We'd stopped there a couple years ago en route to Cary from Wrightsville Beach (which is near Wilmington) and enjoyed our visit. We also visited Duplin's sister location in South Myrtle Beach, S.C., earlier this year during out East Coast trip that included stops in Savannah, Charleston and the Myrtle Beach area. And we've bought Duplin wines from the shelves of local grocery stores.
Duplin is North Carolina's oldest winery, dating to 1976. It is known for its expansive selection of sweet wines, a good number of which are distributed to retail outlets in the state and a few adjacent states. The original site in Rose Hill also has a bistro that serves food during lunch hours.
For several months, we promised each other we'd pull away for a short trip (a two-hour drive) to the ocean with a stop at Duplin in between, but the arduous task of unpacking compounded by necessary return trips to Indianapolis to tidy up loose ends on the move there, not even one trip ever happened.
But on Oct. 24, shortly after returning from our most recent trip to Indy, we decided to do the day trip to the ocean. We stopped at the winery on the way, joined the winery's Heritage Club while there, then proceeded further south to Wrightsville Beach before returning home at dusk.
We tasted 12 wines at Duplin, only one or two of which we remembered from our tasting there two years ago. The winery is also festooned for the holidays (and I don't mean Thanksgiving -- see photos at left and below), and tickets to the dozen or so performances of its annual Country Christmas Revue, which begin next weekend, were nearly sold out already.
One of the wines available in the first batch of wines we received with our membership was called "Forty," a limited-edition white sweet wine produced to mark the winery's 40th anniversary -- and priced at $40 a bottle. It is undoubtedly one of the best sweet whites I've ever had; we each had a glass of it, which came free as another perk of our membership (members get one free glass with each visit). Those are our glass of "Forty" you see in the photo leading off the post. Below is a photo of the main area with tasting bar. This is where club members meet for the quarterly wine-release pickups, we're told.
While in Rose Hill, which boasts on its roadside welcome signs that it is home to the largest frying pan in the world, we pulled off the highway to briefly check out the frying pan. It was mostly covered under a pavilion in a town park, apparently exposed only during special community celebrations. That's the pavilion in the first photo below, and a closeup of the "frying pan" (the handle is closest to the camera) in the second photo below.
I had been eager to return to the Fish House Grill in Wrightsville Beach, where a couple years ago I enjoyed what I considered the best fish and chips meal I've ever had. You can imagine our disappointment when we got to Fish House and looked through the menu only to find that the fish and chips was no longer there.
We asked our server about it, and he said it had been removed in June. He said the meal was very popular, "but it wasn't cost-effective."Lee Ann and I talked about what that could possibly mean, and the only thing we could think of was that the price of the wonderful fish they used had gone up and they couldn't justify passing along the cost increase to customers. I ended up getting a blackened mahi mahi, but it wasn't the same.
Because we so enjoyed the trip to Duplin, we made another visit there on Nov. 2, this time to dine at the bistro. The bistro's special of the day was a fried pork chop, which I've never had before. So I was game. Unfortunately, it was not as good as I had hoped it would be.
All of the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone 6s Plus.
Above and below: Shots from Wrightsville Beach.
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