Garden Gate Vineyards
261 Scenic Drive
Mocksville, NC 27028
(336) 751-3794
www.gardengatevineyards.com
I think the Muscadine grape has showed what it can do, as far as the durability of the vines, the grapes, how long it’s been here, and I think it would be wonderful if it could get the recognition that it deserves. – Bo Whitaker
In the hot North Carolina summers of Bo Whitaker’s youth, when the blueberries were ripe and ready for picking, his grandfather would make blueberry wine. For North Carolinians of Bo’s generation, this story is not unusual—except for the fact that his grandfather didn’t just make wine. Charlie Howard, known to most as Uncle Charlie, was one of the best and most respected bootleggers in Davie County. Bo fell in love with his grandfather’s blueberry wine as a teenager, but he didn’t fall into the craft of winemaking until much later. First, he married his high school sweetheart, Sonya, started a family, and put in thirty-four years as a line superintendent for the local power company, EnergyUnited. When Bo retired in 1999, he took some time to figure out what he would do next. Bo and Sonya started Garden Gate Vineyards in 2000. They planted blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, and, of course, blueberries. But they also planted grapes. Bo planted his first vines right next to their house, filling an acre with hard-to-find Muscadine and Scuppernong varieties: Hunt, James, Triumph, and Magnolia. Today, thirteen different wines are made from the fruit that’s grown at Garden Gate Vineyards. Uncle Charlie would be proud.
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: Bo & Sonya Whitaker, owners
Date: August 13, 2008
Location: Garden Gate Vineyards – Mocksville, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Wednesday, August 13, 2008. I’m in Mocksville, North Carolina, at Garden Gate Winery, and I’m sitting with Bob “Bo” Whitaker. [Laughs] And sir, if you wouldn’t mind stating your name and also your occupation, please?
Bo Whitaker: Okay. My name is Robert E. Whitaker. Everybody calls me Bo. I was born October 18, 1949, and we got into this as a hobby. I was retired from the power company.
Were you born here in Mocksville?
I was born here. I’ve been here all my life, except I won a trip to Vietnam in the [nineteen] ‘60s and other that, I’ve been here all my life.
If we could start with a little bit about your family, you were talking about your great-grandfather or grandfather and some history in bootlegging.
Bootlegging, I guess a lot of people says it’s bad, but back years ago, it was a living. My grandpa [Charlie Howard] and Robert Glen Johnson, which is Junior Johnson’s daddy, they was like brothers. Well they had their little business, and they did that, as far as I know, it was in my family for over 250 years. But when they bootlegged, you said you could not make money and not work, so what they did was they built houses, bought land, sawmills, and they made them—everybody thought that they was legal. And they made a lot of money, and they helped a lot of people and it was just a way of life.
Now tell me about that photograph you have in your tasting room of your grandfather.
The photograph in the winery is my grandpa, and everybody called him Uncle Charlie. And he was ninety-six years old when he died and he just—he loved to farm, but that was his money right there. But he come from four generations of bootleggers that was passed down, and I guess that’s about all. I mean I thought the world of him. A lot of people still comes by here, and they’ll tell me that they knew him, and they’ll bring me an old jar and said they bought their first liquor off my grandpa. So that’s kind of a conversation piece.
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And talk to me about the Prohibition story you were telling me inside.
Back during Prohibition, certain people could get licenses to make liquor for the government. My grandpa was lucky enough to get one. Well he decided that he’d make it for the government, but he didn’t want to lose his other business, so he started making wine. And the good people, the people that bought a whole lot of liquor, he always said they needed a little Christmas present, so he made blueberry wine—blueberry and Muscadine wine—and he’d always make sure that they got them like a—he’d give them a big crock-pot. It was equal to a five-gallon bottle. And they just thought that was amazing.
But that’s the reason I wanted to make blueberry wine is the color. If you ever see blueberry wine, it’s the most beautiful color that there ever was. And people will come here to get the blueberry wine, and they want to make it. Well, they say it won't ferment, and I always tell them, well, blueberry wine, I could always tell my grandpa was going to make it. He’d tell my grandma, he’d say, “Go to the store and buy boxes of raisins,” and I knew what was up then. You put raisins in blueberry wine, and it’s like a starter and the raisins will help—started to ferment and then after about two days, when it’s fermenting good, then you can dip the raisins out. Well that’s the reason I like to make blueberry wine; it just reminds me of being a teenager at home when it was being made there. [Laughs]
So what else did you learn from your grandfather about making wine and how did he, maybe, factor into you wanting to be in this business after retiring from the electric company?
