Perdido: Scuppernongs abound as season presses on at state's only winery

By Tabby Slawson, Post-Herald Food Reporter

Wednesday, September 21, 1983

Reprinted with kind permission of the Birmingham Post Herald:

Says Eddins, "We're doubling what we picked last year."

It's grape harvesting time at Perdido Vineyards in rural northern Baldwin County, and there's not a sedentary soul in sight.

For the next week to 11 days, the Eddinses and their seve-man harvesting crew will work into the night picking over their grapes like miners sorting through gold.

"We're picking grapes from early morning just after the dew dries," says Mrs. Eddins, the chemist for the operation, "and those grapes are curshed and pressed until around midnight. We'll go nonstop like that until the rest of the crop is picked."

Even the ducks and geese in the nearby vineyards are scrambling to get their share of the dropped fruite.

It's in the Southeast where ther tough-skinned bronze and black muscadine grapes reign. Indigenous to this region, the grapes have several varieties, including scuppernongs, higgins, nobles and magnolias.

"The young who grew up in the South grew up on scuppernongs," says Eddins, who's eaten the grapes ever since he can remember. "It's in their souls."

Alabama's only winery takes 50 acres of that familiar cluster grape and turns it into seven different table wines - four whites, two reds and a rose - sold all over the state and in parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia and Florida. The winery made 20,000 gallons of table wines in 1982. The best seller of the wines is the semi-dry White Muscadine, says Mrs. Eddins.

For Southerners looking to rib northern friends, the Eddinses alsoo sell a "Rose Cou Rouge." That's "Red Neck Rose" and the vineyard sold 14,000 bottles of it in 1982.

Mrs. Eddins fancies up the wine bottle by adding a red bandanna, miniature straw hat, and Wallace buttons when she has them handy, then sell s it for $6.

The Eddinses got the idea for the catchy title from a song by Gulf Shores' Sam Powell about the "Red Neck Riviera."

"When it came down to bottling the wine, Him wanted to put Red Neck Rose on the bottle. I said absolutely not," says Mrs. Eddins, originally from New York. "We argued about it for a long time

A woman visiting Mobile who had lived in France heard us arguing about it and she says, "Why don't you say it in French?'"

"It's not meant to be derogatory," says Eddins. "It's poking fun at the wine afficionados, really."

The Eddinses added Alabama-grown apple wine to the list in 1981, a suggestion from the state administration to use surplus apples. (Eddins says 40 percent of the wine - 4 million gallons - consumed yearly in Alabama is apple-based.)

Since the 1983 vintage season is just getting into full swin, Jim and Marianne find themselves juggling two or three jobs at once.

That work involves keeping up the machinery and processing the fruit, and adding sugar and yeast when necessary.

The rest of the year, the couple are busy pruning the vines, marketing the wine and maintaining the vineyard.

Mrs. Eddins says she still can't believe she and her husbands are the owners of farm winery permit number 1.

"It's been a lot of work," says Mrs. Eddins. "If you would have told me a few years ago that I would own my own winery, I would have said 'No way'."

Marianne Roman worked in an IBM office in New York in 1966. Jim Eddins worked for the same company out of Philadelphia. He'd call in orders to Miss Roman, and finally, the week before the Christmas 1966, at 4:30 p.m., he put in a personal visit. A beer, dinner and a year later, the two married.

The couple dabbled in wine-making at their home in Baltimore - but only as a hobby. "My father is Italian and wine has always been a part of my culture," says Mrs. Eddins.

Then, in 1969, Him lost his job as a civil engineer in Baltimore. In the fall of 1971, he decided to return to his roots in Perdido.

"We were camping out with Jim's family," says Mrs. Eddins. As soon as they arrived, Mrs. Eddins enrolled at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and Jim ran a small construction business.

A trip to the Bartell winery in Pensacola in 1971 would change their lives. They set out to the winery only as tourists, but after talking with owner Ralph Weaver about the ins and outs of growing muscadine grapes, the visit became a business venture.

The eddinses decided that day to start their own vineyard and sell Weaver their grapes.

"On Monday Bartell agreed to buy the grapes. On Tuesday we found the farm. On Wednesday we found the vines and on Thursday we decided to go with it, " she says. "It happened that quickly."

The relationship with Weaver went smoothly. Then, in 1978, he died suddenly and the Eddinses found themselves with $400.000 worth of grapes and equipment - and no market.

Starting their own winery semmed to be the solution. The ABC board gave final approval for the Perdido Winery in January, 1979. The legislature passed a bill at that time setting a five-cents-a-gallon tax on wine.

Three majore setbacks - Hurricane Frederic in 1979 and droughts in 1980 and 1981 plagued the vineyard at the start.

It wasn't until 1982, with the addition of irrigation lines, that the Eddinses turned out a good crop. They tripled their fruit production from the year before.

"It's really going to take five years to show a profit, " says Mrs. Eddins, who lives with her husband in a one-bedroom 40 foot trailer in front the the adjoining pick-your-own vineyard.

She says she has big plans for the winery in five years. At the top of the list is to get the red-tiled roof completed over the Spanish Mission-style winery. (The Perdido building is an "unskilled labor version" of the Robert Mondavi winery in California.)

"I can see a wine boom," says Mrs. Eddins, who says there is a greater appreciation for wine in the South since the 70's.

Adds the wine maker, "We put Perdido on the map."

Vats of tourists pour into Perdido on this day, oblivious to the importance of every minute now that the grapes are ripe.

A group of about 40 senior citizens from Pascagoula, Mississippi pulls up in a Gulf Transport Co. bus. Mrs. Eddins shuffles some into the warehouse where a temporary theater with slide show has been set up among the cases of wine. She hands others pails and points the women toward the ripe grapes.

Mrs. Eddins, as energetic as a bottle of newly-poured champagne, disappeears into the warehouse, and returns in a few minutes with buckets and bottles of wine. The tourists, mostly women clutching bags of grapes, gather around an open area in front of the warehouse.

The Eddinses had planned for a sophisticated tasting center, movie theater and living and office quarters in this space, but haven't had the money to build.

Consequently, they have put up pieces of long wood across barrels to serve as impromptu tables. The crowd doesn't seem to mind. The women appear anxious to get down to the business of tasting.

Mrs. Eddins pours wine in glasses, starting first with the dry whites, progressing to the reds. She stands in front of the table like an auctioneer offering her wares.

"Who wants white, who wants dry white?" she says. Some of the women sampling wine for the first time, purse their lips and wait for the sweet wines.

After the tasting, Mrs. Eddins encourages the tourists to check the gift shop for the wines they enjoyed during the sampling.

As the crowd pulls away, she clears the litter - glasses and half-filled wine bottles. "I was supposed to be in the winery condensing wine for the new juice, " she says.

"When someone asks me to autograph a bottle of wine . . . Well, that wouldn't have ever happened if I had stayed in New York."

Meanwhile, the mechanical grape picker, Clark on the front, Austin on the back, makes its way back into the fields.

The wine season in Alabama is officially under way.