Best of 2023

A look back at the top experiences of the last year

2023 was a great year for wine and beer activities, so I decided to rank the highlights of my beer and wine activities. Here’s to doing even more in 2024!

Happy New Year from North Carolina wine influencers, 2 Winey Friends, NC Wine Guys, Blends & Bubbly, NC Wines, Tarheel Taps & Corks and Wine Mouths

8: Special events in wine, beer and cider
Events at North Carolina wineries, breweries and cideries are getting better all the time. Here are just a few that were memorable in 2023: A wine and food pairing dinner at Gioia Dell’Amore Cellars. They promise more wine dinners in 2024. A Raclette cheese tasting at Botanist & Barrel, because who can resist this melted cheese poured over vegetables, bread and more? So many celebrations at Glass Jug Beer Lab, including a Girl Scout cookie and beer pairing in RTP and a Mardi Gras celebration in downtown Durham. And fellow wine influencer Dave Nershi shared his love for and expertise in South African wines by hosting a food and wine pairing dinner at his home. And Dathan and Jen of Triangle Around Town hosted a fun “Open that Bottle” night in their home.

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  Guests gather around tables in the Gioia dell’Amore tasting room for the food-wine pairing dinner.

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  Mardi Gras celebration at Glass Jug Beer Lab in Durham’s Central Park downtown.

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  Raclette cheese tasting at Botanist & Barrel.

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  South African wine dinner at with Dave Nershi of Vino-Sphere.

7: Mead tasting with friends at Starrlight Mead
I think The Plant in Pittsboro is such a fun place to visit, so I invited some friends to taste mead at the Starrlight tasting room in the beverage district. After our tasting, we toured the production room and strolled through The Plant to see other businesses, including ax throwing. We wrapped up our afternoon with a beer at Fair Game Beverage.

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6: Food and beer tours
I started guiding food tours with Triangle Food and City Tours, which provides tours in Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood and Boylan Heights. I also began working with People1Tourism to offer some beer and cider tours in the Whitaker Mill neighborhood. Please look for opportunities to participate in both of these tour groups!

5: Wine tastings with Merlot2Muscadine
Fellow wine influencer Arthur Barham hosted several wine tastings this year, and I participated in two of them – sparkling wine and Tannat tastings. Arthur is a real expert in planning such events, and I hope he’ll do more of them in 2024!

With candles and lanterns, the tasting continued even without lights.

May wine tastings with Merlot 2 Muscadine

4: NC Winegrower’s Association meeting
This year’s wine annual meeting was a real celebration, and as one participant described it, like a family reunion. The sessions were great fun, including a Reidel glassware demonstration. You can read more about it in the blog or Screw-it Wine (shop for the digital issue).

A Reidle glassware demonstration was part of the wine conference. Nearly 300 participated.

3: Judging the 2023 NC Wine Competition
After a surprise last-minute phone call from Brianna Burns of NC Wine and Grape Council, I found myself with a group of wine experts judging the top wines entered in the state wine competition. And this year’s top pick was a Seyval Blanc from Shadow Springs Vineyards.

Judging the NC Wine Competition for 2023

2: NC Wine Digital Media Summit
Having hosted this event in Yadkin Valley, as well as online during the pandemic, the @ncwineguys took this event to Western North Carolina to explore wineries in the Crest of the Blue Ridge AVA. In advance of the Summit, participants spent two days touring wineries and cideries in the Hendersonville area.

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1: Trip to Napa and Sonoma
A Big Highlight of this year’s wine experiences was visiting wineries and more in Napa and Sonoma. It was a wonderful opportunity to taste some of the best wine produced in the world, but it also left us with a true appreciation of what North Carolina’s wine industry and how accessible it is. You can read all about the trip in three recent blog posts – yes, it took three posts to get it all down! Before Christmas, Arthur Barham and I took the opportunity to trade notes on recent wine trips, including his to the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Arthur, Natalie, Kyle and Mary enjoyed dinner together and swapping wine trip stories.

