Juiced up: a father-son duo in the small mountain town of Laurel Springs might be the secret behind the success of your favorite winery.

• Author: Dodson, Jim
• Position: Town Square - Thistle Meadow Winery

Tom Burgiss is a funny guy, a spry, witty 84-year-old retired pharmacist and poster boy for the magic of a second business career. When I heard he owned a small mountaintop winery that specializes in teaching others how to make wine at home, I phoned to ask if I might come visit some early autumn afternoon. "Absolutely," he responded. "Come on up to the top of the mountain and we'll give you some very good wine. But better come soon, though. I'm so old, why, I don't even buy green bananas anymore."

Burgiss and his son, Brant, own and operate Thistle Meadow Winery and grapestompers inc., an online home winemaker's supply firm located off N.C. 18 in Laurel Springs, an unincorporated village in Alleghany County with one post office and 800 residents surrounded by tall mountain slopes covered with Christmas trees. Thirty years ago, Burgiss retired as head pharmacist of a drugstore in Sparta, which is 10 miles northeast of Laurel Springs, and set off to see wider places in the world with his wife, Nancy. He wondered what he might do with the rest of his life. Perhaps the most fateful travel stop turned out to be a condo rented for a month in Victoria, British Columbia, the "garden city" of Vancouver Island.

Tom picks up the tale from here. "The man who rented us the condo welcomed us with a bottle of wine I happen to love good wine. And this wine was very good--so good I went over just to thank him and ask where we could buy that bottle of wine to take home. Turned out, he'd made it himself--from a kit, no less. I was very impressed."

He was also eager to see if he could replicate the feat of grape fermentation back home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Burgiss needed a good retirement hobby to stay busy and keep his mind sharp on his family's 125-acre homeplace in the pretty vale where he grew up "cutting thistles out of the meadow for my granddaddy because nothing much else would grow here."

Innovation was in his blood. Tom Burgiss's grandfather, C.A. Reeves, was a scientific Renaissance mountain man, the 32nd licensed dentist to operate in North Carolina and the first to engineer an electrical dental drill for use in his Sparta practice. The dentist-inventor set up a water wheel that produced DC current, generated off a clutch of old car batteries housed in a nearby shed.

Back home, Burgiss studied the deceptively simple craft of making wine. "It's a hobby as old as the Bible," he quips, "tricky but not all that hard to do, just takes lots and...