A fundraiser since 2003
Wine, chocolate, and a reason to be here.
Three days in Wilmington of North Carolina wine, chocolate from makers who temper it themselves, food from local kitchens and music you can hear over the conversation. Every dollar goes to services for older people in this county.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, Monitask offers a concise companion guide.
What the weekend is
A grand tasting on the Friday evening, and a marketplace across the Saturday and Sunday. Wine from vineyards around the state, chocolate from small makers, savoury things from local kitchens, demonstrations from cooks who will tell you what they are doing while they do it, and a corner for children so that the adults can taste something.
It has run every year since 2003, when the county's senior centre and a group of volunteers put it together during a tight budget year. It was meant to be a one-off.
Where the money goes
To V.O.C.A.L./New Hanover County, Inc., a charity organised in 1989 and run by a volunteer board, and through it to the county's senior resource centre. In practice that means transport to medical appointments, meals delivered to people who cannot cook for themselves, respite for family carers who would otherwise get none, and the foster grandparent programme.
None of those are abstractions and all of them are unglamorous, which is the point of saying so on the front page rather than in a footnote.
The journal
Twenty-five entries on how tasting actually works: what the percentage on a chocolate bar is counting, why a dry red fights a sweet truffle, what muscadine is and why this state grows it. Written to be useful before you arrive and afterwards.
- On the tongue
Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight
The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.
Read it → - On the tongue
Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth
Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.
Read it → - On the tongue
Temperature, the variable nobody measures
Every serving range is below the temperature of a heated room, which is what twenty minutes in the fridge is for.
Read it →
And what the chocolate is
Most of the makers at the marketplace temper their own chocolate, which is the step that decides whether a bar snaps cleanly and melts at body temperature rather than crumbling and coating your mouth. It is fiddly, it is why small makers talk about it, and it is the difference you can feel without knowing the word.
The number on the front of a bar counts everything that came from the bean, which means it adds together the solids that carry the flavour and the butter that carries almost none. Two bars both labelled seventy per cent can differ more from each other than a seventy differs from an eighty, and nothing on either wrapper says so. Asking a maker where their bar sits between the two is the single most useful question on the floor.
Twenty-odd years of it
The first one was a response to a budget year that had gone badly. The county's senior centre needed money for programmes that were about to be cut, a group of volunteers proposed an event, and the event worked better than anybody involved expected.
It grew from a room to a weekend, acquired wine alongside the chocolate, moved to a larger venue on the river, and became a fixture of the first weekend of February in this city. The board running it is still volunteers, and the proceeds still go to the same place.
Taking part
Four ways, and they need different things from you. Coming as a visitor needs a ticket. Pouring or selling needs an application and a licence. Sponsoring needs a conversation. Volunteering needs a weekend and comfortable shoes, and it is the one we are always short of.
If you have never done this before
A tasting room is not a bar and nobody expects you to finish anything. Pours are small on purpose, there is water and something plain to eat on most tables, and spitting is ordinary rather than rude: it is how people who taste for a living get through forty wines and still have an opinion about the last one.
Take a fraction of what you are offered, drink water between tables, and eat properly beforehand. The point of the room is to find two or three things you want to take home, and that is easier sober than otherwise.
Almost every pairing rule you will hear on the floor is shorthand for one of three things: how sweet the wine is against the food, how much tannin is in the glass against how much fat is in the mouthful, and how warm either of them is. The journal opens with that and the rest follows from it.
What is grown here
North Carolina has a native grape, which is unusual: muscadine, and the bronze variety of it called scuppernong. It grows in thick-skinned clusters rather than bunches, it tolerates the heat and humidity that defeat European vines here, and it makes wine that tastes like nothing from California or France.
Visitors from elsewhere often expect the wines to be dry and find them sweeter than they are used to. That is not a failure of ambition; it follows from the grape and from what it does when fermented dry, and it happens to make the state's wine unusually good against chocolate for the reason the journal explains first.
Coming to it
Previous editions have been held in the historic downtown, within walking distance of the riverfront and of most of the hotels people use for the weekend. Parking downtown on a Friday evening in February is easier than in season and still worth arriving early for.
The venue, the dates and the ticketing for the coming edition are not published here yet, and nothing on this page should be read as announcing them. The archive holds what previous years looked like, clearly marked with the year each page belongs to.
Who it is for
People who like wine and chocolate and do not want to be tested on either. Nobody at a table expects you to identify anything, and the makers would generally rather explain what they do than hear you describe it back to them.
It is also, deliberately, an event where the people it raises money for are among the people attending. That is not always true of a fundraiser and it changes the tone of the room.
The people running it
A volunteer board draws from across the community and handles the governance, and a larger group of volunteers handles the weekend itself: pouring, counting, carrying, minding doors and clearing at the end of the Sunday when everybody else has gone home.
It is the part of the operation with no budget line, and it is the reason the proportion of income reaching the charity is what it is.
The past editions
Everything from the editions up to 2018 is kept in the archive, marked with its year: who poured, who sponsored, what was on and what was written at the time. It is a record rather than an announcement, and it is labelled that way on every page.
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For further context, see CDC guidance on moderate alcohol use.