Entwined: it's how a family grew its business and resurrected a Tar Heel industry.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Duplin Wine Cellars Inc. - Cover story

Outside Duplin Winery, rain is crawling across the coastal plain toward Rose Hill. Inside, David Fussell retreats from a brightly lit gift shop into a dark room where grapes once passed into their afterlife. These days, it's a classroom for growers and wine lovers. Tables and chairs face a big-screen TV and stage. Display cases tell the history of winemaking in North Carolina. Next door is a restaurant that offers live entertainment, including dinner theater.

All this is for show, a marketing tool. The wine sold here is made a few blocks away, just outside the town limits in a cluster of no-nonsense metal buildings that a sign identifies only as a "federal bonded winery." With tank capacity to produce 750,000 gallons a year, Duplin Wine Cellars Inc. is the largest winery in the Southeast. It's also the biggest muscadine winery in the world.

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Fussell, 63, is eager to show a new video about the company's history. Duplin, which opened in 1975 and is the oldest operating winery in the state, bottled its millionth case last year. It sold 176,000 cases, reaping $8 million revenue. But the tape doesn't tell the whole story. Not hardly. His mother had warned him not to open a winery. So had his grandmother. His wife wondered if he had lost his mind. "You can't do that," she'd told him. "We'll be run out of town."

Back then, even selling wine was illegal in Duplin County. Making it would enrage preachers, prohibitionists and prigs. People sent hate mail. Some told his family they were going to hell. His oldest son, now company president, fought with other kids over where his kin would spend eternity.

But Fussell held firm in his belief it was the right thing to do. Before going public with his plan, he had prayed over it three months and searched Scripture for clues. One day, he knelt in his study, clasped his hands and tried again. This time, he believes, the Lord answered. No burning bush or blinding light, not even a voice, just thoughts running through his head.

"David, go on and do it"

"Why, God?"

"Because it's going to help people."

"What do you mean it's going to help people?"

"Just trust me. It's going to help people."

A little wine, the Bible says, is good for the belly. Muscadine wine, medical research says, is even better, rich in compounds that help prevent cancer and heart disease--which nobody knew then. But before the winery could help anyone, David Fussell would have to go through his own hell, one born of bad breaks, bad decisions and brain chemistry. Things reached the point where, for a time, he could not pluck up the courage to crawl out of bed and go to work.

Truth be told, it was Dan's idea to start a winery, just as it had been his to start growing grapes. Fussell and his older brother had long wanted a farm, so in 1972 they bought 132 acres with $4,000 of savings and a $52,000 federal loan. Dan, a carpenter, researched what to grow. State agriculture officials were pitching muscadines. Word was that a New York winery was paying $350 a ton. Over the next three years, the Fussells poured about $30,000 into a 10-acre vineyard.

But muscadines glutted the market, tumbling to $150 a ton. The Fussells didn't have winery contracts and, as their first harvest approached in 1975, realized they might not have a market. Profits from tobacco, hogs and other products couldn't cover the loss. Starting a winery seemed the only way to avoid losing the farm.

Before Prohibition, the native grape had made North Carolina the nation's top wine-producing state and Edgecombe County native Paul Garrett's Virginia Dare the best-selling brand. But the industry hadn't bounced back with repeal. There were 25 Tar Heel wineries at the turn of the century, but only 12 remained in 1947. All had closed by 1950. Another, built in the mid-'50s to provide Onslow County growers a market, closed in 1968. To stimulate new wineries, the legislature in 1972 cut the state tax on native table wine from 60 cents to 5 cents a gallon. That same year, one opened near Edenton but would shut in 1980 after its principal...