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Richard Childress is driving through a pounding rainstorm, trying to get back to Charlotte, N.C. He has one hand on the cell phone and one on the wheel. He wants to talk wine. The thought occurs: Is it worth wrapping one of NASCAR’s top race team owners around a guardrail just to gab about grapes?
“We should be OK,” he says calmly.
Of course he’s calm. This is a guy who used to race stock cars, a guy who hunts big game in Africa, man who showcases a trophy lion in his home posed in mid-pounce — the position of the beast just before Childress brought it down.
He’s also the man who watched his racer and friend Dale Earnhardt die in Turn 4 of the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. He knows adversity. A little rain on the highway is not that big a challenge.
What was a challenge: creating a vineyard and establishing an eponymous brand of wine with grapesgrown in North Carolina’s Piedmont, at the base of the Yadkin Valley, a place thousands of miles away from Napa Valley’s storied winemaking.“If you look at the history of wine, North Carolina was the largest wine state before Prohibition,” Childress says. “[Thomas] Jefferson, in Virginia, brought some of the first clones over. The East Coast is 20 to 30 years behind California today, but we have potential to do some great things.”
Q: What has been the response of NASCAR Nation to your wines?
A: The response has been great. We’ve got a huge NASCAR following, but also a following from wine drinkers. We couldn’t be any better with our timing on getting into the market.
Q: Are you hearing that people are using the wine for race day?
A: Normally, you’d have big cookouts for Super Bowl. With NASCAR, every weekend is the Super Bowl, so you can have super cookouts every weekend.
Q: How did you get interested in winemaking?
A: My passion for wine goes back a long way, back to the ’70s, when wine wasn’t a cool thing to be doing. I first got into them when we were out in California, at Riverside. We’d taste wines in the evening and bring wines home to North Carolina.
Then one year we went back to Sonoma at the Sears Point track and got to go into some more wineries. Then we went up to the Finger Lakes, where they have some fantastic wines, too.
I collected for quite a few years. Once I decided I wanted to do that, I wanted to see what could be done with it.
Q: Why do it in North Carolina?
A: Grapes make a great alternative crop for tobacco farmers. The soil is wonderful; the climate is right. We have about 40 acres at my home in Lexington, N.C., and another 45 acres around the winery itself. We purchase North Carolina grapes, and some of the farmers have converted their tobacco farms into vineyards.
Q: How much are you producing annually?
A: We have a 14- or 15-year-old vineyard. We’re shooting to crush 30,000 tons of grapes this year.
Q: What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
A: Our biggest challenge in North Carolina is humidity. It can cause some diseases that can kill plants.
Q: How do you juggle the demands of managing race teams and a vineyard?
A: That’s where surrounding yourself with the right people becomes important. I have great people running the race shop and my winery. My daughter looks after my winery as general manager. Mark Friszolowski is one of the best winemakers in the country.
My son-in-law looks after the competition side of the race shop. It’s sort of a family-operated business.
Q: Has being a vineyard owner flushed any wine lovers out among the NASCAR drivers?
A: A lot of them are real knowledgeable wine drinkers. There are so many that like good wines. One of the first to join was Kurt Busch, and you wouldn’t think he’d be a wine drinker. Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon are both very knowledgeable about wine.
Q: Do you have a preference?
A: I love red wines with dinner. I drink white wines if I want to relax on a hot summer day. There’s nothing better than a glass of pino gris or a chard on a hot day.
Q: What’s the next step for your winemaking?
A: I think we’re at a crossroads. One of the things we’ve struggled with is: Do you want to put your Childress brand on a wine that is a $9.99 or keep working and keep after your cabs and chards?
We’ve made a decision to stay with what’s made us successful. We’re a race fan’s wine that’s for starters and which is affordable for everyone. Our most expensive bottle is $65. But at a certain point, you have to ask what you want to be noted for.
Q: When will we see the day when the Gatorade at Victory Lane gets tossed aside in favor of spraying a little
Childress wine on the driver?
A: We actually have plans to do that. We have a bottle for when we win. We have to win a Nextel Cup race first. Busch beer is a sponsor of our Busch Series car, so we don’t want to bring a bottle into a Busch race. But we have some champagne in the works.
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