WINE COUNTRY?

• Author: Miller, Jeff
• Position: Brief Article

Once the nation's leading winemaker, North Carolina struggles to regain a name for itself as a producer.

It's about quitting time for Rob Crook. It's still an hour before 5 p.m., but tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so the state Department of Agriculture building in downtown Raleigh is a ghost town. Some security people remain. So do a few workaholics and those with appointments they couldn't avoid.

Crook, acting executive director of the North Carolina Grape Council, folds his lanky frame behind a cheap, wood-laminate desk in his sunless sanctum at the back of the building. Bottles of North Carolina wine -- all full, it should be noted -- and jars of muscadine-wine jelly stand on a built-in bookshelf, along with promotional pamphlets, books and binders. The fluorescent glare overhead seems almost cheerful compared with the gray day outside. A faint, brown stripe runs down the pale-blue walls from ceiling to floor, a reminder of when Hurricane Dennis flooded the fourth-floor office with half an inch of water.

Crook runs the Grape Council, a state office set up to promote the grape and wine industry in North Carolina. He doesn't look much like a marketing guy or a wine snob, casually clad as he is in a white tennis shirt and khaki pants. Between swigs from a Gatorade bottle, he talks about his background -- bachelor's in biology from the University of Maine at Orono in 1987, master's in forestry from N.C. State University in 1995. He also did time in the Peace Corps, helping Costa Ricans preserve indigenous trees, and managed four workers at a small winery in Massachusetts during his undergrad days. Smart guy. Knows a lot about soils and trees. But a wine expert? "No," he says. "I know people who are wine experts, and I am not a wine expert." A marketing expert, perhaps? "I am not a marketing expert," he admits.

His chief qualifications for the job, aside from general horticultural knowledge and limited winery experience, were his availability and acquaintance with Tania Dautlick, the woman whose job he is temporarily filling. Dautlick, herself a novice fresh out of N.C. State's horticultural-science master's program when she started the job in 1995, left in August for a 10-month stint in Poland to be with her new husband, a water-and-sewer engineer. Crook's job, as he sees it, is to hold down the fort until she gets back in June. "Avoid chaos," he says, laughing. "Being a temporary executive director, I am not involved in trying to leave a personal stamp on this job."

Probably a wise decision, but an unfortunate setback for an industry that seems ready to ripen and can use all the visionaries it can get. Managers at all three of North Carolina's major wineries -- Biltmore Winery in Ashevile, Westbend Vineyards in Lewisville and Duplin Wine Cellars in Rose Hill, which makes wine from North Carolina's native muscadine grapes -- say that they sell every bottle they make. Two were started in the 1970s -- Duplin in 1976 and Biltmore in 1978 -- with the help of a state law that taxed wines made from out-of-state fruit more heavily. (The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the tax unconstitutional in 1985.) The third, Westbend, opened in 1988, but its owners, Jack and Lillian Kroustalis, started planting grapes as a hobby in 1973. Their vineyard was one of the first in North Carolina to grow French vinifera grapes used in chardonnays and cabernets.

More recently, winemaking has caught the fancy of prominent Charlotte builders Charlie and Ed Shelton, owners of The...