The white wine for the wedding: Viognier from RagApple Lassie.

RagApple Lassie was one of the wineries we stopped at earlier this month. Beautiful, big space, nice wine-tasting room. Short tour included something I’d never seen in all my wine tours in Napa and Sonoma: vats of freshly crushed grapes. Made me want to take my shoes off and stamp around for a bit.

One of the charms of the NC wineries is being able to talk with the winemakers themselves. When the proprietor was a wee tad, he was a 4-H club member, and was given a calf, which he kept as a pet. The calf (later, cow) was called Ragapple Lassie–which explains the elegant, wine-drinking cow on the bottles (which are lovely by the way–an unusual shape, gold foil accenting a color that varies by the vintage).

Ragapple Lassie is just one example of Life After Tobacco. Although tobacco and other crops are still grown there, the family is betting on a future in the Yadkin Valley appelation.

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