Sunday, April 06, 2008
Food, "Behind the Bar"

The circle of friendship

Tiger Mountain Vineyards a fortunate venture for two couples

CREDIT:Courtesy of Martha Ezzard
From left to right, Tiger Mountain Vineyards owners Bill and Leckie Stack and Martha and John Ezzard
By Hope S. Philbrick

    Nestled in the mountains in Tiger, Georgia, are rolling vineyards belonging to two couples: John and Martha Ezzard and Bill and Leckie Stack. The neighbors became friends and then business partners. Since 1998, the couples have brought their harvests together and partnered to transform their grapes into award-winning wines. Their wines, which bear the Tiger Mountain Vineyards label, are sold at the winery and also in some of Atlanta’s top retail shops, restaurants and bars.

Q Is your background in wine?

JOHN: I’m a urologist and practiced in Denver for 30 years before coming home to my family farm in 1997. I always wanted to keep the farm together since it has been in my family for more than 100 years.

    There were some grapes grown here, but they were Concord eating grapes. I put in the vinifera and native American wine grapes. I wanted something to be done with the farm instead of beans, corn and potatoes as my dad had done. I had an interest in wine, so decided to plant wine grapes.

    I went up to Virginia to visit Dennis Horton, the proprietor of Horton Vineyards, to study his vines and talk with him about what grape varietals would grow well in the southeastern United States. I started planting in 1995, and have 8.5 acres with nine varietals.

BILL: I’m currently a lawyer and have been a lawyer in Atlanta since 1962.

    Leckie and I have an apple orchard and I was trying to find something better to do with apples because the market was so bad. I started making apple wine in the late 1980s.

I had reservations about growing vinifera grapes in the Georgia Mountains, not knowing whether they would be any good or could survive. With John and Martha’s first grape crop, we did a trial run using about 1.5 tons. The wine tasted pretty good so we started planting grapes in 2000. We now have about six acres.
That first effort was pretty medieval: We used an apple press that holds three gallons and had about 250 gallons to process. We worked day and night in my basement and got a few barrels of wine.

I’ve learned winemaking by making a lot of mistakes along the way, a lot of reading and talking with winemakers, traveling and observing. Many winemakers around the world are self-taught. The wine community is very cooperative; very few people try to keep secrets.

What are the challenges of growing grapes in Georgia?

BILL: I think that growing grapes anywhere has its challenges and what you need to do is find the grapes and systems that work where you are. Our challenge in Georgia principally has to do with humidity. Picking grape varietals is key. For example, Cabernet Franc is a fairly early ripener with thick skin and loose clusters so fungus doesn’t have a good place to attach. And then the trellising system that we use gives a lot of sun exposure and air movement.

We don’t have a water problem and don’t need to irrigate. I’ve never had a bird problem—we have a hawk that keeps the birds out. The drought hasn’t bothered us one bit: The vines can go down about 30 feet with their roots.

Wines are going to reflect where they’re grown. As we’re learning more even the challenges we’ve got will be minimized.

JOHN: Last year, we had a terrible freeze in April after the vines budded out. It didn’t kill the vine but damaged the cordon—the bearing arm of the vine. In the fall at harvest time, you don’t want to see a hurricane coming. If there’s too much rain when you’re trying to harvest, it dilutes the sugars.

    We’re at 2,000 feet, and so we don’t have problems with Pierce’s disease because the sharpshooter that carries it can’t survive the winters at this altitude. But we worry about global warming helping the bug to survive at this elevation.

    Norton is a native American grape and really grows well here. Cabernet Franc does exceptional as do several others. I enjoy growing grapes because I like the wine. SP
For more information, visit www.tigerwine.com.