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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
By Michael Hastings
Winston-Salem JOURNAL FOOD EDITOR
A segment on NBC’s Today show the other week didn’t exactly send shock waves around the world, but North Carolina wineries certainly felt some tremors.
The segment plugging North Carolina wines over wines from California’s Napa Valley resulted in press releases from www.visitncwine.com, the winery Web site of the N.C. Division of Tourism, as well as a flurry of e-mails from North Carolina winemakers.
The March 27 segment featured “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert, an author, a radio host and the founder of www.supermarketguru.com, talking about food trends. Near the end, Lempert declared, “Napa out…. The new wines are coming from North Carolina. This is what’s going to be hot this year.”
The table set up for the segment included bottles from Childress Vineyards in Davidson County.
It’s hard to believe that Lempert’s prediction will come true, no matter what you think of North Carolina wine.
Lempert said in a telephone interview that the Today segment was “all in good fun,” and he has no reason to believe that Napa’s quality or popularity is going down soon.
Being realistic
Even Margo Metzger, the director in the N.C. Wine and Grape Council, discounted the snub against Napa.
“I don’t think Napa’s going anywhere,” she said.
Mark Friszolowski, the winemaker at Childress who made the wines featured on the show, said, “It was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Was it a judgment on Napa quality? I would say no. But was it a judgment on North Carolina wine quality? I would say yes.”
On the show, Lempert mentioned only global warming in explaining his pick of North Carolina wine as a trend. In a column for www.ivillage.com, Lempert explained it further, essentially saying that studies suggested that Napa would become too hot to make world-class wines by the end of the century and that North Carolina, in contrast, is and will remain more temperate.
“You could argue that (the next trendy wine region) could be any other place,” Lempert said. “But North Carolina makes good wine.”
His opinion was based on tastings of several Childress wines for a radio-show interview with Friszolowski a few months ago.
Most of North Carolina’s wine is distributed within the state, and quantities are relatively limited - and there are shipping restrictions to take into account - so even if consumers nationwide wanted to make the wines a new trend, most would have a hard time getting hold of them.
Still, news that the state is making good wine surprised many Today viewers.
“From the hundreds of e-mails I got based on that segment,” Lempert said, “most people had never heard of them.”
And the dramatic way that Lempert plugged the wines surprised folks in the N.C. wine industry.
“Almost every conversation I’ve had personally or professionally since then has mentioned it,” Metzger said.
Van Coe of Stony Knoll Vineyards happened to be watching Today that morning.
“I couldn’t believe it. It was amazing,” he said.
Linda King, the winemaker at RagApple Lassie Vineyards in East Bend, called the segment “a fun little blip that really got people excited.”
Any national press of a budding wine industry is a big plus, she said. “I put it up on my wine blog (www.ladyofthegrape.com), and I got a lot of hits on it.”
With the help of the Internet, news of the segment spread quickly.
“The information is going out to a lot of people,” King said. “It’s making people aware that we have a good industry here.”
Here’s a link that will take you to the Today show video on New Trendy Foods: http://tinyurl.com/4gawv3.
■ Michael Hastings, the Journal’s Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at mhastings@wsjournal.com, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.
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