Meet Nicolas Hogrefe | Executive Winemaker, CEO, & Owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nicolas Hogrefe and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicolas, what’s something about your industry that outsiders are probably unaware of?
As people trend towards buying their alcohol at the supermarket, the small and local producers get pushed out of their local market. To supply chains you need distributors who will pick you up and you have to be able to supply the numbers and at the pricepoint that works for them. As mom and pop bottle shops shutter their doors due to the trend of large all in one place shopping this becomes even more forced. Unique artisanal products won’t be made if they can’t be sold en masse to stock resets at grocery stores if smaller retailers can’t afford them anymore as their wallets get lighter until they eventually close. There needs to be a movement to start buying your alcohol at the local shops again or I fear the loss of diversity and experimentation in our industry, leaving only those businesses that can get a bottling line and a low pricepoint. Hence, we got a bottling line and we keep tight margins, low enough to get mead made from local NC honey into grocery chains; we had no choice but to scale up and work with distributors to stock these grocers, it’s where 90% of our revenue comes from. Hence the beer bottles we use that keep packaging costs down. To survive and have any fighting chance at making it as a meadery we must scale up.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
I think I’ve been pushing a very large rock up a hill for some time. Bringing a new style of mead to the beverage industry, a spontaneously fermented method ancestrale honey wine, alcoholic and probiotic, was and continues to be a massive challenge. Many have never had or heard of mead before and even in the mead community we are a dry natural wild funky meadery in a sea of dessert fruity meads and heavy traditional meads. Yet people love our products when they try them and get to understand what they are enjoying. Supporting the local bees and drinking a healthier form of alcohol gets a lot of folks turned on once they get it, but wow the marketing for something new is always difficult, especially around something as habit forming as drinking beer. Getting g someone to go from beer to mead is a challenge here, but I spent years in the streets sampling our meads with the public and getting out there, so we are now seeing some returns on that work and people are getting their mead now at the grocery store! Trends are shifting in our favor and I’d like to think all that work promoting NC mead is starting to pay off.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Kerr Scott Lake would be my go to here in Wilkes. Hiking and mountain biking around its edge or canoeing/fishing around the lake would be my go to for a lovely day here. Or if you’re into disc golf (we have a 9 hole here at Stardust!) head to Rolling Pines! One of the best courses in the world.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Shoutout to Sandor Katz for writing the books Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation, the books that got me into this whole mess by convincing me to apply to grad school and get excited again about science.

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