Located at 8220 NC 68 North in Stokesdale, Stonefield Cellars offers wine for sale by the bottle as well as tastings, snacks, and chocolate Thursday through Sunday. Outdoor seating is available, and the winery hosts weekly Friday concerts. It can also host weddings and private events. Frequent buyers can enjoy discounts through a Wine Club.
Guilford County is hardly wine country, but Stonefield Cellars still manages to acquit itself nicely. At first glance, this smallish vineyard feels like a family farm (replete with chickens), but don’t take that for a lack of sophistication. Follow Fezzik the greeter-cat across the scenic patio, and you’ll enter a dignified tasting room. Tastings go for a very reasonable $7/person ($10 if you want special reserve wines) for seven samples. The selection features only two dry whites, six dry reds (including two reserves), and eight sweet/fruit wines. Everything is made on-site, and whatever isn’t grown locally is brought in from elsewhere in the Tarheel State.
I’m not much of a wine connoisseur, but I definitely found the blueberry (not too sweet), strawberry (decidedly sweeter), and vin de narle (a dessert wine with chocolate and cherry notes) to be to my liking. My wife, who also gave high marks to the Dread Pirate Roberts (a spicy red blend), and I opted for a bottle of the vin de narle in the mid-teens, about the going rate for many of the non-reserve bottles here.
Though there were several others who had lined up to the bar for tastings at the time of our visit, Stonefield Cellars staff seemed well-equipped to handle the volume. They were knowledgeable about their products and free of the snobbishness that “winery” sometimes connotes.
Those who have toured wineries the country (or the world) over may be nonplussed by Stonefield Cellars, but for the Triad, it does what it does very well.
8.25/10
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