Napa and Sonoma
Part 1, Northern Sonoma and best views of the region
Part 2, Sparkling wines and things to do off the wine trail
Part 3, Historic and boutique wineries, and tips for your own visit

Merlot2Muscadine on the Finger Lakes region

Chatham Beverage District

Spend a day in this unique setting tasting mead, beer, cider, coffee and spirits

Guests enjoy beverages at outdoor tables in the Beverage District.

When I was in graduate school in 2009, one of my classes took a field trip to Piedmont Biofuels in Pittsboro, where used cooking oil was converted to biodiesel. When I visited the Chatham Beverage District recently and saw the signs for Piedmont Biofuels, the memory came right back to me.

The once industrial complex that became the Beverage District is now home to mead, beer, cider, coffee and spirits, as well as a small farm that provides produce for a vegetarian restaurant. Lyle Estill, owner of Fair Game Beverage and Distillery, describes the transformation of the area as, “a happy accident.”

The complex and surrounding acreage started as a chrysanthemum farm in the 1950s. From 1986-96, it became the “Cold War relic” of an aluminum smelting plant, but that operation never quite took off. So the plant was abandoned until Estill and partners bought it in 2005 to produce biodiesel. 

In 2013, Fair Game moved into the space as the 13th distillery in North Carolina and the first to do barrel aging. Clientele footwear changed from “steel-toed boots to stilettos,” he said.

Estill became an owner of Fair Game Distillery in the 1990s and began to see a new purpose for the district. At the time, Becky and Ben Starr of Starrlight Mead were looking for a bigger home and began making plans to build in the district.

Today, Fair Game Beverage offers rotating taps of local beer and cider from the district’s Chatham Cider Works (which doesn’t yet have room for its own tasting area) and BMC Brewing Co., as well as other local beverage producers. Fair Game also sells its own spirits (with distillery tours on Saturdays) and a nice selection of estate wines from across North Carolina.

“The thing is booming,” Estill says. On any weekend afternoon, crowds fill the parking areas and wander to the meadery or into the beverage district. The space feels almost like a Spaghetti Western set, with buildings on two sides of an open space, where guests stroll by.

Part of the district’s charm is outdoor artwork, including a shiny pondscape with dragonflies and birds, as well as giant green frogs. Hearing loud noises at the end of the property? You’ll find people playing darts and throwing axes at a wooden wall.

Starrlight Mead opened its new tasting room and production facility in October 2018, after about four years of planning and building. The new facility doubled the size of both the production and tasting room space from their original location at Chatham Marketplace.

On Mead Day back in early August, crowds filled Starrlight Mead’s tasting room and porch to sample the honey wine that comes in a variety of flavors, from traditional off-dry mead to blackberry, as well as coffee, lavender, ginger and more. A holiday favorite is spiced apple, which can be served warm. 

“Business is increasing to levels even better than pre-pandemic,” Becky Starr says.

The Starrs started their meadery in 2010 after tasting mead at Renaissance fairs. The meadery purchases 7 tons of honey each year (roughly 400 hives’ worth) to make their mead. Three hives onsite help visitors understand that bees are the equivalent of grape vines for mead production.

At Starrlight Mead, you can experience a guided mead tasting at the tasting room bar or enjoy six meads in a flight on your own. Once you’ve decided which ones you like, buy a bottle to enjoy in the rockers on the covered porch.

Hungry? Copeland Springs Kitchen offers vegetarian bowls and small plates with seasonal faire like squash pie, zucchini and corn fritters, and sweet and spicy cucumber salad. Their food is available to take out to any of the beverage businesses in the district. 

Around the perimeter of the Beverage District are fields where Copeland Springs Farm raises produce. A walking trail around the property goes by the farming areas.

On Sept. 25, Starrlight will hold its annual Meadfest, a mini-Renaissance Faire. The free, family-friendly event will be mostly outdoors.

More about Meadfest

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Fair Game Beverage Co.
220 Lorax Lane
Pittsboro, NC
919.548.6884

Starrlight Mead
130 Lorax Lane
Pittsboro, NC
919.533.6314