It was funny, in a way. They had a black man that lived up the road, and any time that they was going to make liquor or wine they’d always go get him. His name was Mr. Nate Moulty, and I never could figure why they had to have him there. Well, he would sit on a wooden stump and when the liquor would start running out, he’d taste it with a dipper, and if it was good, he’d kind of smack his lips and grin, and my grandpa would smile. But my grandpa always said that to make wine and make good liquor, you’ve got to have a taste for it. If you don’t have a taste, nobody will buy it, and he always said that Mr. Nate had the best taste of anybody in his life that he had ever saw for liquor. He said if it weren't good, he’d tell you. And the wine, back when I was a kid, my grandpa would make blackberry wine, and if we had an upset stomach, my grandma would make us drink a glass. And somebody—and I still have people tell me. I said, “Well do you think it worked?” And they said, “Well we got over it.” I said, “Well either we got over it, or the wine cured it. I don’t know which it was.” But back then, wine was used like medicine. It was different things. But I guess all the years that I’ve been around it, I met people—still have people to come here from probably twenty, twenty-five counties and they always—they see that picture and they’ll say, “Do you know Uncle Charlie?” And I’ll say, “That was my grandpa.” And said it’s a—well, what he done, a lot of people didn’t think it was right, but it was a living, so that’s—I just enjoyed being around it.
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Was your grandpa still living when you started the winery?
No, he died in 19—I graduated in 1968, from high school, and he died in 1966 and my mom and my dad was scared to death. He always said that—in fact, my uncles told me, said, “When you got out of high school, everything he had he was going to offer to you.” He wanted it carried on. And a lot of people would say, “Boy, your grandpa would be right at home over here.” And I said, well—or your uncles—and I said, “Oh, yeah.” They loved to be around stuff like this. But I really truly and think if, like I say, if I had wanted it, I could have probably got everything. In fact, my uncles told me, said, “If he hadn't died when he did, we’d not got nothing; you’d got it all.” So he said, “He had eleven youngins,” and said that, “he really had twelve because he always said that he thought more of you than he did all of us.” And so I thought that as awful good, but in return I wondered how many of my uncles and aunts didn’t like that remark. No, I admired him. Like I say, I always thought he was fair. He was, like I say, he was a big man and a lot of people describe him as a mean man, but any time he had a problem with somebody he would go straight to them. He wouldn’t send nobody to carry his mail; he’d do it his self. But in return, I’d heard them say he was a mean man but he was a fair man so—. That pretty well sums my grandpa up.
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Before you retired from the power company, did you always have a mind that you wanted to do something like this, or did this come after you retired?
No, I always wanted to do something like this, but with the job I had I know(ed) that if I ever got into something like this—I was over a bunch of men and over several counties, and it wouldn’t have bothered the people that I worked with but I know somebody would say something, “We can't have somebody working for us that’s doing that right there.” And so when I retired, they asked me, they said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, you know, I said, “I’m probably going to get my license and,” I said, “either build me a pantry and sell beer and wine—or,” I said, “I might go to making wine.”…But I was lucky enough to get to come home at fifty years old, so I had plenty of time. And we’ve established the place. We have a lot of people that come here due to the—who my grandpa was and there will be people that come in, and they’ll have stories and stuff that happened years ago. Some of their kin people got caught hauling liquor for my grandpa, but I never know when somebody walks through the door; a lot of people know me that I don’t remember. But it’s good. It’s good, real good.
You mentioned earlier when we were walking through the vineyard that you read all the books that you could get your hands on, but how did you start?
Well I always said, really, when I retired, I didn’t know really what I wanted to do, and I said I might grow rosebushes. My grandma was crazy over rosebushes, and I thought they was beautiful. Well my wife and her girlfriend or best friend, however you want to say it, they was going to the winery, and they wanted me to go one day. So we went to a winery and I—the grapes was hanging down, and I just stopped them and I said, “I’m going to tell you, right yonder is one of the prettiest sights I have ever in my life saw.” If you ever get a chance to see a vineyard when the grapes are in—are ripe, hanging there, to me, they’re beautiful—more beautiful than roses. And I said right then, I said, “This is what I want to do.”
