the catalytic event, the bumper crop, or had you already been pondering winemaking? Was there—?
Well as a lawyer again I was wanting to make something and I was trying to figure out what to make. And it just seemed to come together with the wine, the Okefenokee, and kind of jibed and you know we’ve just steadily grown from there.
And you mentioned earlier in our conversation—the kind of family history of winemaking and the like or regional history of winemaking, people burying carboys in the ground. Did you have any—and you mentioned that in a kind of general fashion. Were there any particular members of your family that did make wine?
Yeah; I mean I had a grandfather that made wine on both my maternal and paternal sides. It’s not something that—that they made more than five-gallons a year but they dabbled in it. Times were difficult back then and I guess if they wanted some wine they were either going to make it or do without, so—.
Talk to me about using local ingredients and the import of that. You mentioned tupelo and galberry honey as being a part of some of the wines.
Right; and—and our goal is to—to make a local wine made from local—locally produced products whether they’re the fruit or the honey and not many people know that the Okefenokee used to be one of the largest honey producing areas in the US before it became a National Wildlife Refuge. As a matter of fact one of the islands out there is actually called Honey Island because it had an unusual high number of bee hives with honey production there, so—and we can't use 100-percent of one particular honey because the tupelo and the galberry come in at the same time and you can't tell the bees not to go to one and—as opposed to the other. So it’s a nice blend; it gives a nice complex structure to the Folkston Funnel Bubble and we’re just happy to use anything that local folks make here and incorporate it in the products.
And where in—in looking around your property, the—describe for me the—the topography here. We’re surrounded almost entirely by pine trees.
Pine trees, Georgia is the only state where the pine—the pine industry is the number one gross domestic producer. And Charlton County is the second most pine tree populated county in the State. My brother is a forester; my dad is a forester; most of my friends are in the forestry business; we grow pine trees and we’re just trying to diversify a little bit the winery aspect to show that we can do something other than pine trees to I guess buffer any recession in the pine tree industry, kind of like what we’re going through now with the housing market the way it is.
And in terms of incorporating local ingredients are there other things you’re exploring? Right now you use blackberry, blueberry, muscadine, other—?
Blanc DuBois and we have actually entertained and experimented some with a mead which is a honey-based wine. We’ve gone so far to make a Madeira—not a Madeira but a mellomell which is a combination of honey and a fruit to produce a wine. We’ve made some blueberry and tupelo galberry wine together; the problem with that is they usually have to age about four years before it gets to a point where it’s agreeable. [Laughs] That’s work in progress.
So we talked about the way that some of your efforts might help with tourism here in—in and around the Okefenokee, but there’s also a sense that—that this work can help people see the value in the place that they live and the place that they grew up. Is that a part of this?
Yeah; and then that’s what we’re trying to do. I mean everybody has a sense of place and you can either look back on whatever your sense of place is favorably or unfavorably. I think the—the place that I live is a wonderful place, you know and I want to share some of that with people that visit here. And you know not only do we have the Okefenokee but there’s—there’s a lot of good people that live here. And I just want to I guess relay to the people that do visit through here you know how much I like it, how important I think it is, and how much I think they would enjoy to visit it. And if you look at it from an eco-tourist point of view, I mean those—that’s the—the group of people that spend a lot of money when they visit a location. The Okefenokee is worth seeing; it’s part of the National Wildlife Refuge and I think if people came here, gave it a chance, looked at it, and enjoyed it, they would see the sense of place that I appreciate about this.
And perhaps the first way they’re introduced to this concept is looking at a bottle of Chesser Island Winery seeing the—Chesser Island Wine, seeing the—the tin roof building on the front and thinking I want to go to this place. I want to see—.
Sure; and—and most people that visit the Okefenokee they only get a glancing glow. The US government only allows a handful of people to actually go out into the Okefenokee every year. What people don't realize is again there’s 30-plus islands out there; there’s lakes, there’s prairies and every one of those lakes, every one of those prairies was named for a reason. Bugaboo Island—it got that name because of something that happened there; Billy’s Island you know—our wine is named Billy Bowlegs Blue. He was the last Seminole Indian Chief to leave the Okefenokee; Suwanee Tawnee—you know the—the—all of these labels are done for a purpose of trying to communicate something that the average person is not going to get to see by just casually visiting the Okefenokee. If you delve into what’s out there you’ll understand there’s you know hundreds of years of history in the making and it’s all got a cool story behind it.
So what was the Bugaboo?
Bugaboo Island was named because in 1878 I believe there was these two trappers that got stranded because of the storm. So they made it to Bugaboo Island, set up camp, and as the storm approached they kept hearing this awful noise that was coming from the center of the island. It was a Haney or a Bugaboo if you will, as they called it, and for almost two decades nobody else would go to the island because of the stories they relayed about that. Well eventually somebody got brave enough in the early 1900s to actually go out there and they discovered that there had been two trees that had grown together and any time the wind blew it rubbed them and it made an awful noise. They stilled called it Bugaboo Island after that.
What’s next in terms of—in terms of naming wines after places around here? What’s the next project?
The next project is Fox Fire Cuvée Rouge. It’s a blend of Muscadine and blueberry made in the traditional sparkling wine method. It will be finished in a brute to a demi-sec and Fox Fire is just a fancy word for—you know what it is John—swamp gas. So—but you know the color of swamp gas that it is translates well into the color of the wine that it, so most people don't realize Fox Fire is swamp gas.
Naturally occurring phenomenon?
Right; a combination of decomposing plant matter reacting with oxygen to create a glowing light.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.