"...as comfortable as an old hound dog under the back porch."

Friday, 15 February 2013.  The title of this blog entry was taken off a brochure from the Grapefull Sisters Vineyard, which is located just outside Tabor City, NC. That's where we spent a most pleasant Friday afternoon today, tasting wines and enjoying a picnic lunch...along with a chilled bottle of wine, of course!  We've been dying to visit this winery -- just a few minutes from our Willow Tree campground -- but haven't found the perfect day for a picnic.  Today was just such a day.  Beautiful blue skies -- the bluest blue I think I've ever seen, with nary a cloud in sight-- and temps in the mid-60's provided just the invitation we needed to head north into North Carolina to visit the Grapefull Sisters winery.  Situated in a mostly remote, rural, farming area of NC, GSV is certainly not the easiest place to find.  It took us a couple wrong turns before we ended up at the head of their driveway into not only the winery, but the CarrollWoods RV Park & Campground, part of the same property.  GSV also has a quaint inn/B&B, the "Inn d'vine" that resembles an old tobacco barn.  It actually looked quite charming, in a "rural" sort of way.  We were visiting in what can only be described as the off-season, since we had the tasting room all to ourselves.  Amy was our wine expert, and in this case, it was all about the Muscadine grape, a Native American grape naturally low in sugar and extremely high in antioxidants (resveratrol) -- about 40x higher in antioxidants than other vinifera grapes, according to their literature.  According to Amy -- who seemed to know anything and everything about the Muscadine grape -- Johns Hopkins University did a study following the revelation that a glass of red wine every day was good for you.  Per JHU, the red wine should be Muscadine wine and you should actually drink TWO glasses of this type of red wine.  The health benefits outweigh any concerns about alcohol for most people.  I haven't followed up on her explanation, but all the wines we tried at GSV were mighty tasty.  I would say mostly semi-sweet to sweet, but a couple of them "fooled" your taste buds, since after the first sip it tasted just a tad more peppery.  Very nice for accompanying cheese and crackers.  We ended up buying a chilled bottle of GSV's Southern Charm wine, described as a wonderfully balanced light bodied wine...with well-expressed crisp red fruits with plenty of soft flavors.  And it went quite well with the picnic lunch Lynette had prepared for us: cheddar cheese, crackers, and chicken salad. We ate our lunch and drank our Southern Charm wine on the grounds at GSV, next to a small man-made pond under a breathtakingly blue-as-blue-can-be sky.  We even had a "floor show" of sorts: one huge goose, three goslings, and two mallard ducks.  If the ducks got too close to the goslings, the big goose would chase the ducks around the pond or out of it.  Made for quite an interesting show as we sipped our wine, ate our lunch, and enjoyed a most beautiful day in the Carolinas.

Lynette pouring a glass of Southern Charm at GSV.

The resident "top-dog" goose surveying its territory.

The "top-dog" goose with goslings under the fir tree.

And here's another shot of our campsite at Willow Tree.  If you enlarge the photo, you'll see we are camped on Pace Arrow Drive; campsite is #24.  All the campground's streets are named after well-know motorhome manufacturers.