So the first year that we made wine we were—our vines weren't established and people that I had worked with, helped get power to the farm, and they called me and they said, “Is it true that you’re making wine?” And I said, “Yeah.” They said, you know, “We’ve got several vines.” So the first year, we got all our grapes off of the different people that I had helped get power to their new homes or kids’ homes. There was more than—I guess there was close to 6,000 pounds of grapes. And they wouldn’t take a penny, so what I did, everybody that give me grapes when I made wine, I’d give them a case of wine out of their grapes. Well then I run across a young lady, and she’s still living, and she’s Miss Lizzie Reeves. She’s ninety-two years old, just had a birthday. But her vineyard is forty years old, and she asked me, would I be interested in leasing it. So we leased it, and I told her, I said, “Well let’s just do it for a year.” And she said, “Well, I’d really like for you to have it,” said, “I’ve checked you out. I know who you are.” And I said, “Well, I might not do it to suit you.” Well she told me several times, if I hadn't took the vineyard when I did—her husband died—her vineyard would be history…But that’s—that’s really about how we got started.
And my wife and them, they had such fun making it and they was asking, “So how did y’all mash the grapes?” And I said, “My grandpa would put them in a pan and put a—like a heavy cloth over it and he had a maul and he’d mash them like that.” And they laughed, and they said, “He never did stomp them?” And I said, “No.” And I—they said, “Well how did he strain it?” And I said, “Well,” I said, “he’d have my grandma go to the store.” And they used to have the hoses—brown stockings and they’d stuff them stockings full of the mash and they just—everybody would walk it down. And they said, “Well, how are we going to do ours?” And I said, “I don’t know, other than use cheesecloth.” “But,” I said, “what I would do,” I said, “but you can do anything you want to. If I was doing it, I’d go buy a good heavy pair of panty hose.” And that’s how they made it. And they told everybody the reason it was so good, they squeezed it through panty hose. But that’s—and they just had a ball doing it and it was really pretty wine, and they wanted to bottle it too soon. And I told them, I said, “No,” I said, “you really need to let it sit for about a year and a half.”
But that’s more or less how they got into it, and I liked the vines, and so we started making wine and started giving it for birthday gifts and Christmas gifts. And then I told her [Sonya], I said, “You know, if you want to do it, that’s fine, but I was thinking about getting a pantry store and just getting my beer license and selling beer.” Just to meet people, you know. When you work and see people from everywhere and then you come home, it’s pretty hard not to see people.
So what year was it that you planted your first vine?
We planted our first grapes in—I guess it was 1999 or 2000 was the first year, and then the last—well, we’ve changed some vines out but the last vineyard, I guess in 2005 was when this one was did.
How many acres do you have right here by the house?
We have—all totaled, we have three acres of Muscadine and Scuppernong and Niagras. We have a quarter acre of blackberries; we have a quarter acre of strawberries and then a quarter acre of raspberries. And our blueberries, I tried to raise them, but you got to have about six different kinds to where they’ll cross-pollinate. So a guy come here one day from Wake Forest; he’s a big Wake Forest fan, and he had a blueberry farm, and he said they didn’t spray [their berries]. And said his dad had left it to him and said he at first was going to sell it but said he found out it’s a pretty productive little business. So he brings us our blueberries; they’ve never been sprayed. They’re handpicked. They’re washed. And so we just—we signed a paper with him, and we’ve been getting them off him for eight years and he’s never went up [in price]. So he’s—I made another good friend, plus a good customer.
What made you want to produce all those different kinds of fruit wines?
Well, when we started, we was over at Tanglewood one day and one of the—they had—that’s the homecoming; they have all the wineries come to Tanglewood Park. It’s halfway—well it’s over here at Clemens, halfway between here and Winston, and it’s owned by the Reynolds. But anyway, they was all kidding me. They said, “Redneck.” And a couple of them was race car drivers, and I said, “Well I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I wouldn’t call nobody a redneck. Rednecks is what made NASCAR.” And they said, “I was just picking,” which I knew they was. But I told them, I said, “Everybody wants to follow California, Virginia—different states. Every state that makes wine needs to make their own wine. I said, “North Carolina is a fruit state, and that’s the reason we want to do fruit wine.” And the reason we went with the Muscadine and Scuppernong, North Carolina, it’s the state grape. They’re very hardy; you don’t have to spray; they can live hundreds of years. And so that’s—that’s the main reason we went with the kind of wine that we did go with.
