ASHEVILLE – What was supposed to be a time for celebration has become a season of mourning what could have been for the owners of a winery and restaurant.
Gourmand owners Peyton Barrell and Katie Grabach were awaiting shipment of the final pieces of equipment to complete their French rotisserie and wine yard, set to open Nov. 7 in the River Arts District.
At the grand opening, they’d planned to open the bottles of custom-blended wine provided by their Foundy Street neighbors, Pleb Urban Winery.
Now, the bottles are rare, bittersweet treasures ― the last of Pleb’s existing products after Tropical Storm Helene decimated the winery leaving a debris-scattered foundation.
“We love those guys. It’s terrible,” Barrell said. “It takes so much work and so much time to make really good wine, especially in an area that’s foraging new territory to make good wine. I’m at a loss for words for what’s happened to them. It’s incredibly unfortunate.”
Gourmand didn’t fare well either.
The restaurant was knocked off its base and crashed into the wall of next-door brewery in the Sept. 27 historic flood, raising the French Broad River to more than 24 feet.
“We didn’t think it would be this bad. We put up one layer of sandbags. It wasn’t a ton of time,” said Lauren Turpin, who founded the Pleb in 2016 and opened the tasting room in 2018 with business partner and winemaker, Chris Denesha.
Barrell and Grabach said the 35 Pleb magnums ― safely stored in their home’s basement ― were to mark the opening of the eatery and wine bar but will likely be reserved for a relief aid fundraising pop-up.
What remains of Pleb, which celebrated its sixth anniversary on Sept. 1, are the winery’s production room floor drains, half of the tasting room bar and part of the framing from the patio fence.
The winery, which had distribution markets in New York, Texas, California and Massachusetts, had been stocked with the last grape harvest of the season and enough wine stored to last for at least two years.
Its vast inventory was among the items carried away with the current.
“Whatever’s out there is all that’s left,” Turpin said.
Pleb Urban Winery’s final haul
On Oct. 24, Danesha stood in the open space where Pleb used to be, still amazed by the destruction. Denesha said he didn’t imagine the storm would topple the 10,000-square-foot cinderblock and metal-framed building.
Turpin said she was at the winery when the preceding heavy rainfall began and was forced to quickly vacate the area as the river seeped onto Lyman Street. She said she would’ve taken more valuables with her if she’d known the outcome, though it still wouldn’t have been enough to save the wine company.
“In order to move 85 barrels of wine and 10-15 tanks, that would probably take months,” Turpin said.
Denesha said Pleb likely took the brunt of the flood waters and debris that rushed into the River Arts District due to its position as the structure nearest where the Swannanoa River feeds into the French Broad River.
Denesha said as a grape grower he regularly follows weather forecasts and thought the area would reach 10 inches of rainfall.
“We didn’t see it coming. We thought worst case scenario maybe a foot of water,” he said.
Denesha said he’d harvested the final batch of grapes of the season and stored them at the winery a day before the heavy rainfall began.
Recently, Pleb relocated its vineyard from Boone to Marshall. He filled every tank and barrel with wine, knowing that they were going to have reduced wine production for the next couple of years.
Denesha said the newly planted crops are “mostly alive” but that it would take three to four years after yield for the new grape harvests to grow. Pleb worked with other growers but without a building, equipment and necessary funding, there’s nothing to produce.
Turpin said the estimated losses include a product retail value of $2.2 million and hundreds of thousands more for the equipment, structure and other operational tools.
She said while Pleb’s brand and mission are alive the company wouldn’t be rebuilding but starting over.
“(With) wine ― the hardest thing you can lose is time and that’s what we lost, and we can’t replace that,” Turpin said.
Denesha and Turpin said they established Pleb to foster North Carolina’s wine industry and culture, embracing organic and sustainable farming. Eighteen months after the tasting room opened, the business was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’d just gotten on the other side of that. We were starting to make some headway,” Turpin said.
