RagApple Lassie Vineyards
3724 RagApple Lassie Lane
Boonville, NC 27011
(336) 367-6000
www.ragapplelassie.com
We’re in the exact same location the Hobsons have been for 100 years, and we certainly never had 600 people a week come here to watch our soybeans grow, to stand beside a stalk of tobacco or to ooh and ahh about our corn, but they do that about our wine…So it’s absolutely incredible what [the wine industry] has done for this area. I just never want us to get away from our farming heritage. – Lenna Hobson
Frank Hobson is a third-generation farmer. His family has raised various row crops, including tobacco, on the same land in Booneville, North Carolina, for a century. In 1995 he married, adding a new member to the family, his second wife, Lenna. And in an effort to insure that his family’s land remained agricultural, he added a new crop: grapes. In 1999, after doing lots of research and generating contacts through his farm supply business, Frank located some vines and planted ten acres in Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. In 2000 Frank and Lenna established the winery, naming it after Frank’s champion show calf, RagApple Lassie. Today, thirty-five acres of vinifera grapes grow on Hobson land. But the bulk of the property is still dedicated to corn, wheat, soybeans and tobacco. The Hobsons are so tied to the their farming roots, in fact, that a tobacco leaf graces the back label of every one of their wine bottles.
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: Lenna Hobson, owner
Date: August 14, 2008
Location: RagApple Lassie Vineyards - Boonville, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Thursday, August 14, 2008. I’m in Boonville, North Carolina, at RagApple Lassie Vineyards with Mrs. Hobson. She and her husband have Rag Apple Lassie, and Mrs. Hobson, if you would please state your full name and your occupation, please?
Lenna Hobson: My name is Lenna Hobson. My husband is Frank Hobson, Jr., and together we are the owners, managers, gophers, and jack-of-all-trades at RagApple Lassie Vineyards, here in Boonville.
And may I ask you state your birth date for the record, please?
My birthday is May 21, 1944; and Frank’s birthday is November 6, 1943.
You were sharing a little bit of your history as a married couple before we started recording, but just a quick story of how y’all met and came together before you started the winery here.
Frank and I have been married since October of 1995. We actually grew up knowing each other…We dated lightly in high school. Remember, we lived 100 miles apart. We both were involved in 4-H Club very heavily; you’ll hear more about that later. And we would see each other at 4-H Club week, and I had actually spent a weekend in Boonville when I was like fifteen, and Frank had been to the mountains and spent a weekend at my home. You know, all this was arranged by our mothers. And then my parents, obviously, had retired and my mother died first, and then my father, while I was still in college, so we lost contact with the Hobsons, so to speak. And then thirty-five years later, Frank and I had not seen each other in thirty-five years. Both of our spouses were deceased, and we both liked the adults the other one had become, and here we are together.
Let’s talk about 4-H a little bit, and I know that Rag Apple Lassie is the famous cow that your husband raised in 4-H, but what did you do in 4-H?
We both were very involved in 4-H, and 4-H was very, very important to all rural youth, primarily over the United States, but certainly in North Carolina, where our experience was and is now coming back. That’s an advertisement. I will say it. It’s now coming back in the urban areas, which I find very interesting. But as youth growing up, 4-H was a part of school, and I became involved, you know, during the school year. And I was involved in dairy; I was involved in public speaking. When I say dairy, I’m talking from the cooking side—food demonstrations and those types of things. I have lots of medals for that—for public speaking, for sewing and collecting. Frank was very involved in beekeeping and in dairy cows. They had a small dairy on the farm, and Rag Apple Lassie, who was his 4-H show calf, or she was a registered Holstein that was born on the Hobson Farm in Boonville. And when she was a day old, Frank’s father looked at Frank—and his nickname for Frank was Buck—and he said, “Buck, this one is yours. You can raise and do with her—this is your show calf.” And so she was Frank’s huge, huge pet, and all the people here in Boonville still tell me they had dogs and cats for pets; Frank had a cow that followed him everywhere he went, followed him when he rode his bicycle. And when Frank was eleven years old and Rag Apple was like twenty months old, she was the Grand Champion Show Calf in North Carolina at the North Carolina State Fair. And this was in 1957.
Do you know how he came up with the name RagApple Lassie?
