THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507270049
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAIGE WILLIAMS, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
ROANOKE ISLAND keeps two ancient secrets.
A band of English settlers vanished in the 1500s, which became the legend of the Lost Colony.
The lesser-known head scratcher associated with this Outer Banks, N.C., island is the mystery of Mother Vineyard.
Mother Vineyard is said to be the oldest scuppernong vine in the country. Once, it consumed the land north of Manteo, rolling in thick brambles all the way to Roanoke Sound and bearing bushels of sweet grapes every fall.
No one knows who planted the vine, or when, only that it was probably a part of North Carolina long before everything but the rivers and woods.
Some historians say Indians planted the vine; others say Colonists did.
Whoever planted it couldn't have known how much it would mean to the region.
Mother Vineyard bore a Southern icon, a marble-sized symbol of autumn - and the nation's first cultivated wine grape.
Thomas Jefferson was said to have sipped scuppernong wine and declared it fit for the finest tables in Europe. ``North Carolina,'' he wrote, ``has the merit of . . . giving the first specimen of an exquisite wine, produced in quantity, and established in its culture beyond the danger of being discontinued.''
But Jefferson was wrong.
The wine trade faded away. Neighborhoods grew up around Mother Vineyard, with expensive houses and neatly clipped lawns overlooking the sound. Homeowners took shears to the vine, taming it into a tidy patch, if such a wild thing can be tidy. The most visible clue to its existence is the street that bears its name. Mother Vineyard Road winds past the yard where the vine grows, inconspicuous and ordinary, on scaffolding of logs and wood beams.
It hardly looks like a treasure until you duck below the scaffolding, into the shadows.
It's a secret world, cool and dim, faint traces of sunlight lying like lace in the grass. There, the vine shows its age, twisting and turning out of the sandy soil, limbs thick as thighs, like unearthed roots, gnarled and knotted with time.
Mother Vineyard may be an obscure bit of lore to folks who live in other parts of the state, but it has fascinated generations of coastal North Carolinians.
William Etheridge was inspired toward fanciful musings long after he left his native Manteo to teach at the University of Missouri.
``The Vine is a romantic and revered object and you should approach it with the imagination and respect due its dignity as the oldest living thing on the Island and one of the oldest living fruit plants on earth,'' the late Dr. Etheridge wrote in papers preserved at the Dare County Library.
The word scuppernong comes from ``Ascopo,'' the Algonquian Indian name for the sweet bay tree. ``Ascuponung,'' meaning place of the Ascopo, appears on North Carolina's early maps. By 1800, the common name was scuppernong.
Cuttings of Mother Vineyard were taken to Washington County and beyond. They grew in such hardy abundance, Americans made wine, as Indians had before them. By 1900, the scuppernong gave North Carolina the distinction of being the top wine producing state in the nation.
``Virginia Dare'' wine - reds and whites, mixed with California grapes - outsold all others and won the grand prize in the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904.
It was the height of North Carolina's wine days, and the beginning of the end.
Prohibition forced vineyards to New York and Southern California and then closed them altogether. Wine lovers started favoring dry tastes over sweet. Then nature delivered the coup de grace: the crippling winter storm of 1985 killed most of the state's 1,600 remaining scuppernong acres.
This was Paul Garrett's fear, that the scuppernong would die. As founder of Virginia Dare wine, he toured the South imploring farmers to grow scuppernongs, but politicians warned them not to depend on a grape. The Mother Vineyard legacy withered away.
Today's wine industry is rebuilding, but in large part without the scuppernong. The N.C. Grape Council says only three of the state's 10 wineries make scuppernong wine: Bennett Vineyards in Beaufort County, Duplin Wine Cellars in Duplin County and Martin's Vineyard in Currituck County.
As for Mother Vineyard, it can't grow fruit if it isn't pruned, and the Rev. Kenneth Whitley has long given up on that.
What's left of the vine grows in his front yard. At 89, he puts his energies into keeping up the fig tree and dogwoods. Anytime he even thinks about peeking under the scaffolding, his wife, Elizabeth, warns him not to: ``Ticks!''
So Mother Vineyard is left to yield nothing but wonder.
``. . . If once while looking at the great twisted trunks you happen to hear the drums and wild harp strings of a brawling sou'wester,'' Dr. Etheridge wrote, ``you may wonder whether the old vine is under bond to grow grapes for the wine-press of the immortals.'' by CNB