Editor's Note: This is the second of three farming stories we will bring you, highlighting local efforts to live off the land.

More than 10 miles into the heart of Weeksville is a house by the side of the road surrounded by grape vines. Some of

Staff photo by Justin Falls (ENLARGE)

Baby grapes are seen on the vine at Mack Sawyer's growing operation at Weeksville Vineyards.

Staff photo by Justin Falls (ENLARGE)

Mack Sawyer retrains a grape vine along a metal wire at his growing operation at Weeksville Vineyards at 1630 Salem Church Road in Pasquotank County, June 5.

the vines have slight tendrils clinging to metal wire strung between poles. Others have thick woody vines that have hardened in place.

Most of the 435 vines were bought three years ago in Georgia and Alabama, but Mack Sawyer, one of the home's current owners, said a few of the vines had begun to grow there years before when his wife's family lived on the site, and would pluck scuppernong grapes when passing the vines.

The disease resistant scuppernong vines are "what everybody

calls the old grape vine out in the country," Sawyer said.

Now those grapes are joining this year's crop of five muscadine varieties to be mixed into area wines made by area vintners like Sanctuary.

"We haven't had much of a harvest because the soil is not good down here," Sawyer said. "There's a lot of clay, so if we had planted anything else we would have had a lot of problems."

But muscadines can thrive in poor soil conditions, he says. One vine's main stalk is about four to five times smaller than one a few feet away planted about the same time.

Sawyer said the soil has clay spread throughout.

Where there is clay you can see where some vines didn't grow as tall as those in the rest of the five acres.

It's been three years since longtime Elizabeth City-area resident Sawyer, 62, started to plant the grapes. His harvest last year wasn't enough to sell to the Moonrise Bay winery on Knotts Island, so he gave the winery the few hundred pounds he had grown.

His goal this year is to get at least a ton to be able to sell to Moonrise Bay and Sanctuary Vineyards in Jarvisburg, once its winery opens. Three years is a typical period of time before planted vines can produce a full harvest, he said.

"People look at you like, 'well when are you getting grapes?'" Sawyer said. " ... I can't tell you to come back on August the 20th and say, 'let's pick grapes' because they're not going to all be ready at one time like something else like the corn, wheat and all that and your potatoes."

Sawyer hadn't grown grapes before he and his wife, Faye, inherited her parents' 45-acre farm. They lease out 40 of the acres and use five for the vines, which they've named Weeksville Vineyards & Cellars. They've also converted the farmhouse into a tasting room.

Sawyer had always enjoyed wine, but he became interested in growing grapes after a trip to Italy four years ago toward the end of his photography career.

"This was my little hobby, my little project to have something to do once I got out of photography, but it's turned out to be bigger than something to do," Sawyer said. "It could lead into something real big when these buds all mature and get very, very productive, but I don't see taking in the other 40 acres. I think I've got all I can chew right now."

Aside from the scuppernongs, he's also growing Carlos, Noble, Magnolia and Doreen muscadine varieties. One of his Weeksville neighbors is also growing muscadines, large circular, sweet grapes with thick skins.

He said the two area wineries with sandy soil are able to grow the vinifera grapes used to make dark reds and dry whites.

But because the sweet muscadines are hardy, and he hopes will flourish over a period of time, Sawyer wants to be one of their suppliers in the area's fairly open muscadine market.

Some say muscadine wine is too sweet, but some enjoy it after passing over reds, whites and blushes. In late May, a few weeks after the tasting room opened, one visitor told Sawyer he didn't like the taste of wine. Sawyer introduced him to muscadine wine.

"He said he never believed that wine could taste so good," Sawyer said. " ... But with people who just say 'I don't drink it, I don't taste it, I don't like it,' there's too many grapes out there, there's too many wine makers and there's too many wine makers with their own recipes to say, 'I don't like it.'"

Bill and Britney Luton are two Weeksville wine makers who make grape and other fruit and vegetable wines. Britney's taste buds are the couple's standard that they've used to perfect their recipes.

"He does all the work," she said. "I do the fun part."

Bill, 27, an Elizabeth City State University management and marketing professor, wanted to construct a fermentation center in their home but eventually built a square building behind his house last year just big enough for a 100-liter fermenting tank, several six-gallon bottles and various packaging equipment. Bill said he tries to keep the temperature at about 70 degrees and always between 60 and 80 degrees in the room.

Outside the door, the floor mat reads "The Party Starts Here."

The "party" consists of the Lutons' strawberry, pumpkin, raspberry, sweet potato and spiced-apple Riesling. The couple likes to make what they refer to as "weird wines." The sweet potato is popular, but the tomato wine experiment didn't work out. Britney said once they begin to grow their own grapes, she'd like to make more traditional wines such as Cabernet Franc.

The couple buys local produce now to ferment their wines, which they give to friends until they get necessary permits to sell from the Luton Family Winery.

"There's no way to make sure that you have quality except to watch it come out of the ground," Bill said.

He said they hope to be selling their sweet potato and pumpkin wines by the winter holiday season this year.

But their wines are in such a high demand from their friends acting as tasters, that they know they have to build up enough of a stock before making the wines available at their own winery, The City Wine Sellar, and Montero's Restaurant.

The most they've been able to produce is between 10 to 15 cases a month. Once they start selling the wines, Bill said he believes the sales, in this largely profitable industry, will fuel the growth of their business.

Bill teaches at the university and is also running for a school board position, and Britney, 28, takes care of the couple's two children and is finishing her last semester of college. As they began working on the wine, they found more reasons to continue.

"It gets in your blood, and you can't even really stop thinking about it," he said.

"It's what we want to do," Britney added.

"It brings us together," Bill said.

That's why they hope to begin planting vines in their land off Florida Road in February. The couple hopes to conduct soil samples in the fall and to start preparing the deep sandy soil. Bill knows the land is productive from when his grandfather grew prize-winning sweet potatoes on their four-acre property and his family owned a lot of the land along the road.

"We want to make a lasting legacy out of it just as they did," Bill said.

They started making wine about one and a half years ago when Bill read some books on it and the two visited wineries in South Carolina and North Carolina. At the Lake James Winery in Glen Alpine, N.C., they bought some equipment which they used to make their first batch of spiced-apple Riesling.

"It's not the equipment that makes the wines," Bill Luton said. "It's your recipe, and it's your adherence to the right standards."

In five years, Britney hopes to have mature vines and a larger winery to be able to host tastings.

They began the wine-making mostly because of an interest in wine. But they also want to incorporate Weeksville's atmosphere. Bill said the wineries they went to took visitors out of the outside world to a place that only included them, the grapes and the wine.

"Wine drinking to a serious wine drinker is less of a beverage than an experience," he said. "We drink our wine here, and we think it's just the best place in the world."

Mack Sawyer also hopes to sell the location at his vineyard, having customers taste wines that may derive in some part from his grapes then sit on rocking chairs on the porch in the silence as little but a few tractors drive by.

"I quit 30 years of photography and got into this, and I think I've gotten more work than I ever experienced," Sawyer said. "At 62, I'm wondering 'what are you doing?' ... just for the love of seeing them come up, and live, produce, and have a good glass of wine."

Weeksville Vineyards is located at 1630 Salem Church Road, and is open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays.

They can be reached at 252-330-2622. The Luton Family Winery can be reached online at lutonfamilywinery.com or by telephone at 252-330-4240.

Next week we'll take a look at sustainable farming

in Chowan County.