Dulpin Winery
505 N. Sycamore St.
Rose Hill, NC 28458
(800) 774-9634
www.duplinwinery.com
Since we opened up in [1975], there have been seventy-two other wineries opened up. So we feel like we’re sort of laying the groundwork here for the Muscadine grape and Muscadine wineries. And we think that if we do a good job and if people sample our wines, they’ll say, ‘Muscadine wines are pretty good.’ – David Fussell, Jr.
David Fussell Sr., a school principal, was looking for a way to supplement his income when he heard about the price that Muscadine grapes were fetching in New York. He planted his first Muscadine vines in 1968. But in the 1970s, the price for grapes fell. Needing an outlet for his fruit, David decided to make wine. But again, his luck would turn. In the 1980s Duplin Winery faced new tax laws and regulations, causing the winery to face difficult times. The bank took David’s house but left him with a fledgling winery. He did his best to keep the place going. David even helped out other growers by taking their fruit, giving them stock in Duplin instead of cash. Duplin Winery maintains relationships with some of those growers to this day, helping Duplin Winery become the largest bottler of Muscadine in North Carolina. Today, David’s son, David Fussell Jr., continues the family tradition as president of Duplin Winery, where he’s committed to “making the best sweet wine in the world.
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: Dave Fussell, Jr., President
Date: August 11, 2008
Location: Duplin Wine Cellars – Rose Hill, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Monday, August 11, 2008. I’m in Rose Hill, North Carolina, home of Duplin Winery, and I’m here with Dave Fussell, Jr., part of the three generations of Duplin Winery here. And, David, if you wouldn’t mind, please, stating your name and your occupation for the record?
Dave Fussell, Jr: I’m Dave Fussell, Jr., and I am the President of Duplin Wine Cellars here in Rose Hill, North Carolina…I was born August 18, 1967, so that makes me forty years old, but in another week I’ll be forty-one.
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Before we talk about the winery specifically, could you talk about your family’s history in this area?
Well the Fussells have actually been here for a very long time. They came over from England—from Philadelphia and moved down in the 1700s. We kind of stick around here because nobody else will put up with in any other places, so it’s a very prominent name here in Rose Hill. There are probably about, I would say 200 Fussells here in Rose Hill. My grandfather, well I remember my great-grandfather; they of course lived here with my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother happens to be second or third cousins to Winston Churchill, so that makes us kind of feel a little fancy. But we’ve been here for a long, long time and I—fortunately for me, I’ve grew up here in the country and really enjoy it, and it’s a nice place to be.
All right. And then fade into the 1970s and [when] your family got into the wine business. Can you talk about what your family was doing for a living before that?
Okay, well, we’ll go back to the ‘60s. In the 1960s, my granddad [Daniel Jerome Fussell] was a big homebuilder here in the area. He built most of the brick homes around Rose Hill and within Duplin County. My father [David Fussell Sr.] graduated from East Carolina University back in, I think maybe [nineteen]’61 or ’62, and he became a school principal and he stayed in the school business for many years. But he decided that he wanted to supplement his income and wanted to start farming on the side. He contacted the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and said, “What’s the best crop to plant?” And back then, it was a big winery out of New York [Canandaigua Wine Company] paying $350 per ton for our native Muscadine grapes. Well it takes four years for a vine to fully mature, so back in ’68, I think, we started growing Muscadine grapes about four miles from the winery here. And then [in] those four years, the price fell from $350 to $125 a ton, and so we were stuck with a whole bunch of grapes. And we like to say that we’re Methodists because we couldn’t be Baptists; we had to get into the wine business and find a market for our grapes.
The building that we’re in right here [at the winery], this was the little warehouse for my grandfather’s construction business and they—he—he sold this—this building to my—my dad and uncle was in the wine business also early on. He sold it to—to them…And so they converted this old building into a winery and started making wines out of their grapes and was lucky enough to sell it and eventually got some other growers to join in with him. And we didn’t have any money back then, so we exchanged stock in our winery for the other growers’ grapes, and they brought them in. And we used to have to stomp grapes by foot, and it was sort of a family affair and back then if your foot—if your foot wasn’t purple it meant you didn’t work very hard. So I always tried to have purple feet, and I thought it was cool back then when I was like five or six and I had the purplest feet in the neighborhoods.
But anyway, we work really hard as a family and back then we had an old retired Baptist minister who whistled How Great Thou Art in the bottling room, and we did everything by hand. We used to be what they called a lick and stick operation where we’d have to lick a couple of labels or a certain label to put it on the bottle and that was fun times back then.