And what about your customer? Did you want to attract a certain kind of customer with the fruit wines?
That’s a very good question because Richard Childress [proprietor, Childress Vineyards] asked me one day, he said, “What made you go with the fruit wines?” And I said, “Richard, you ought to know better anybody with NASCAR.” I said, “Once you cross the Mason-Dixon Line, it’s pretty hard to take sweet iced tea out of a man’s hand.” And I said, “People from the South has a sweet tooth. And I said, “I’m not saying they won't drink the California wine but,” I said, “people will come in here.” And I don’t know, really, if they drink that much wine. They say they want some sweet Muscadine or sweet Scuppernong like their grandparents made, and we have dry and sweet but really, the sweeter wine has sold better than the drier wine. But that’s—and he looked at me and he told me, he said, “You do have a point.” And the last I heard, he was starting to make a sweeter wine. So yeah, I really think the South, they will—you have a lot of people that likes the real dry wine. But a lot—most of the South, and this is out of respect, are hard-working people. I mean they earn their money and they want something where they can go out and have a good meal and have a good bottle of wine, and they don’t care about what the name is. In fact, I don’t know how many people are drinking the Muscadine wine now because they’re scared to death of—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing the word right, Lipitor®, the pill [a drug used to treat high cholesterol]. They’re saying if you take that, you’ve got to be real careful. You’ve got to watch your liver and your kidneys, and the doctors have recommended that. I don’t know if it works, but a lot of people says it does. But a lot of people are drinking wine for health reasons. So I think, really, it will be good for the state of North Carolina—good for any state because there’s so many jobs lost—regardless of if you make dry wine, sweet wine, and so far, all the wineries I don’t—if somebody comes here and they want a real dry wine, we tell them Childress [Vineyards] is across the river, RayLen’s [Vineyards & Winery] is about ten minutes from here, so if people goes there and they want a sweeter wine, they tell them about us. And, really, as long as everybody pulls together, I think it will be good for everybody.
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Can you talk a little bit about the bottling room back there and everything is really, you know, small scale, tabletop, low-key production line in there.
Sonya Whitaker: It is. We do everything by hand. It’s manual. We have a little bottling unit, and it only takes three of us to bottle. We generally bottle about forty gallons at a time, which takes probably about an hour, hour and a half to do. It’s just very simple. You know, we don’t have any high-tech equipment or anything like that, but it’s manageable for us. That’s the big key to us is that it has to be manageable. But that’s how we bottle and we put our labels and cork and cap all at the same time, so it works out good.
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Now how many of the people who come through here are actually familiar with Muscadine wine?
Sonya Whitaker: I would say probably half are. Just like our customers right then were from Canada, and they had never heard of Muscadine but, you know, they liked it. They thought it was a very unique taste, and it’s fun telling them about the grape and all…The Muscadine grape has—it’s very beneficial for lowering cholesterol and for high blood pressure. They’re doing a lot of research on it. They’re coming out with the seed pills and, hopefully, it will be a breakthrough in medicine, I’m hoping.
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Now what do you hear some of your customers say about your wines—the Muscadine and the fruit wines?
SW: Most of our customers like the taste of the Scuppernong and the Muscadine. They’re two—they’re the same—they’re both Muscadine, but they have very different flavors. I think the Scuppernong is a little fruitier. We have both the semi-sweet and the sweet. It’s amazing that some people—customers come and they’re just learning to drink wines. And they want the very sweetest they can get, so, of course, they go more for the sweet Muscadine and sweet Scuppernong. But, you know, gradually as they keep drinking, they’ll go to the semi-sweet and eventually, probably, even a drier wine and all. But it’s fun watching them come back, and they’ll try the little bit of drier wine, you know, and they’re either at that point or go back to the sweet wines.
BW: Everything that we have, and I think what our best thing is about all our wines, you can taste the fruit that’s in it. And, like I told you when we was down there [walking the property], we don’t put water back in our wine when we filter it; we put wine to wine. And the more fruit you use—in fact, I guess we might put too much fruit in our wine, but we try to keep it to where you’re drinking what you’re asking for. You’re not just—and a lot of them, you know, there’s recipes of all kinds, but I told her, we have plenty of grapes, we have plenty of strawberries, plenty of blueberries; let’s put them in, so we get the good color and the good taste.
