Sampling Muscadine Magic at La Belle Amie
By Lenore McKenzie-Morris
Steal away for an afternoon at La Belle Amie Vineyard and you'll forget there's an ocean nearby.
The mesmerizing impact of sipping a glass of wine under the shade of a tree while listening to live music will take the tension off anyone frazzled by summer travel. Locals have their favorite events at the vineyard, where the festival schedule carries names such as Summer Breeze and Autumn Magic Blues and Jazz. Big Band music and Parrot Head festivals take turns with rock from March through early November.
Jennie Dalton and Cindy Stone traveled from Bennettsville, S.C. on a recent weekend to attend the Summer Parrot Head Fest. Relaxing in their chairs early in the afternoon, the girls were sipping Coca Colas to temper the wine they planned to enjoy later in the day.
"We left the husbands home working and the kids asleep in their beds," Stone said. "We're self-employed and needed a day off."
"We needed a break," Jennie said. "We needed to do something different."
While the band played Jimmy Buffet, most people just lounged in their chairs, enjoying the breeze blowing across the gently sloped festival area. Others carried paper bowls with mounds of freshly fried potato chips or plates with funnel cakes.
Oak Island residents Angela and Bill Gratton donned their Parrot Head Festival hats and drove down the coast to the vineyard to relax with friends while listening to music and drinking wine.
The couple comes for the Jimmy Buffet music in the summer and for the winter bonfires when warm wine drinks are served.
At a booth on the end of the vendor lane, near the vineyard's main building, staff members are mixing up frozen wine coolers, selling wine and giving tastes of the vineyard's various labels.
Jim Adams was on a mission at the booth, testing out wines he could share with Grace Brown after the festival. The couple compromised on a bottle of Bitchin' Babes, a smooth white Muscadine wine.
Brown, was raving about the frozen wine coolers.
"They are excellent," she said, taking a sip. "These are awesome. I'm not a big white wine person, but I really love this."
Adams, who lives in Greensboro, visits the vineyard on a regular basis while visiting his parents in Calabash. The Adams family maintains a festival club membership that gives them free admission to all festivals, guest passes to an event, a wine glass and some other goodies.
Wine lovers will find that owner Vicki Weigle has an exciting array of wines, including French and Romanian wines bottled exclusively for sale at this Coastal Carolina vineyard. Her real treasures, however, are the custom blended wines she's developed using the Muscadine grapes grown here on her ancestral family farm.
While I was there, Weigle treated me to a glass of wine from an unlabeled bottle of Pinot Noir. Smooth on the tongue and rich on the palate, the wine was getting the nod of approval from a select few customers. Weigle said she was testing the blend of the pinot noir as well as a Riesling throughout the festival. If it passed judgment with everyone, and it seemed to be doing just that, she'll be bottling that blend for sale in mid-September.
Weigle, who can spin quite a tale about the vineyard, shares her love of La Belle Amie during each festival on a one-hour talk that takes visitors past the old tobacco farm and out to her grape vines.
Her 15-year journey as a vintner began as a decision to leave corporate Texas and return to Horry County to care for an aging mother on a former tobacco farm. Along the way she learned to grow grapes, blend wines and cope with hurricanes.
Today, she has contract farmers in Bladen County, North Carolina supplementing her own grape harvest. She's recently opened a winery in Elizabethtown, N.C. for bottling her wines and is constantly on the go tending all the facets of her growing business.
But to her, it's all worth it.
"When people come to this place, they see the vineyard and the grounds and they find a great wine that they like, that makes me feel so good," Weigle said. "I love this farm with all my heart."
La Belle Amie Vineyard is located on St. Joseph Road, just off S.C. 90 about two miles from the Sea Mountain Highway Intersection of S.C. 9 and S.C. 90 in Little River.
Visit the winery any day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. except on Sundays. Upcoming festivals include the Dog Days Blues and Jazz Fest on Aug. 8 and the Whole Lotta Shakin' Oldies Fest on Aug. 22. Festival admission is $8, but there's a $3 discount if you bring two canned food items for the local food bank.
For more information, visit www.labelleamie.com.
There are no comments posted. Add yours below.