RagApple Lassie’s name is like thoroughbred horses and everything; they take part from the sire and part from the dam. RagApple Mutual Devotion was a world-famous bull and still has her bloodline, still continues to this day, and so the RagApple Lassie name came from RagApple from the father and Lassie from the mother, and so we can take no credit for naming RagApple Lassie that name. It just turned out to be a very serendipitous name, but it was given by the registration authorities. I will tell you that we have had people—we’re situated very near Interstate 77, so we have had people come off of 77, you know, our little highway road signs that say RagApple Lassie Tours or whatever, we’ve had people from Wisconsin, from New York, and what is the other dairy state in the Midwest? Anyway, that recognize the name RagApple as being a major Holstein bull, and they say that has got to be connected to—and they come off the Interstate into our winery, and they walk in and they see all our cow boxes, and they go, “Oh, yes. It was a dairy bull.” They recognize it because they had the bloodlines on their very same farm. RagApple has been in the National Holstein lore since like 1927 or something.
Frank is the third generation to be on this land. Can you give a little background of his family?
The property that RagApple Lassie is now situated on has been in the Hobson family for 100 years. Frank’s grandfather, Bonson Hobson, came and bought, initially, 1,400 acres that extended from—we’re at the northern boundary, if you will, all the way to the Yadkin River. And he had thirteen children, and so it was divided among, you know, each child got their portion of land, and the whole land is still largely in the Hobson family. Frank’s cousins own other parts of it; there’s really less than fifty acres that is owned outside of the Hobson family now, but it’s owned by different branches of the family. So Frank’s portion—and he has bought some from other cousins, and his father had bought some but it passed from Frank’s grandfather to his father and then to Frank, and that’s why we built the winery. Frank’s worst nightmare was that his beloved land—which has always been a farm, had always been agricultural, and still is until this day. Now there are various Hobson homes scattered across the tract of land, but it is largely agricultural, primarily tobacco; that had been the cash crop on the farm from its beginning until the last two or three years—the demise of tobacco in the last two or three years has reduced down. We grow corn, wheat, soybeans, a small amount of tobacco, and then our Plan B to help insure that this farm remained agricultural and didn’t become a housing development was the planting of vineyards, and then we ended up building the winery.
Can you talk about you and Frank sitting at the kitchen table at home and brewing up this plan to start a winery?
As I said, planting vineyards was our Plan B because Frank and I were married in ’95, and that’s when all the rumbling about the demise of tobacco and the beginning of all the states filing the lawsuits against tobacco companies, so Frank realized immediately—and I have to back up and say, Frank has been a farmer all of his life, lived in Yadkin County, which is a rural farming county in North Carolina, all his life. But, to me, he’s one of the very unique individuals from that county because in many ways he embraces change. He is not a character that sits around and says, “Oh no, look what they are doing to me.” And so he had been aware that tobacco—the demise of tobacco—was looming, which had been a huge cash crop for not only North Carolina, but surrounding states, and he was constantly investigating or following any new developments in farming that might lead to something that would provide the economic value of tobacco so that this farm could remain agricultural and wouldn’t be tempted to become a housing development at some time in the future.
So with that bit of information, once the viticulture industry actually it began at Virginia Tech, a professor at Virginia Tech stated to someone in this area, he said, “I’m sure that you all can grow French vinifera [vitis vinifera, grape vines native to Europe and the Mediterranean] grapes down there because they’re doing well in Virginia. The industry is developing here, and you’re on pretty much the same latitude we are. You pretty much have the same climates that we have. You really need to look into that.” Prior to that time, all the energies in North Carolina and from NC State, which is our land grant university, had been directed toward Muscadine, which is in every state; and we had a large Muscadine industry in Eastern North Carolina. So with that little push, you know, it just somehow took root and went from one winery—French vinifera winery that had been here in North Carolina, Westbend [Vineyards], which was the very first one, to today there are twenty-two inside the Yadkin Valley appellation, which is also something unique to this area, and seventy-two statewide. So it has developed quickly because all this has happened since 1999…So we were having dinner and I looked at him, and I said, “We’re going to plant a vineyard aren't we?” And he said, “Yeah, we are.” And I said, “Well how much are you going to plant?” And he said, “Well I don’t know.” He said, “The nursery person hasn’t called me back to tell me how many plants I can get and when.” And, typically, you have to order the plants a year in advance and pay because they’re grafted to order. And they were going to work with him on some of the clones, and he had gone back to Virginia Tech, and they were going to tell him, you know, some of the varieties that they had recommended that he start with that were typically easier to grow, took less coddling, were a little bit easier to just grow, as opposed to some that were more temperamental and Chardonnay being one of those.
