Vineyard & Winery Management Magazine
Feature Story
Wineries in the New South Balancing the interests of vintners and Baptists
By Tom Johnson
It took a tough guy to open Alabama's first winery. Jim Eddins spent 30 years in the Marine Corps as a combat engineer and infantry reconnaissance officer. When he retired from that, he moved to southern Alabama to work as a construction engineer building, among other things, churches - big business in the heart of the Bible Belt. He also farmed 50 acres of muscadine, a thick-skinned, purple-bronze grape native to the American South and resistant to the region's rots and fungi. He sold those grapes to a winery across the border in Florida until 1978.
"The guy I was selling my grapes to was found dead in his wine tank," Eddins recalled. "They padlocked the doors and I had nowhere to sell my grapes."
So Eddins decided to open a winery of his own. There weren't any wineries in Alabama at the time, so he read the statutes and discovered that the law gave the government no discretion in granting licenses to farm wineries. Forty years before, in a fit of agricultural populism at the end of Prohibition, the state legislature had guaranteed farmers could turn home-grown grapes into wine and the state couldn't do a thing to stop them.
Despite that, when Eddins applied for his winery license, the clerk refused to grant it. The grounds for the denial were the clerk's uninformed confidence that, in a state with nearly as many dry counties as wet, winemaking couldn't possibly be legal.
"I got up and yelled in his face as if he were a Marine boot," Eddins said. "The law says ‘shall issue.' That doesn't mean maybe. It doesn't mean in accordance with their religion. It says ‘shall issue.'"
The yelling got him an audience with George Wallace, the four-term segregationist governor who to this day remains the personification of the Jim Crow-era Southern pol. Wallace, who died in 1998, was a pretty tough guy himself, but Eddins marched up to the governor's desk and made his case. Wallace listened and said he would only grant the license if Eddins agreed to buy the surplus apples that were apparently Wallace's biggest problem that day.
Thus did Alabama get its first winery since Prohibition, Perdido Vineyards, with a product line that eventually included apple brandy.
‘HANG-UPS ABOUT ALCOHOL'
Thomas Jefferson was one of the first to note the difficulty of growing wine grapes in the American South, referring to his winegrowing aspirations as "the parent of misery." The soils are generally too fertile, the air too humid and the nights too hot for producing balanced wines from European grape varieties. The infrastructure of equipment and supply vendors is thin to non-existent. Capital is hard to come by, and the easy, collegial exchange of ideas and expertise Jefferson prized was made difficult by the vast distances between vineyards.
In the modern world, more daunting than anything Jefferson faced is the South's religious and political climate. As Becky Berta, who with her husband owns Jules J. Berta Vineyards in Albertville, Ala., put it, "We're in the Bible Belt. We've still got a bunch of hang-ups about alcohol in general."
The Bible Belt, as it is generally defined, runs from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to the oil fields of west Texas. It's a broad, diverse swath of America populated by roughly 70 million people, about a third of which are one kind of Baptist or another: decent, God-fearing folks who believe alcoholic beverages to be the work of the devil. That's a powerful, even defining political bloc, and it exerts its considerable muscle to prevent what it considers to be sin.
The South is not monolithic, and despite its puritanical tendencies, it has changed. There remain hundreds of bone-dry counties, where the sale of alcohol is prohibited, but there are also more than 500 wineries scattered in 14 states along the Bible Belt. In fact, officials in most Southern states have come to see winery growth as economic development, as a tourist draw and as a viable option for farms previously dependent on tobacco. The result is broad public acceptance of a growing and vibrant wine culture, with pockets of disapproval.
"When we first opened 23 years ago, I was in a dressing room of a department store with a pastor's wife," said Louisa Cooke, who owns Beachaven Vineyards & Winery in Clarksville, and is president of the Tennessee Farm Winegrowers Association. "And she said, ‘Do we need a winery?' She was the only person who questioned it."
WINNING CONVERTS
In much of the South, wine is something new, foreign and even a little bit naughty - and it's quickly winning converts. Cooke likes to tell a story about how she knew the churches were coming around when fellowship groups started showing up at the winery.
"We've had lots of church buses stop by our winery," she said. "We've actually had Baptists stop by and say, ‘We won't tell brother so-and-so if you don't.'"
Hanover Park Vineyard was the first winery in a previously dry county in the Yadkin Valley, not far from Winston-Salem, N.C. Michael and Amy Helton bought the land in 1996. When the county refused to grant Hanover Park a business permit, the state stepped in.