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Well what can you tell me about the winery in New York, when your father started growing grapes, that was that connection for the sale of the grapes, and do you know what the winery was and how they were using the Muscadine grapes?
Well back in the 1960s a large winery called Canandaigua Wine Company, which now is called Constellation Winery or Constellation Wine Group, and they happen to be the largest wine group in the world today, but back in the 1960s they just were really after getting some of our native Muscadine grapes. And so they came down and they were offering a very good price, and so a lot of growers in North Carolina started growing grapes with the intention of selling it to Canandaigua for $350 per ton. But, of course, with the law of economics, supply eventually became greater than demand, and so that drove the price down. Once that price fell down to $125, none of these growers could even pick the grapes for that, so we got into the wine business. And we got about seven other good families to join in with us and exchanged stock for the grapes and a lot of the other—there were like sixty-four vineyards in North Carolina at that time, and only eight are here still today. But we grabbed those guys and started trying to market our Muscadine wines with the intention of just making the very best sweet, most fruitiest wine you could possibly make; and we’re trying to make a wine that tastes just like you’re up underneath the grapevine eating the grapes, and we still strive today to make that very same wine. We wanted to be known as making the best sweet wine in the world. And we try hard at it.
Tell me how that’s going because Southern wine is really making headway on the international scene and vinifera [vitis vinifera, grape vines native to Europe and the Mediterranean] is making, you know, a name for itself growing in the South on the international wine scene. And how does Muscadine fit into that, and how do you promote Southern sweet wines to a greater audience?
Well we, of course, started making wine back in 1972, and my granddaddy made a lot of money building homes. So we about broke him and actually, my father lost his house. And we—but the bank didn’t want the winery back in the mid-‘80s when we lost a lot of money; they said keep the winery going and just try to pay us whatever you can, but we want your house. So my granddaddy had to buy the house from the bank so I’d have a place to stay. But it was a big struggle up until 1996, and in 1996 they said—they came out on 60 Minutes [television news program] and they said, "Drink a glass of red wine; it’s good for you.” Well that’s about the best news a wine maker could ever here.
So we came back and said, you know, “They—they’re promoting red wine; let’s—let’s start focusing on red wines,” and we started making some. And actually, we got a good break. A nice little Baptist school up the road, Campbell University, has got a great pharmaceutical school. And they came down and they said, “Dave, they’re doing all kinds of tests on vinifera wines.” You know, there are three different types of grapes grown in the world; there’s viscera vinifera and those are grafted—or were grafted to our Muscadine—Southern Muscadine grapevines and they flourished over in Napa Valley and Robert Mondovi helped make those famous, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet; those are native—those grapes are native to Europe. And then there’s vitas Lambrusco, and if you’re a Methodist like I am, and if you go and have communion in your church, you usually have a little Concord grape juice. A Concord is a Lambrusco grape, just like Lambrusco also has Niagara, Concord, Delaware, Catawba—these are all grapes that are native to the Northeastern part of the United States. And then we like to think, just like, you know, our Lord, you know, made Adam and said, “I can do a little bit better than that.” And, of course, he made someone like you, a female, but we like to think that maybe he looked at those two grapes and said, “Let me try one more time, and I think I can do better than that.” And, of course, we have our grapes here in the Southeastern part of the United States called Muscadine or vitas rotunda folia. Vitas rotunda folia is a very difficult name to say and us Southerners, we can make it really long at the end if we wanted to, but vitas rotunda folia grapes remind the earlier settlers of the Muscat grape and we made it a little longer and instead of Muscat we add a little extra syllable, Muscadine. And so all of our grapes are called Muscadine.
Well Campbell University came down and let me—let us test these Muscadine wines because all these tests are on vinifera grapes, and we’re looking for this resveratrol [a powerful antioxidant found in Muscadine grapes]. So they came down and they got seven cases and went back, and a few weeks later they came back and they said they wanted seven more cases. And I’m saying, “What? Wait a minute. What are y’all doing, having a party up there?” And they wanted to carry some wine to Tuft’s University up in Boston. And they came back with some very positive results and showed that Muscadine wines had seven times more resveratrol in it than the other grapes that were grown in the world. And, of course, my dad said, “Is that good news?” And of course they said, “Oh, yes.” So our biggest state paper, The N & O [The News & Observer]came down and took some pictures of Dad and put my dad on the front page of the biggest paper in the state, smiling, holding a bottle of wine saying, “Not only do they taste good; they’re seven times more healthier.” And since that article in 1996, we’ve been able to sell every single bottle of wine we’ve made. They contribute Muscadine wines and the health benefits to our climate here in the eastern north of the United States. It’s kind of hot and humid during growing season, and it’s very different than Napa Valley. Heat and humidity supports a lot of fungal disease and, just as the good Lord helps us produce natural antibodies whenever we’re sick, he has to help the grapes out a little bit, too. So the amount of stress put on the grapes, the more stress, the more resveratrol compounds or antioxidants they produce, and so our climate puts a lot of stress on them and they had these antioxidants to survive our climate.
