Text: Jennifer C. Key

For pure romantic impact, there is little that competes with a vineyard – long rows of fruit laden vines twisting up onto their supports, and a sense of alchemy underway, as grapes become wine. This vineyard, however, has even more to offer Irvin-house Vineyards has incorporated another romantic staple – our low-country’s ageless oaks, wise and ponderous, dripping with Spanish moss. The atmosphere here is a palatable thing.

Most South Carolinians would be surprised to learn that our state boasts a few vineyards. Every Southerner has heard of – if not grown up on – muscadine wine. The muscadine is the only grape that will grow in the majority of our state’s climate, grow abundantly, in fact, our ancestors took advantage of them long ago. The first wines to be made on this continent were made form the muscadine and Jim and Ann Irvin are re-creating an old classic.

When Jim, a contractor, and Ann, a teacher, retired and married, they moved out of the city and onto some property of Ann’s on Wadmalaw Island that had formerly been the headquarters of a Charleston carriage company. They both love to garden, and the eleven – and – a –half acres of unspoiled land provided the perfect setting. As they made their plans, Jim’s long-time desire to make wine and a well placed piece of advice turned them onto a much more ambitious track.

In 2001, the Irvins purchased the vines. The muscadine comes in several breeds, and the Irvins chose four – two purple grapes, Ison and Noble, and two white, or bronze grapes, Tara and Carlos. They order 2,600 “bare root” vines. Each vine was so small that they came 100 to the bundle, and the entire 2,600 rode easily in the back of a pick-up truck. With much hard work, posts were driven, guide wires hung, and vines planted. The Irvins decided against pesticides and chemical treatments, and have relied solely on elbow grease and TLC to bring their vines to maturity. While the muscadine’s ability to grow was never in question, the Irvins had been told that the vines could take up to four years to produce enough fruit for a wine harvest. Two years later, however, they were able to harvest in the fall.

Timing means a lot in the wine business. The ideal is to harvest the grape when it has reached its sweetest point. Harvest too early, the grapes do not have enough sugar. Harvest too late, and you lose too much of your fruit to rot. Technology has stepped to the plate and provided a hand-held tool called a refractometer. When a drop or two of juice from a grape is placed on a glass screen, then held up to the sunlight, the refratometer measures the amount of sugar in the grape – in units called “brix”. Mature has it’s own system, however, though perhaps not as precise. When grapes are young, they are bright and shiny. The sugar level increases as they ripen; and natural wild yeast in the air become drawn to the, and settle on their skin, giving their color a much more hazy appearance.

After the grapes are harvested by hand they are run through a crusher /de-stemmer and pumped into the primary fermentation tanks, each one holding 1050 gallons. The tanks are treated with a sterilizer and an enzyme that helps break the juice down form the pulp. After 24 hours, five gallons are removed from each tank and mixed with yeast. The yeast mixture is then added back into the tank.

The skins of the purple grapes are allowed to remain in the tank until all of the color is drained in order to give the red wines their rich color. For the white wines, the skins are allowed to remain in the tank 24 hours after fermentation. Once the skins are colorless, they are removed and added back into the field as fertilizer for the vines. Eventually, because old skins are coated with the type of yeast used to ferment wine, that type of yeast will become the prominent wild yeast in the vineyard, and no further yeast will need to be added to future crops.

Once the fermentation process is completed, the wine enters a racking stage, where it is allowed to settle. After the wine has racked, it is filtered through a series of filters: one coarse, one medium, and then a micro filter. After the last filter, sugar is added. If even one yeast is left after filtering, the sugar would feed it, and the wine would once again begin to ferment, making accidental champagne.

The Irvins have chosen five Charleston artists to design the labels of each of their five wines: William Jameson, Charlynn Knight, Hilarie Lambert, Mark Horton, and Matt Constantine. The labels have a colorful, distinctively elegant appearance, as do the names of the wines: Tara Gold, a semi-dry, white table wine; Magnolia, a sweet, fruit flavored white wine; Live Oak Reserve, a blend of light fruit flavors; Mullet hall Red, a dry, red wine; and Palmetto, a rich, sweeter muscadine wine.

The wines are available for tasting at the Irvin-House Vineyard’s tasting room and gift shop every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Mrs. Irvin has stocked the shelves of the gift shop with delightful, artistic pieces that are priced remarkably affordable. The grounds alone make the trip out to Wadmalaw Island worth making – converted barns and stables, a walk-through garden, and the famous oaks – but the real treasure at Irvin-House Vineyards is the Irvins.

Ann Irvin delights at the idea of meeting new people as she works in the tasting room. “I love to hear the stories that people bring with them when they visit,” she said. “That’s the best part of the tourist business to me. To get to hear where people are from, to hear about their lives in different places.”

If any forum is likely to inspire comfortable, easy conversation, then surely that place would be settled under the Spanish Moss, gazing out over the lanes of vines, and sipping the wonderful wine.