CityView Magazine

Local Artist THE Cypress Bend Vineyards will have its first chocolate wine on a large scale. It takes the brain of a mathematician but the heart of an artist. McClanathan has both. But he never imagined that a degree in biology and a career W spent in the lumber industry would serve him well as a winemaker. But here he is by turns vintner, inventor, electrician, mechanic and occasional farmer. He’s a native of Michigan who now ties his livelihood to one of the South’s most storied vines, the muscadine. Rows and rows of flowering grapevines line the driveway of Cypress Bend near the small town of Wagram and the smaller community of Riverton, a hamlet not far from the banks of the Lumber River. The closest city is Laurinburg though Fayetteville is only about 45 minutes away. This land has been handed down to generations of Smiths who have farmed along the banks of the Lumber since 1807, sometimes trying their hand at homemade wine. More than 200 years later, Dan and Tina Smith would turn muscadine wine into a full-fledged business. Cypress Bend wines have claimed 73 medals in just three years, including the coveted Muscadine Cup awarded at the North Carolina State Fair. For McClanathan, as a winemaker, it’s a personal point of pride, but he also considers it a sign of the times that Southern wine is finally earning the respect it deserves. California gets all the glory, but an argument could be made that the South had a 100-year head start in the wine business. President Thomas Jefferson grew grapes at Monticello in Virginia. And by 1840, North Carolina was the leading wine producer in the Union, a distinction it soon lost to Georgia and, eventually, to states farther north and west. From the beginning, oenophiles debated the merits of native grapes vs. vinifera grapes. The scuppernong is the nation’s first cultivated wine grape and native to North Carolina. At the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904, a North Carolina wine made 24 | Food & Wine • 2010 WINE art By Allison Williams AGRAM – Jim McClanathan is part science geek, part artist. A single drop, actually a drop of a drop, will be the secret ingredient to the newest wine at Cypress Bend Vineyards. For the past few months, McClanathan (pictured top right) has been measuring, testing, tasting and sniffing small batches of wine flavored with chocolate, but if the experiment works, OF

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