A warm afternoon in mid-June finds Jon-Michial Carter sitting in a space dotted with gleaming machines, half-ton refrigerated bins, and other winemaking accoutrements. He twirls a glass of red wine, a fruity, smooth cabernet blend. It’s nothing like his day job as founder of ChartSpan Medical Technologies, a high-tech company he started in Greenville thirteen years ago, the same year he married Catherine, the company’s administrative director.
Their light-rich winery lies tucked in a transitioning Greenville neighborhood only a ten-minute walk from Unity Park, a mile from the heart of downtown, and 2,487 miles away from where their merchandise begins its journey: in Paso Robles, California, where they purchase cabernet sauvignon, albariño, and tannat grapes.
This particular Saturday, Catherine welcomes visitors to Carter Family Wines. She uncorks a cabernet blend. Along with the wines, she serves a charcuterie board of salami, prosciutto, cheeses, small pickles, and crackers. All the while, the couple’s Goldendoodles, Frankie and Olivia, wait their turn for a photo op.
“I’ve been a wine collector for twenty-five years,” Jon-Michial says. “I had this overwhelming passion to do more with wine. I was obsessed with it. My passion reached a fever-pitch level.”
As their wines take three years to reach maturity, so Jon-Michial spent as many years fermenting his oenophilia. Through those years, he traveled frequently to New York City, where he earned his sommelier credentials from the Master Court of Sommeliers. He also traveled frequently to Paso Robles, where he worked and learned everything he could about how to make and sell wine.
“Becoming a sommelier helped me a lot,” he says, “but the most important training I got was working harvests, being in the production facility, being a grunt.” His classroom: Barr Estate Winery, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Greg Barr, who co-owns Barr Estate Winery, describes Jon-Michial this way: “My impression of Jon-Michial is that once he sets out to do something, nothing’s going to get in the way of him getting there. He’s very astute, studies the craft pretty well, and is always asking questions.”
As one would expect from such a detail-oriented student, Jon-Michial selected Paso Robles for its unique weather patterns, which create the ideal environment for what he calls “world-class grapes.” Harvests take place in late October to early November when the fruit is peak-cold. That’s when Jon-Michial hires an independent trucker out of Knoxville, Tennessee, to haul the grapes cross-country in a semitrailer container chilled to 35 degrees. The produce lands in the winery’s bins, just as cold.
Creating an Urban Winery
Jon-Michial’s journey from the high-tech, venture-capital world took a considerably less-direct route to his winery. A Kansas farm boy, he graduated from a liberal arts college in Wichita in 1991. Soon, he anchored the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts at Wichita’s ABC affiliate. A few later, he advanced to a broadcast company in Michigan. Then, on to Houston and Dallas as sales director for Viacom. Next stop, Greenville.
In 2019, Jon-Michial purchased three tons of grapes from Barr. That inaugural vintage yielded 250 cases in 2021. Last year, their 13 tons blended into 750 cases. (Over the next five years or so, the Carters say they plan to reach a cap of 3,000 cases.)
Last year, the company saw its first customer: John Moore, former president and CEO of NEXT Upstate, the startup incubator that, incidentally, helped launch ChartSpan. One day, Moore happened to click on the company’s website, though it was still in beta testing. He was hooked.
“The quality of this kind of wine is on a whole other level,” he says, “and then to be made here in the city of Greenville is just kind of cool—a true urban winery.”
As a working manufactory, the winery has no dedicated tasting room; rather, wine connoisseurs and would-be aficionados gather around a large table that looks like an outsized kitchen island. Visitors mingle among the machinery, get tours of the facility, and see the cask room, cooled to 54 degrees.
“We are giving them an experience with food and wine and conversation,” Catherine says of the private events. “And they get to ask all kinds of questions they might have had about wine.”
The couple serves as the tastings’ hosts. The Carters are, after all, the winery’s only employees. That’s why they enlist an army of volunteers when the grapes arrive. Here’s how the production process flows: The workers sort the grapes from the bins, de-stem them, run the fruit through pressing machines, and move the juices move into carefully selected French oak barrels.
A few years pass. And when the barrels finish their work, the wine is ready for consumption—and sales in artfully labeled bottles. Whites are priced from around $29 a bottle, the red blends for about $49 each.
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This afternoon, Jon-Michial shares what makes his heart flutter most these days. For it was back in October that his actual heart had been suffering from all that stress at his day job. His doctor told him to stay away from the office.
“I wasn’t allowed to look at ChartSpan. It was the happiest professional week of my life,” he says.
And now? “It’s how I’ll end my career, being a winemaker—something I’m really proud to say,” he states. “I only wish I would have found it earlier in life because I truly love it.”
Carter Family Wines sells direct-to-customer or, in corporate-speak, D2C—that is, online. And while the winery isn’t open to the general public because the couple has no interest in retail, the winery instead offers a Wine Club, whose costs range from $250 to $1,000, and welcomes non-members to book tastings by appointment on their website.
VIP Wine – Tasting Experience
At the tastings, Jon-Michial and Catherine Carter pour their latest vintage and give tours of the facility at 400 Birnie Street in Greenville, where they also share their winemaking techniques. The 60- to 90-minute experience costs $30 per person; groups are encouraged.
To book a wine tasting, visit www.carterfamilywines.com
Photography by Jack Robert Photography.
