Megan Riley opens a large book with a red velvet cover. Inside are 25 tiny, numbered vials of liquid. She selects No. 12, unscrews the thimble-sized black cap, and passes it to the five people at the table inside Hanover Park Vineyard’s Yadkinville tasting room. They smell it. “Most people say the scents smell familiar to them,” Riley tells me later, “but without visual cues, they can’t always put a name to them.”  

The book of vials is a wine aroma set, a tool used by wine educators like Riley, who owns winery tour company NC Wine Gals. The idea is that once you learn to identify the isolated scents in the kit—like violet, vanilla, toast, and blackberry—you’ll be able to pick out the same notes in your wine. The vial being passed around contains the scent of strawberry, present in about 90% of rosés, she says. (Rosé contains no strawberries. Scent notes in wine come from chemical compounds called esters, created during fermentation.)

After everyone sniffs, Riley shows them how to cover the openings of their glasses of rosé with the palm of one hand, swirl with the other, then breathe it in.

“I can’t smell it,” a middle-aged woman in a visor says with a laugh as she lowers her glass. 

“It takes a lot of practice,” Riley reassures her. 

Riley’s had five years of it. She launched NC Wine Gals in 2019. Before that, she’d worked in IT sales and then as a travel tour guide, leading small groups to countries like Iceland, Portugal, and Nepal. During one tour, in Croatia, she fell in love with wine—specifically, wine from places where people don’t necessarily expect to find good wine. 

Shortly after returning home to Charlotte, she attended a Piedmont Culinary Guild dinner where the hosts served North Carolina wines alongside their counterparts from the West Coast and Italy. “It really surprised me and opened my eyes to how good N.C. wine had gotten,” Riley says. 

Until then, the San Antonio, Texas, native had subscribed to the commonly held belief that all North Carolina wines are syrupy sweet and made from muscadine grapes. And for a long time, that was true. But in recent decades, vintners have experimented with grape varieties and discovered that many found in California and Europe—like chardonnay, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon—can grow in western North Carolina, too.   

“I started geeking out on it,” Riley says with a chuckle, “and I couldn’t believe people hadn’t heard about North Carolina wine or didn’t have any nice things to say about it.” She started studying it, then launched NC Wine Gals to share what she learned.

This year, Riley and her team of six other guides have led about 120 tours, up almost 20% from last year. Whether public or private, each tour has four to 10 guests—mostly women, she says, and a lot of bachelorette parties—who are shuttled around in NC Wine Gals-branded 15-passenger vans.

Most of the public tours out of Charlotte leave from Camp North End. The vans take guests to tastings at three wineries over about seven hours and include breakfast pairings, local charcuterie boards from Charlotte-based Off the Block, and vineyard picnics. The company also offers tours of other lengths, some that include stops at bourbon distilleries (to appeal to men, Riley says), and ones that leave from Asheville, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem. “If someone asks for it, I’ll create it,” Riley says. “Someone recently asked me about doing a tour in a Tesla. And I was like, ‘Sure, we can do a tour in a Tesla—why not?’” 

But all her tours run on a common theme: Break the saccharine stereotype. NC Wine Gals’ slogan is “The Unsweet Wine Tour,” and tours visit only wineries that produce alternatives to muscadine. Riley hopes to expand NC Wine Gals to offer more tours from more cities so even more people can discover the range of the state’s wines. She’s currently hiring more guides—and saving for another van.

“The great thing about these North Carolina wineries is, not only is the wine good, but they’re very unpretentious. It’s a great place to learn and ask questions about wine in general without the (owners) making you feel awful about not knowing things,” Riley says. “That’s the tenet of our tours, too.”

TESS ALLEN is the associate editor.