So he got everything in place. This decision was made in 1999 that he was going to prepare. We had this one field that was exactly ten acres that was sort of isolated across the road from the rest of the farm, and he decided to plant that field to devote it half to Chardonnay, half to Cabernet Sauvignon, and he began preparing the land…and then we planted our first vineyards in April of 2000. We planted five acres of each—took out the wheat crop, you know, and laid out the rows and planted the vines.
At the in the fall of 2000… Frank comes through, and we’re having dinner and, he said, “You know,” he said, “I’m really proud of my vineyards.” He said, “They’re beautiful.” He said, “They’re going to grow beautifully here.” He said, “We’re going to be able to grow grapes here.”…And I said, “Well, have you ever given any thought—.” I said, “If we’re going to get into this in a big way, and if this is what you think is going to keep the farm agriculture,” I said, “how about if we just go for broke and build a winery, and we’re in charge of our own destiny, and we’re not at the mercy of anybody?” And he looked at me, and he took one sip of wine. We were always wine consumers, just not wine makers. And he looked over the top of his wine glass, and he said, “If you’re waiting on me, you’re backing up. Get your shit together.” That was the decision; it was made in thirty seconds of time. And I said, “Great, end of conversation.”
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Talking about the long history of winemaking in North Carolina and the home wine making tradition and the fact that North Carolina was the biggest, from what I understand, producer of grapes and wine before Prohibition, that now to be in 2008 and be making wine and kind of carrying on that long tradition but with vinifera grapes, where do y’all see yourself fitting into that long history?
Well, you’re absolutely correct. At the turn of the century, North Carolina was the single largest wine-producing state in the United States. Now remember, California didn’t exist then, as far as wine making was concerned, nor Oregon, nor Washington. It was primarily centered on the East Coast, which was North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, the Eastern—where Scuppernong and Muscadine grapes were so prevalent. And the largest wine producing state fell under the heading of the wine that came from more like what’s made in the Finger Lakes of New York now, the Concords and the Niagras and the Nobles, the American hybrids. So it was never the largest wine producing French vinifera state.
But that was a large part of the economy at the turn of the century, but then World War I came into play and then Prohibition and then tobacco became king, so there was no need to go back and pick up the small pieces of that, because tobacco became such a king and such a cash crop and was providing, you know, cotton in the southern United States and tobacco here in the Middle Atlantic States. The economy was doing beautifully, and world-class universities all over this entire area was being built with money that came from the tobacco industry and the cotton industry, so there was no need to look further. So then you fast forward to the ‘90s and the demise of tobacco, you know, when all the hoopla that is going on about it, regardless of the amount that it contributed to the economy, then people began to need to look further in order to keep their lands agriculture and to not be gobbled up with the urbanization of America and the housing developments. And so it was very fortuitous that, you know, people realized that this area—that we had the microclimates, the latitude, the elevations and everything that would lend itself perfectly to French vinifera grapes. So that’s why all of that being in place, I think, is what has given rise to the very quick evolution of grapes this time. I mean a lot has happened in North Carolina, and it’s been absolutely incredible in less than ten years. You know, what it took twenty-five years to develop, we have done in ten. So, you know, I don’t know if it’ll be good or bad, but we’ll be where California is now, in half the time, also. Learning curves are always shorter…The learning curve for this whole area has been—and my Chamber of Commerce speech is that, you know, our farm—we’re in the exact same location the Hobsons have been for 100 years, and we certainly never had 600 people a week come here to watch our soybeans grow, to stand beside a stalk of tobacco or to ooh and ahh about our corn, but they do that about our wine. So that tells the appeal that it has. You know, there are more and more wine drinkers, but in addition to that you have the mystique and the romanticism that just a winery, a vineyard, wine country—all of those things provide. I mean it has an appeal to people that’s bringing them here. So it’s absolutely incredible what it’s done for this area. I just never want us to get away from our farming heritage.
How much of what you do here today at RagApple Lassie do you think, from a marketing standpoint and who you are as a winery, how much of that story—saving the family farm, it being a centennial farm, and it being a tobacco farm—is integrated into the story of the winery today?