Pleb employed two full-time production workers and five part-time bartenders, who Denesha said are receiving assistance, including through its GoFundMe campaign.
Gourmand indefinitely closed before opening day
Gourmand briefly operated at S&W Market, a downtown food hall, before closing in October 2023 and the owners staking a claim on the RAD location earlier this year.
Barrell said Tropical Storm Helene floated Gourmand’s 613-square-foot newly renovated building, which was set on stilt beams, off its foundation, spun it around, and stuck between a telephone pole and The Wedge Brewery at Foundation.
Grabach said a line at the ceiling tile marks where water and silt rose inside.
The wrecked restaurant was weeks from welcoming its first diners. Yet, the couple considers themselves “lucky.”
Barrell said they had three high-priced pieces of equipment scheduled to be delivered the Monday after the storm and were permitted to cancel the orders at no charge.
“Had this happened a week later we would’ve had like another $120,000 worth of stuff in that building,” he said. “The rest of it’s in there. It looks like somebody grabbed the building and shook it up.”
Barrell said an estimated $250,000 was invested in the business, including a storage unit with nearly $40,000 worth of equipment that was washed out.
Foundation Woodworks, a woodworking studio across the parking and among the many RAD businesses destroyed, was custom building the restaurant’s bar.
Barrell said a front-of-house manager had been hired and is receiving unemployment.
“In some ways, we’re unlucky because it’s a total loss but at the same time we were like 10-15 days from it being twice as bad,” he said. “That’s what’s helping us sleep at night. It’s terrible but it was so close to being so much worse. We’re only responsible for three people right now, not 30.”
Whether Gourmand opens depends on funding, and the business owners don’t know if the building, which has molded and would require being lifted and placed back onto its foundation, is salvageable or if the city will permit them to rebuild at the site.
“We would like to come back here. We would like to see the River Arts District be reconstructed,” Barrell said.
Saving the River Arts District – ‘Downtown for locals’
Despite current events, Gourmand and Pleb owners said they would stay in Asheville and support River Arts Districts’ renaissance and keeping it local-based.
Denesha, a Boone native, and Turpin, of Asheville, said it’s too soon to know what will happen next for Pleb or their careers. But Denesha said the situation has motivated him to burrow deeper into the community.
Barrell and Grabach lived in New Orleans for four years, where they were visiting when Tropical Storm Helene made landfall in Asheville and where they operated Gourmand as a wholesale charcuterie company several years ago.
Nearly two years ago, they moved to Asheville where they thought they would be “consistent and safe” from hurricanes and a city “viable for running a business.”
“If there’s a path forward for us to do it, we would like to bear the torch for the rebuild,” Barrell said. “This development was so cool and had so much potential ― this whole neighborhood does ― and we need to bring it back. Local people need to invest into it to keep it the River Arts District.”
Barrell and Grabach said when they lived in New Orleans they learned how the six months after a disaster can alter a community and local businesses.
Grabach said the Asheville community needs to be resilient to prevent big corporations with deep pockets from moving into the River Arts District now that the local presence is weakened.
“From our experience in New Orleans after Hurricane Ida, the event itself is terrible ― devastating ― but what’s brutal is the next six to eight months,” Barrell said. “The restaurants are bleeding money. They’re not reopening and when they do reopen, they face a market that has also faced a ton of loss and that is where the real challenge is.”
Barrell said dining out is considered a luxury that’s cut from people’s budgets during hardships but to keep Asheville’s restaurants open and the dining scene nationally recognized and rooted in locally owned establishments, residents will need to frequent the establishments, especially on major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and through winter.
“Buy the big bottle of wine. Get the extra round of cocktails,” Barrell said.
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Tiana Kennell is the food and dining reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and covered the arts, entertainment and hospitality in Louisiana for several years. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Instagram @PrincessOfPage.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: River Arts District wine bar, eatery wrecked by Tropical Storm Helene