Like I said, we’ve sold every single bottle of wine since then. Not only do we have our vineyard growing and the seven other growers growing grapes for us, we now have an additional 43 growers under contract growing grapes for us, and that makes about 51 vineyards that we pull from. We also get some grapes from Mississippi, twenty miles south of Meridian. It’s a little town called Quitman, Mississippi, and we get grapes from a man named Charlie Phillips down there, who owns about 150 acres—big vineyard. He grows some very, very delicious grapes and we want to keep them delicious when we put them in the bottle.
We produce, today, about 280,000 cases; that probably makes us about the biggest winery in the Southeastern United States. I think there are a couple wineries in New York a little bigger than us. We are very, very proud of our hard work. We’re about the thirty-third largest wine group in the United States. But if you compare us into Gallo, which is the number one wine group in the United States, we go into them 893 times, so that kind of humbles you a little bit. So in order to compete with those folks, we have to bring out our Southern personalities and our—we just try to out-nice them, so—. But our wines are available in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio. We’ll be in Ohio this month soon, working our way to Mississippi.
I want to ask a little bit more about sourcing grapes, but I wonder if we could go back to when the winery started. And would you say there’s a certain year that the winery really kicked off and when that was?
Well it’s kind of hard to say because, you know, they were making it on the side for a long, long time, and it really wasn’t too legal back then, but we really started going and putting our wines in the stores or finding a few stores in 1975. My mom hand drew a label and we have a bottle over there in our display of our 1975 wines, and so I’d say ’75 was really when we just started marketing our wines legally.
Well and I’m glad you mentioned the non-legal production of wine because I wanted to talk about that, too, because I wonder how—what the learning curve was to making wine on a larger production scale and if that home wine making tradition, it surely helped along the way and how so?
Oh, yes. Well we were lucky—the business was—because my dad was—he went to school for two years up in Ithaca, New York, trying to learn how to make wine. Also, my mom’s dad had a little homemade wine action going on where he supported some friends and acquaintances when we had the police chief on call and we were good to go. But also, before Prohibition, North Carolina was the leading wine state in the nation, and the best selling wine was called Virginia Dare Scuppernong; and it was named after, of course, Virginia Dare, who was the first American born in the States. And a man named Paul Garrett had five operating wineries here in North Carolina. He was the Gallo of the time. We did run into some old dudes. My dad—this is back in the ‘60s, and we found some guys that were a little older that worked for Paul Garrett, and we got the original recipe for the Virginia Dare Scuppernong so we, of course, incorporated that recipe into the equipment that we now had and sort of changed that recipe over the years to fit now what we have. Of course we have some modern presses and we don’t have to stomp the grapes any longer, but we incorporated all that into our winemaking techniques now.
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And y’all are known as—and call yourselves, too—the World’s Largest Muscadine Winery. And I wonder if, over the years, have you just gotten more demand for Muscadine wine or you’ve just been reaching a larger audience or how that works?
Well with the health benefits in 1996 coming out, we played that violin as long as we could, and we still play it today. Muscadine grapes are the healthiest grapes in the world, and by word of mouth that news and that information has spread. We’re trying to educate folks all the time. Of course, if you drove down from Raleigh, maybe you saw some of our billboards out on Interstate 40; so we’ve done extensive advertising on trying to get folks to come into our winery and take a tour. We’re very close to the coast here, so we get a lot of folks from—well, of course, North Carolina, driving down to the beach, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, a lot of visitors and tourists come down to Eastern North Carolina to visit our beautiful beaches. And we’ve got those billboards, and we’ve got brochures everywhere you can go, trying to get people to come in.
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I wonder if there’s some kind of novelty attached to tourists coming through to Eastern North Carolina and getting Muscadine wine and Muscadine jelly because it’s so localized and it’s so Southern and it’s so of this place, so is that part of the popularity, do you think?
