From the center of the vineyard, the land opens in every direction. Mountains stack against the horizon. The sky feels as big as a Billy Wilder western. Rows of vines run long and straight, broken only by the gradual slope of the ground.
Vineyard manager JD Dalton has been standing in this view for most of his adult life. He took over management of the farm in May 2009, the same year the owners purchased the property and its original 92 acres. Seventeen years later, the vineyard has more than doubled in size, stretching across 208 acres with roughly 6,000 vines rooted in clay soil that Dalton knows as well as his own backyard.
In fact, it is his backyard.
“My front yard isn’t very big,” he says, glancing back toward his house. “But my backyard is a pretty good size.”
Dalton lives on the property. His bedroom window looks out over the vines. He jokes that he’s never late to work, but he also never really leaves it. The vineyard has a way of collapsing the line between job and life, especially when the work never stops.
When Dalton first arrived, his background was far removed from agriculture. He earned a degree in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, graduating in 1999. After college, he went to work for a physician who would later become one of the vineyard’s owners. When the opportunity arose in 2009, Dalton stepped into a role he admits he barely understood.
“I was just trying to figure out what in the world we were doing,” he says. “I always tell people I was either at the wrong place at the right time or the right place at the wrong time.”
Learning the land
At the time, the land was defined largely by tree line, and the infrastructure was minimal. Vineyard management is not something that reveals itself quickly, and Dalton discovered early on that the learning curve was steep and patience was a requirement.
“There’s not one thing you can do out here in a day,” he says. “You can’t mow the grass in a day. You can’t get all the weeds in a day. You can’t harvest in a day. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
That sense of unfinished work shapes every step across the property. Even now, after nearly two decades, the vineyard is never complete. Vines are lost every year for reasons ranging from disease to weather to simple chance. Others are planted to replace them. Progress is measured in seasons, not days.
Along one stretch of the vineyard, blue grow tubes mark the newest additions – 300 vines planted this year. They stand out against the older rows, each one a promise that won’t pay off for years.
“It’ll take about four or five years to get fruit off those vines,” Dalton says, pointing to a nearby row. “This is not a get-rich-quick thing. This is a long-term commitment.”
The vineyard currently holds about 202 rows, arranged in a repeating pattern: two rows of one variety, two of another, then the sequence starts again.
A common assumption is that the layout is designed for pollination. Dalton shakes his head. The truth is more practical.
“The harvest machines need a lot of room to turn around,” he explains. “It’s much more efficient to come down gradually than to constantly turn or back up.”
Thriving muscadines
Tsali Notch grows six grape varieties, most of them bronze muscadines. Magnolia and Carlos are the most familiar names to Tennessee winemakers. Doreen and Sterling follow, with Sterling standing out as a personal favorite.
“It’s a bit bigger,” Dalton says. “Everybody thinks a muscadine is the size of an orange. They’re large, but they’re not all that way.”
For red wines, the vineyard relies on Noble grapes – small berries, barely larger than blueberries, but packed with flavor. Dalton refers to the shared characteristic across all of them as “the muscadine twang,” a quality that defines the fruit more than subtle differences in taste.
“If you blindfolded me and I tasted them, I don’t know that I could tell them apart by flavor alone,” he says. “Texture, maybe. But flavor-wise, they all have that muscadine twang. That’s what makes them unique.”
The vines here are naturally resilient. Dalton notes that they haven’t been sprayed with anything in the 17 years he’s been on the property.
“I don’t plan on doing that,” he says. “But if I have to, I will.”
The emphasis is always on observation first. Dalton talks about the vineyard the way a physician might talk about a patient: looking, smelling, touching, tasting before turning to data.
“We harvest based on sugar content,” he says. “But the most important thing we do is observe with our eyes. Then we smell. You can smell ripeness. You taste it. Then we use science.”
Evolving harvest
Harvest has changed dramatically over the years. Early on, the vineyard relied on an aging French Braud harvester – narrow, slow and efficient only by older standards. Its greatest advantage was simplicity. One person could operate it. Its greatest drawback was age.
