Mother vine

I was accompanied by a group of cousins who had fled a wedding at Manteo, a small town nearby. We were refugees from the family wedding. I went to the Mother Vine in order to view the oldest grapevine cultivated in North America. My cousins came to see their wine writer relative and to stay out of the way as my sister, mother of the bride, was frantically making last-minute plans. The Wilsons were generous and indulgent hostesses.

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The Mother Vine shrub is not your average front yard plant. Troy Kickler of the North Carolina History Project says it may be over 400 years old. Croatan Indians planted it in the 1580s. Or perhaps by English settlers from the Lost Colony, which was the first English outpost of North America. It is noted in a 1720s land grant, and it appears in newspaper reports from the 1850s and photographs taken around the turn of the century.

It occupies about one-third of the front yard of the Wilsons. The trellis is six feet high and made of mostly black locusts. This trellis was in place for most of its life before Jack and Estelle purchased the property in the late 1950s and built their home.

The Vine, despite its history, has an astonishingly modern story. It survived a near-divine experience due to technology and recovered to thrive.

Jack Wilson IV and his son John Wilson IV told us about their family’s care of the Vine. They explained how they had trimmed the Vine back to its original acre plus Vinead in order to build the house. Jack also Vineribed how he planted a fence along Mother Vineyard Road to conceal the Vine from tourists who would come to the Wilsons’ patio to enjoy the view of RoanoVineound.

Jack noticed in the spring of 2010 that the leaves along the west edge of Mother Vineyard Road were dying. Unintentionally, a subcontractor of Dominion Power sprayed an herbicide on the Mother Vine to keep the brush from the power lines. Jack called on specialists from North Carolina State University and the University of Virginia to help. They recommended a radical solution: trim the vines ahead of the poison and fertilize them heavily to boost the Vine’s immunity to the chemical. These efforts were successful.

The Mother Vine canines of its ordeal even stronger. The university specialists suggested that the Vine be allowed to grow again in order to strengthen its roots. The Wilsons expand their trellis, and they plan to let vines grow through the front yard.

Jack stated, “It was fertilized and tended to more in the past few years than it had been in the previous 60 years.”

John IV, his son, confirmed that the family had arranged to give the property to Outer Banks Conservationists. This is a group founded by the family to preserve and keep the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, located in Corolla (N.C.), to the public. He said that the conservancy would take over the Vine’s stewardship after his parents died.

It might take a little while. Jack, 88, and Vine’stelle, both 84 years old, are as healthy and spirited as the Vine in their front garden. Jack eats grapes off the Mother Vine. The grapes are muscadine scuppernongs, which contain about ten times as much resveratrol as European wine grapes.

When I visited, there were no grapes left from 2013. With each harvest, the Wilsons let their neighbors pick grapes and enjoy them. Duplin Winery in North Carolina makes wine using cuttings taken from the Mother Vine. The company also makes nutritional supplements out of by-products. John gave me two Duplin’s Mothervine wines, along with a warning.

He said, “It’s best to freeze it very cold and then pour it on vanilla ice-cream.” It’s very sweet.

The ice cream was not needed when I opened the bottle at home a week later. The wine was good. It was sweet but with a balanced acidity. It had the “foxy’ flavor of an American native grape. This is the exact flavor the Lost Colony colonists would have experienced when they ate grapes found on Roanoke Island.

The island was “so filled with grapes”. . . One of the first settlers to the Lost Colony, who made his discovery in 1584, wrote: “I think that in all of the world there is no such abundance.” As I sipped the Mother Vine, I felt a continent in front of me. It was raw and unexplored. I could see its promise of freedom, wealth, and adventure reflected on my glass.

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