Oh, yes. We think about those things, too. We look at things and say, “Okay, well, you know, these grapes can only grow in the southeastern United States. And so these grapes are not available, and these products that are made out of these grapes are not available in the northern states or the western states or anywhere else in the world right now.” I heard that China is trying to put in a lot of Muscadine grapes, though, actually right now. But that is a part of it, you know, something special that you can't find in your hometown or in your area and it only grows here. You know the people—the people talk about the Maryland crab cakes around here; everybody is talking about, you know, the crab cakes are the best and we want them to talk about Duplin wine just like they talk about the Maryland crab cakes or the Duke’s mayonnaise. I don’t know if y’all have—do y’all have Dukes? Okay. Well, if you’re a Southerner, you can drink RC Colas and you’re going to use Duke’s mayonnaise and you’re going to drink Duplin Wine, we hope, and watch NASCAR and look at all the pretty girls. We like that, too. [Laughs]
So how many wines do you actually produce here?
Whew, I think we make about twenty-eight different types. I’ve lost count. And they—some—some are slight different blends of two different grapes or three different grapes. We get in about twenty-one or twenty-two different Muscadine grapes, and it kind of really gets kind of hard to tell the difference between some of them, so I’m sure that we have some Scuppernongs mixed with the Carlos sometimes that we didn’t mean to have but that’s kind of like vegetable soup in that the more things you put in vegetable soup, sometimes the better it tastes and—and so that’s what—one of our tricks is to try to find a good balance of a bunch of different groups to go into some of our bottles and we think that, so far, those fifty-two folks that work with us, they’ve done an excellent job making a good wine and selling and building relationships with folks.
So sourcing so many grapes, is it difficult to remain consistent at all?
Yes, very different. And that’s one of the reasons why we do not vintage-date our wines any longer. We get grapes from a lot of different places and, of course, now it’s good for us, too, because over here, just like in Mississippi, we’re subject to hurricanes, and we’re trying to dodge hurricane winds. We’re also subject to late spring freezes and frosts, and we’re trying to dodge those also. We know we’re going to get hit in certain areas, but we wanted to place our grapes in different areas just so, if we’re hit in this place bad, then when we’ve got some grapes in another, that they’re going to try to make up for it. But so we got grapes in different places, so each and every place that you have a vineyard you’re going to have, you know—the climate is going to be different and the dirt and the soil is going to be different, and then the grower is going to be different because you’re going to have some growers—the best fertilizer for a vine is the shadow of the grower, and we’re going to find some growers they’re in their vineyards all the time, and some of them may be on the golf course and just trying to count their money or the eggs before they hatch. But we have different growers in different places, and then we also have, from year to year, different amounts of sunshine, rain, hot days, cool days, climates are changing all the time. We’re finding now that our climate, of course, is warm and one of the problems that we’re seeing is our grapevines are getting juiced up a little too early in the spring, and then we may have some kind of freeze come through in early April or so, after our grapevines think it’s summertime. So we’re trying to adapt and slowly learn, but it takes a while to get things changed. But right now, the climate is changing faster than we are, but one of the things that we do is we always keep a little bit of the previous year’s wine on-hand in bulk to blend in—so we’ll keep some of the 19—well we kept some of the 1999 Scuppernong, and after the 2000 Scuppernong was ready, we took a portion of the ’99 and slowly bended it in into the 2000 to slowly change our tastes. One thing we want is for our customer not to notice a change, but there is a change and there actually is a change from bottle to bottle, but we just hope it’s so small that our friends and our customers, that they can't tell the difference. So we do some blending from year to year, and we also try to educate our growers on the same and best growing techniques and try to do our best and we reward those guys who pay attention to the vines with the price. And we know the good growers, and we know the bad growers, and the good growers are going to remain under contract. And we’ve got a few growers that we’re going to have to tell, “Listen, you’ve got to do some improvement, or you’ll have to find another place to sell your grapes next year.”
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Well what do you say to the people outside of North Carolina who (a) aren't really aware that there is a wine making industry in North Carolina or (b) are not familiar with the really long history and tradition of Muscadine wine making in North Carolina?
Well, first, they’re ever in the neighborhood, I want them to come by and see us. If they come by and visit, we’re going to promise them that they’ll meet some friendly people, and we promise that our efforts into making something that tastes just like the grapevine. We’re 110-percent. You know, we try very hard. They may not like the wine, but we’re going to try hard to get them to like it.
But one of the things that I want to say is, you know, we have a proud, a bunch of proud folks here, and we’ve got a special grape that only—and we’re so lucky—that it only grows here in the southeastern United States, and we’re going to use what the Good Lord gave us to the best of our ability. And if you want to discover something special and something unique and you want to discover the best sweet wine in the world, you call us on the telephone and we’ll ship it to you by UPS, or you can come to Rose Hill and take a tour of our place, and we’d love to build a relationship with them.