It is integrated into the story of RagApple Lassie 100 percent because we’re proud of our heritage, and that’s part of us…RagApple Lassie, as I told you, was the show calf and…I got up the next morning [after we had decided to commit to establishing winery] and I said, “Love, guess what we’re going to name the vineyard?” He said, “What?” I said, “RagApple Lassie.” I mean big old tears came in his eyes, and he said, “Really?” I said, “It’s perfect. It’s perfect because she has the same heritage to this area that you do. She’s not a fantasy in any particular—she was born on the farm just like you were.” And he said, “Fine with me.” He loved it. We make a wonderful team because he never questions things like that, or he 100-percent supports me, and I do him.
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May I ask you the percentage of acreage that is the vineyard and the percentage that’s farmed in row crops—tobacco and wheat and the like?
We farm 500 acres. We have thirty-five acres in vineyards, and our thirty-five acres in vineyards will support, ultimately, 10,000 cases of wine. And that’s when the vineyards are producing at full percent. We’re still dropping a little fruit so that we don’t over-crop our vines and that we get good root development because, as I said, the life of this vineyard is 100 years. We’re currently producing about 6,500 cases of wine. So we have the vineyards in the ground to support that so the rest of the land—and most of it is farmable. There’s some timbered land, but not a huge amount on this farm. And you rotate. So at any given year, you know, we will have a couple hundred acres and corn or wheat or soybeans, you know, and then you plant the winter cover crop. And when you harvest the wheat off, you come behind it and plant soybeans, so you double crop the land that year, and then you rotate it the next, and so it rotates among tobacco and corn and wheat and soybeans. That keeps down disease, and that also takes care of your land because what one crop takes out, another one puts back in, so best practice farming is crop rotation.
And so then the vineyard and the winery is just one small prong on the wheel that is Hobson Farms?
Yes, the vineyard and the winery, RagApple Lassie, hopefully, someday, will provide the economic support that will allow our heirs, our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to keep this farm agricultural. Right now corn, wheat, soybeans, and tobacco is what still, you know, provides the support and allows us to do this. I mean, building the winery, the whole process, the planting the vineyard and building a winery, you know, is not inexpensive at all. It takes a huge investment, and we put a lot at risk to do that, and it’s like an eight- or nine-year curve before you lose the red and can get into the black ink.
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Well here in the community of Boonville and in the county here, when you first had ideas on planting vines and starting a winery, did you meet any resistance at all in the community?
Yes, but a very small amount. This is a rural community. We’re right in the heart of the Bible Belt, and Frank actually had three or four people, including an uncle, show up at the store and tell him his soul was being endangered, if he proceeded to plant a vineyard and make wine. And that was interesting. You know, you’re going to get a little bit of that. But I can also tell you, after we opened the winery—and we probably have neighbors that we can see their homes from here, who have never been in the doors here, but it’s amazing how many people come up to us when we’re in the community and tell us that they’re proud of the tourism capabilities and what’s happening in Yadkin County, and that it is helping provide other streams of revenue for Yadkin County. Because, you know, not only is farming—we all raise our children and educate them to not come home and prime tobacco and do the hard, hard farm labor, so that’s what’s—actually, that very fact has given rise to a lot of farms to be for sale that other people have built vineyards on because there was no one to run the farms. And if you don’t have a producing stream of income, it’s very hard for people to own large tracts of land, pay the taxes, keep them from growing up and look after them properly. So people are understanding that, and it’s absolutely amazing because these are very conservative people. They’re wonderful people. They’re not particularly well off, formally educated. They’re very intelligent. They just don’t have lots of formal education, but it certainly did not take them long to internalize that wineries and vineyards hadn't not nearly as much to do with drinking alcohol as it did with the opportunity for economic development in their county and giving rise to all the auxiliary things that would spring up and the people that it would bring here in terms of tourism.
And, as you know now, Yadkin County voted in for the sale of wine only two years ago, and many people thought that would never happen. They turned down beer, and they turned down spirits, but they allowed the sale of wine, which I thought was phenomenal because it was a non-verbal approval of what’s happening in the county and the opportunities that the tourism economic development aspect—you know, wineries are not huge employers of business, but if I have 600 people a week pass through our tasting room, they want to eat someplace, and they’re going to buy gas, and they’re going to shop—or all the other things that are available.
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Well let’s talk about the wines, since we’ve got all this background now. Tell me about that first Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon that came off the vine.