"We didn't have to go by those (county) laws," said Amy Helton, now the president of the North Carolina Winegrowers Association. "The lady in Raleigh (the state capital) told my husband it's not up to the local election. It's up to the state. They wanted the revenue."
There are now 14 tasting rooms in the Yadkin Valley, which is, in a way, the Promised Land of the New South for wineries. On weekends, tourists jam the wineries, carting off cases of wine and bags of wine-themed merchandise. Hotels are full and weddings and banquets need to be booked months in advance.
Just about every Southern state longs for that kind of success. In Kentucky, where half the counties are dry and the state Baptist convention counts 2,400 churches, wine is more about "agritourism" than alcohol, a way of weaning farmers off the dying tobacco industry.
"I grew up in a Southern Baptist home," said Stacia Alford, whose government job is to promote Kentucky wineries. "I'm here to help the farmers. I haven't had any backlash to what I do."
Kentucky's promotion of wine includes taxpayer subsidies for bird netting and trellis construction. The state grants a total of up to $4,000 a year to wineries for marketing, a princely sum in media markets where a quarter-page newspaper ad costs $150. When a change in direct shipping laws forced the 60 Kentucky wineries into the three-tiered distribution system, the state cushioned the blow by paying distributors $20 per case of Kentucky wine sold.
CHURCH AND STATE
Change comes more slowly the farther you travel into the Deep South - Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. In Alabama, which now has 11 wineries, the tax laws are a mess, the promotional dollars scarce and public officials so disinterested that it's difficult even to get approval to add wineries to the "attractions" signs along interstate highways.
"They're just slow to do anything," said Tom Vizzini of Vizzini Farms Winery in Calera. "They don't understand that Interstate 65 has a lot of money traveling by. One of these days they're going to understand, this is a business. We don't do this just for our health."
The state is slow, of course, because in Alabama, the political constituency against local wine is bigger than the one for it.
"The Baptists have a very strong voice with the legislators," said R. Jene Beadles, secretary of the Alabama Wineries and Grape Growers Association. "It's been very difficult."
"What we have," said Eddins, "is a convoluted relationship between the church and the government."
In 2008, that convoluted relationship came to a head when the Alabama Tourism Department agreed to put a few tax dollars into the promotion of the Alabama Wine Trail. The trail is an attempt to lure some of the snowbirds on their way to the Florida panhandle to spend money in Alabama on something besides gasoline and fast food.
When Rev. Robert Griffin, moderator of the 57-church Chilton Baptist Association, got wind of the expenditure, he objected on behalf of his flock.
"Nine out of 10 members are opposed to alcohol, because they're good Baptists," he explained. "I'm opposed to alcohol use in any form, according to my Biblical and moral beliefs."
The state government persevered, paying for the printing of a wine trail brochure and distributing it at rest areas and welcome centers. By the standards of other states in the South, it was a small gesture. But by the standards of Alabama, it was significant.
"Things are changing," said Berta. "The tables are starting to turn."
There remains the long process of educating inertia-bound regulators. When three wineries banded together to open a new winery in a refurbished Dr Pepper bottling plant in Birmingham, Ala., the Jefferson County health department decided on its own that a winery had to follow the same codes as a food packager.
"They didn't understand wine," said Vizzini, a partner in The Winery at Pepper Place. "They treated us like a sausage factory. They wanted us to lower the ceiling and put air curtains over the doors. They wanted us to dump all the wine down the drain."
Vizzini and his partners hired a lawyer, brought in a consultant from the FDA in Georgia and delayed their scheduled opening. They wrote it off as the cost of doing business in Alabama, but they saved their wine and, in April 2020, started to pour it for customers.
The highest priority of Alabama wineries now is a revision of laws preventing promotions allowed in other states, including wine tastings and festivals. (Tasting rooms are limited to two hours per day of actual tastings, and the host of a wine festival must undergo an FBI background check.) The wineries copied the law from Georgia, which has the same basic political makeup as Alabama, and got another key constituency - wine distributors - on board before they took the proposed law to the capital.
Unfortunately, the legislature doesn't have time to consider the legislation. The entire 2010 session has been consumed with an argument about whether bingo should be legalized. The Baptists are, as the locals say, "agin' it."
Tom Johnson is a writer and business planning consultant based in Louisville, Ky. He is also the author of the wine blog Louisville Juice (www.louisvillejuice.com).
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