We haven't talked about the Mother Vine yet. Let’s talk about that.
The Mother Vine. We have talked for a while, but this is a very good subject. The Mother Vine is the world’s oldest living grapevine, and it is reputed to be over 480 years old, and that girl is still producing grapes. It is located on Roanoke Island in a little town called Manteo, and Roanoke Island, of course everybody is, I hope, familiar with the Lost Colony, Sir Walter Raleigh’s group that came over, and now they’re missing. The Virginia Dare was born over there on Roanoke Island. They say that Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists actually ate grapes off of this vine, and in the 1800s a winery called the Mother Vineyard Winery opened up in Manteo and incorporated that vine and several other in—several other of these vines that were growing in this area into his winemaking. Of course, over time, the other vines died out or were pulled up, and this one remains.
So there’s a lot of great history there. And about four years ago, a North Carolina Senator, Fountain Odon approached my dad and said, you know, “We need to try to preserve this heritage and this vine. What can we do?” And they came up with the idea of trying to get some direct cuttings from this grapevine and trying to propagate the vines and setting out a vineyard. Well they went out and got 1,000 vines, and that would make about five acres of grapes. But after a whole summer of struggling, only sixty-two of those grapevines survived. So I guess Old Girl, she just really doesn’t want anything else to happen to her. But we got sixty vines, and they planted them out in our vineyard, which is four miles east of her, and we call it the Little Mother Vine Vineyard. And we, just this past year, were able to get our first crop off of those vines, and we’ve got just a few small amount of grapes; and we took those grapes, and we made a Mother Vine Wine out of the Scuppernong, the original Scuppernong grapevine direct cuttings. All of our Scuppernongs are actually descendants of this vine, but from the 1800s, you know, we’ve had several different generations of cuttings come from this vine, but this—these Mother Vine Wine came from a direct cutting from this vine, so we think that’s pretty, pretty neat also.
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Is it making some good wine?
Oh, I’ll let you sample some. I think it tastes very good.
So in the greater scheme of things of being a North Carolinian and a North Carolina winery and producing wine made from a native North Carolina grape and then now this Mother Vine and the history behind that, can you kind of wrap your head around what it means to be in the wine industry in a place like this and that history and tradition you have behind what you do?
Well, you know, I’m not smart enough to put words into it. I can tell you that I, personally, feel lucky. I personally feel like I am working at something that may be—if my son, when he grows up, if he—see, if he’s smart enough, maybe he’ll be a lawyer or a doctor but maybe, you know, someone else like one of my nephews or something could come into our business. We feel like, you know, we’re very proud of our family, but we try to be humble about it, and we know that there are a lot of wineries since us that have come up in North Carolina. We’re the oldest and when we started in the wine business, there was another winery called Deerfield, and the fellow died of cancer, and he was out of business by [nineteen] ’74. But since we’ve opened up in North Carolina, there have been seventy-two other wineries opened up. So we feel like we’re sort of laying the groundwork here for the Muscadine grape and Muscadine wineries and we think that if we do a good job and if people sample our wines, they’ll say, you know, “Muscadine wines are pretty good.” And, you know, we have to set the stage because we’re the ones out there in the stores. The other seventy-two, only a few are out in our stores, so we have to set a good example for all the others, too, and we feel like we’re doing that.
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So what would you say is thee future of Duplin Winery?
I hope that we stay in business. We are developing new markets as we grow. We, of course, have to always forecast four years ahead what are we going to sell because it takes four years for a vine to fully mature, so we’re setting grape vineyards out now. We set out this past year about sixty-two acres, so we’re planning on growing because I’ve got to buy those grapes from those guys. We would like to one day, I think, sell wines throughout the world, but we don’t want to sacrifice our quality, and so we’re growing slowly and folks listening to this, you know, if you’re listening to it ten years from now in 2018, we may be in Mississippi by then but I don’t know. But I promise you we’re working hard at trying to get there. I think that our future is bright, as long as we continue to have bright folks working here at the winery, and so we’ve got to retain those guys, the ones that come in here, those ladies that come in here and bust their butts for us, we’ve got to make sure that they get paid well and want to stay here. So we’ve got to treat them fair, and that’s our goal, to be fair to our folks and to make the best—I think I’ve said that before—make the best tasting sweet wine in the world. That’s it.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.