“If you can’t find parts and you start having to build them, that gets expensive,” Dalton says.
With the old machine, harvest could stretch six to eight weeks. Today, it takes about nine days.
The modern harvester shakes the vines, drops the fruit and uses vacuum systems to separate leaves and sticks. Everything that doesn’t belong in the bin is mulched and returned directly to the rows, feeding the soil it came from.
“That’s how efficient the machine is,” Dalton says.
Even so, harvest is never predictable. Dalton has seen yields swing from 65 tons to more than 200 tons depending on the year. Rain, heat and timing all leave their mark on the fruit.
“There are supposed to be four seasons,” he says. “But I’ve never had one year identical to another.”
Reshaping the future
For several years, Tsali Notch existed solely as a raw fruit producer. Grapes were sold to wineries and breweries, and outside of “you-pick” season in early fall, there was little reason for the public to venture 9 miles off the interstate.
That changed in February 2012, when Tennessee passed the custom crush law.
“That was huge for us,” Dalton says. “It allowed us to turn our fruit into wine and sustain the business.”
The vineyard expanded its offerings to include wine, muscadine products and hard cider. Visitors began driving several hours not just to buy fruit but to experience the place.
Events became another piece of the puzzle. Dalton is careful with the distinction.
“We’re not an event venue,” he says. “We’re a working vineyard that does events. That’s different.”
Tsali Notch also participates in Harvest Hosts, allowing members to request overnight stays. The program brings dozens of RV drivers each year and helps support what Dalton describes as an 11-month agricultural cycle.
“I don’t have animals like a dairy,” he says. “But I do have 6,000 little vines that depend on us.”
A small but mighty crew
That “us” is a small group. Dalton’s father, now 83, has worked alongside him since the beginning. Another longtime employee, Vicente, has also been there since 2009. Three people are responsible for pruning every vine on the property by hand.
Pruning begins after harvest, once leaves fall and the vines go dormant. It typically starts in November and stretches into March.
The work is meticulous and repetitive, but it sets the stage for everything that follows. Grape vines, Dalton notes, can produce for about a century under the right conditions. In this climate, with this soil and rainfall, they do well.
The reward for that patience is brief. When harvest arrives, Dalton takes only the berry off the vine. Everything else remains, waiting for the cycle to begin again.
Most of the wine made from Tsali Notch fruit is produced elsewhere. Dalton’s responsibilities are already full, and winemaking would add another layer of complexity.
“I’m very thankful for our partners,” he says.
Through collaborations along the Rocky Top Wine Trail, the vineyard has access to a processing facility capable of handling 60 tons of fruit a day – a turning point that opened new possibilities for Tsali Notch.
“Before that, I could sell only raw fruit,” Dalton says. “Now they can turn it into liquid for me, and I can sell 300 gallons here, 200 gallons there, 50 gallons somewhere else.”
The vineyard’s fruit ends up in bottles made by Keg Springs Winery, Amber Falls Winery & Cellars, Silver Springs Bottling and Apple Barn Winery, which has also produced cider. Together, they’ve pushed muscadine beyond its traditional boundaries.
“Most Southern wineries do muscadine one of two ways – sweet red or sweet white,” Dalton says. “We do it 13 different ways, plus ciders.”
Experimentation is constant. This year, Dalton tested underripe fruit for a low-alcohol, low-calorie wine. Whether it ever reaches production is uncertain.
“But it might be phenomenal,” he says. “We’ll see.”
Playing the long game
From the vineyard, the view stretches across a broad swath of Tennessee. Dalton pauses often, not because there’s nothing to do but because there’s always something to notice.
“You can’t beat it for a backyard,” he says.
The vineyard is quiet now, settled into the space between seasons. Leaves will fall and pruning will begin. Blue grow tubes will stand in place, waiting years for their turn.
Nothing here moves quickly, and nothing ever really ends. For Dalton, that’s the point.
“This is a long game,” he says.
And at Tsali Notch, the long view is everywhere you look.