For damaged North Carolina wineries, there are no harvest celebrations to be found

Hailey Klepcyk is the president of the North Carolina Winegrower Association and a member of the state's Wine and Grape Council .

The native North Carolinian was educated there — studying Business Management at NC State and earning a degree in Art and Photography from Elon University — and over the past decade has worked in the wine industry both in distribution and as a tasting room manager at Piccione Vineyards in the Swan Creek American Viticultural Association (AVA).

These past couple of weeks have seen Klepcyk, a sales representative for Wine and Beer Supply, help to provide a lifeline to the Mountain Region wineries that were knocked for a loop by the remnants of Hurricane Helene in late September. Contacted Wednesday, she was in the midst of making another several-hour round-trip to where so much of the damage took place.

"I was in Boone trying to get gas, it was just a little crazy here," she said. "I'm headed up into the mountains to some of our wineries to deliver like shippers so they can at least sell wine online. So yes, just running around."

The damage was centered on wineries in and around Asheville, where the rebuilding from the winds and unfathomable flooding is expected to take years and the number of dead and missing residents continues to fluctuate .

Wineries of all sizes were affected, from Biltmore Estate in Buncombe County, which figures to be closed for at least another few weeks until its water is restored, to Stone Ashe Vineyards in Henderson County, which reopened on Oct. 10 but noted in an Oct. 7 Facebook post that several roads leading to the winery had been reduced to one lane because of damage.

Plēb Urban Winery in the River Arts District of Asheville was destroyed, according to a story that Wine Enthusiast posted in early October . The timing of the storm just made it worse, said Chris Denesha, co-owner and winemaker at Plēb Urban. Harvest had just ended and the grapes were just starting to ferment in tanks.

Insurance, he told Wine Enthusiast, will cover very little of what was lost.

"We recently planted a vineyard and had to pull out our largest and oldest vineyard this year," Denesha said. "We purposefully made and stocked up on wine this year to bulk up for the next three to four years. We had every barrel and tank at capacity from this past harvest—timing couldn't have been worse."

A GoFundMe has been started for Plēb's, which will be used to help support the staff and pay the farmers for their fruit.

The Wine Enthusiast story referenced several other wineries and their fate and linked to GoFundMe sites that have been started for them and other community organizations.

Klepcyk said she is working on a list of western North Carolina wineries, cideries and meaderies that will provide information on who's open, who will be reopening soon and who's closed indefinitely in addition to who has gift cards and wine to sell.

That list should be finished by early next week, she said.

One industry vet who is still feeling the reverberations of the storm is Justin Taylor, who makes wine at Parker-Binns Vineyard and Winery in Mill Spring and also for Marked Tree Vineyard in Flat Rock. Two trees fell on Taylor's home, which forced him to send his family to a temporary home in Atlanta while he remained in North Carolina.

"It is hard to describe because we were insulated from the outside world without cell service and data during the 10 days after the storm," he responded Thursday by email. "I wasn't able to get into the winery until 7 days after, and it was just to press and run back to figuring out our house. We are stable now with a rental house through the insurance company and [I'm] back in the cellar pulling things into place."

Dan McLaughlin, an original member of the Fine Wines of North Carolina organization who has successfully secured grant money to advance winery work and agricultural efforts in the state, said one short-term priority will be trying to find money that will help the affected wineries get their product to areas that are more accessible.

"Up toward Asheville is real bad," he wrote in a text several weeks ago. [Some of those] roads might not be accessible [until] late 2025. If tourism is way down, they'll all be hit hard since they sell most [of their wine] from their tasting rooms."