Well, obviously, we thought they were divine. And they were good for your first wines, you know, [Laughs] and they’re aging nicely. Actually, our very first wines that came off, a very small harvest came in the fall of 2001 and a neighboring winery, RayLen, Steve Shepard, who was the wine maker there, made our wine for us, so that we would have wine to open the doors of our winery with, you know, that was going to be constructed by the fall of 2002. We didn’t have very much wine. I needed it to last as long into the year as it would, so we put everything in 550 [milliliter] bottles, rather than 750s. So I had a smaller bottle, and it was unique, and we made it for several months. Obviously, we didn’t have time to age wines very much, and they’re young vines, but they had great flavor, and they were very well received. And North Carolina, actually, even these self-appointed and self-acknowledged wine snobs, have given great credence to what’s happening in North Carolina. The vines are aging, the wines are just getting better, they have more strength of character, they have always had great flavor, great characteristics of the wine industry, great characteristics of each varietal and great strength there. We’ve never had really, really weak, weak wines, and so they’re just getting better all the time with age.
Tell me what wines you offer now, in addition to those original two grapes that you started growing.
We have fifteen varietals in the ground that we bottle as varietals. We have a Pinot Gris. We have a Viognier that we currently are out of, but that’s part of our lineup; the Easter freeze a year ago took care of that. We came out with a new blend this year that’s very unique called Kaleidoscope Gold that’s primarily un-oaked Chardonnay; Viognier, Traminette, little bit of Pinot Gris—seven different wines in it. And then we have our wine maker’s signature wine, Chardonnay; and our Chardonnay is made very unique in that it’s truly aged and it’s new French oak, so it has a more golden color than most Chardonnays. It’s very creamy and buttery. Our Chardonnays turned many a non-Chardonnay drinker into a Chardonnay fan. Then we have Merlot, which is Frank’s favorite, and that is the sexpot of wines, and it’ll go with anything, but that’s always been Frank’s favorite. We have Cabernet Sauvignon, which has always been my favorite because we are both meat-eaters and like our good steaks…And then we added to that, we have a Syrah, which has all the great peppery characteristics—divine with lamb. We have the only Red Zinfandel, at this point, grown in North Carolina because they initially said you were not able to grow Zinfandel in North Carolina and, you know, back to our farming heritage, you don’t tell a farmer he can't do something. You know, as he said, “There’s probably a way, you know, we’ve just got to find out, or it may take a few extra songs in the morning.”
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So what, would you say, is the future of RagApple Lassie?
I hope it becomes a mighty force at the size it is, you know. And we worked very hard for this. We’ve put our heart and soul here; it is our baby. RagApple, that’s the one thing in our marriage that Frank and I can say we have totally developed on our own, so we have great connection to it. We were very naïve in the amount of time it was going to take to do it. I’m talking about personal time, as in seven days a week, working ten hours a day. We were very naïve about that…But we’re very happy. We’ve been blessed with great publicity; we’ve been blessed with great awards. Every wine that we produce, except our two Kaleidoscopes that are brand new to us this year, earned at least two international awards. We were named finalist for Best New Winery in the United States by the Wine Appreciation Guild in San Francisco. We’ve been written up in a gazillion magazines. Copia, the large wine and food education institute in Napa that Mondavi funded, now has an exhibit on its walls, Wine Across America, and we’re there; we’re the North Carolina wine. So we have been very, very blessed.
Now, if and when you and your husband finally get a mind to retire, are your children are going to carry on the vineyard and also the farming?
Our children will carry on the vineyard; they have great pride in that. We have four little grandsons nine and under that all love it, and so, you know, this was sort of for them. And they will do it, and all the others are involved in various aspects. As to the rest of the farming, no. And Frank and I hope—we’re counting on having everything established firmly enough that, you know, growing corn, wheat, and soybeans will not be an issue for them, will not be a necessity for them because they don’t even have the expertise to do that. But once the vineyard is established or then they can lease the land or rent the land, you know. Some farmers use other people’s land to grow things on and other people that are still farmers, they will have the wherewithal to not let it grow up.
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Is there anything that hasn’t come up already that you want to make sure to add or a word to end on?
I’m sure I’ve given you way more details than you ever wanted to know. But you know, this has our heart and soul and this is something we’re proud of, but we would do it all over again…We have met many neat, neat people. We’ve had many opportunities come our way that were just really special for us that we’d never had without this so, no, this is great. And thank you for honoring that, and thank you for coming to ask our story.
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