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What about the future of Muscadine wine?
SW: Well my own opinion is, I hope the Muscadine wine blows North Carolina off the map for all the benefits it—medically, that it will do and plus, for the uniqueness of the grape.
BW: I think so, too. I fact, you know, I think the Muscadine grape has showed what it can do, as far as the durability of the vines, the grapes, how long it’s been here, and I think it would be wonderful if it could get the recognition that it deserves…And not only in North Carolina, like I say, I know Alabama, Georgia—it’s, I guess you’d say, a legacy. It’s been here, and I think you said in Mississippi, it’s a Southern grape that they said that when Sir Walter Raleigh come to North Carolina and discovered it, it was here. But if you read in the books—and I believe they said the Spanish. They think the Spanish is the one that brought the original Muscadine and Scuppernong and said they brought the tobacco over. So I mean, you know, it’s hard telling how long it has been here but never got the recognition it should have got.
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Well what do you say to the people who (a) don’t really know that there’s a wine industry in North Carolina and (b) if and when they hear about Muscadine wine, they just think it’s just some, you know, trash sweet wine or something and look down their nose at it?
BW: Well, I think about the wineries, but more and more people is finding out, and I tell people, you know, when they come here, I always thank them for coming because I know they didn’t have to stop. And they say, “Oh, no, it’s an honor to come.” But the thing that I think the winemaking is going to do for every state, especially North Carolina, when you come to a winery, you’re going to pass like a state park. They’re—it’s going to open people’s eyes to what all is offered in the state of North Carolina…I think the Muscadine grape will finally get the recognition that it deserves, but in return I think the wineries is going to open North Carolina—it’s going to open the eyes to so many people to see what we have here to offer because now there’s wineries from the coast all the way to the mountains. And now there’s so many—well, really, in a given day, you could probably—well you could probably get twelve or fifteen, easily.
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Bo, I want to ask you about kind of carrying on this family legacy and—it’s not only like a family legacy, but a North Carolina legacy with Muscadine being native to the state and winemaking being such a long-standing tradition here and how you feel like you fit into all that?
BW: Well, I can say if my kids didn’t want it, I don’t think I’d want to sell to somebody, unless they wanted to continue doing it the way we’re doing….I really and truly think, all right, if you’ll notice, when it first started, there wasn’t but a hand few of us that made Muscadine wine. Now more people are going into Muscadine wine for the basic reason, you don’t have to spray, less maintenance, they’re very hardy grapes. And I think a lot of people jumped into the vinifera [vitis vinifera, grape vines native to Europe and the Mediterranean] because, you know, it’s California wine, and they’re bringing their wine makers down. But in return from everything I’ve read and asked, the vinifera grape cannot stand humidity and cold. Well this area right here is blessed with it, so I really and truly think—well Childress Vineyards is starting a—now they have all kinds of grapes, but they’re starting to go to Muscadine and Scuppernong. And I told Sonya, it’s like before, a few of us had a land-lock on it; now others are seeing, I guess you’d go back and say—and this is in joking and fun—rednecks are buying more wine than high society. So more vineyards you see that are opening up are Muscadine and Scuppernong, up in Yadkin County especially. Up in—well down east and I really think in the next five years it will surprise you how many there will be. And if you lined twenty wineries up, and every one of them made Muscadine and Scuppernong wine, every one of them will have a different taste. And I’ve heard old people sum that up better than anything: the taste comes from the dirt. If it’s good dirt, like they’ll say—we had a guy come up from Florida and wanted to buy our fruit, and he said North Carolina was killing Florida. He said the soil is no good down there; the soil gives the fruit a better taste. Well, it comes right back, North Carolina is a fruit State. But no, I think Muscadine is here to stay, not only in wine but in the pill, in the juice, I just think the doors is wide open.
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What do you think your grandfather would say about you being in the wine business now?
Well, we had some people to come over yesterday that knew him real well, and they said, “Boy, your grandpa would be proud of you, wouldn’t he?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” I said, “I hope he would.”…Really and truly, I think I would like to see one of my kids to do it, but the basic fact, it’s been in the family all these years, and now it’s legal and I’d just like to see my kids carry it out. Whether they will or not, I don’t know.
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