When Nico Hogrefe talks about terroir, the owner and executive winemaker of Stardust Cellars in North Wilkesboro is talking —at least a little bit—about land. After all, it was the rolling beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains that drew him across the country in 2016 from San Diego to Wilkes County, North Carolina. And he’s talking a bit about water, pulled from wells beneath his winery.
But most of all, Hogrefe is talking about air, and the creatures who inhabit that omnipresent element. Stardust specializes in what he calls ancestral meads, honey wines brewed without commercial yeasts. The bees and wild microorganisms that float through the Southern Appalachian foothills, he believes, are what make his beverages unlike anything else in the world.
