We recently connected with Jorjanne Paulk and have shared our conversation below.
Jorjanne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?
Paulk Vineyards is the brand name for our family business, which is made up of multiple farms, as well as a manufacturing facility and winery. My husband’s late grandfather began growing muscadine grapes in the early 1970s, and this year, we’re celebrating our 50th harvest! My father-in-law and his brother continue to grow the muscadines, while my husband handles all the processing, from making wine and juices to dietary supplements and ingredients. In 2017, we began making wine and opened our tasting room here on the farm in 2019. I began managing the tasting room and planning events in 2020. Our oldest son is currently in college, majoring in crop production, so that he can continue growing the legacy of Paulk Vineyards, and we are very excited about it!
Personally, I worked in the family business about 15 years ago, coordinating food safety audits and handling all the paperwork that goes along with that. And, I hated it! I honestly thought I would never work alongside my husband and our family again because of that experience. For the next eight years, I worked with some friends, managing a small cafe and helping with weddings and other events. Little did I know, this time was actually preparing me for the work I now do and love here in our family business!
What I’ve learned from my own experience is that even in a family business, everyone must play a role that they truly enjoy, not just working out of obligation to the family. While our children have grown up working on the farm, we have tried never to make them feel obligated to come back to work with us as adults. If they do feel led to come back, we must find the best position for them to work and feel fulfilled as individuals, in addition to meeting a need in the business.
Of course, as with every business, there are conflicts that must be resolved, and tensions that must be managed. At the end of the day, though, family is the most important thing, so we must remember to value our relationships over being right. We can disagree on lots of things in the business, but we must agree that family comes first in a family business.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My husband, Chris, and I were high school sweethearts in this small town of Ocilla, Georgia. We both took off to college in the big city of Atlanta, he at Georgia Tech and me at Oglethorpe University. knowing one day we’d return home to raise a family, but we had no intentions of doing that anytime soon. Shortly after graduating and getting married, his family farm, Paulk Vineyards, was featured on a Food Network show called “Food Finds,” which resulted in his grandfather calling and asking him to come home and start a new venture on the farm.
“Papa Jacob,” as we called him, started growing muscadine grapes on the family farm in the early 1970s. Over the years, Chris’s father, Gary, and his uncle, JW, have continued growing the muscadines and selling them to grocery stores and farmers markets. For 50 years now, fresh muscadines have been shipped across the country and in the last couple of years, even into Canada! For those not familiar with muscadines, they are a type of grape that is native to the southeastern United States. Papa Jacob began to realize the health benefits of muscadines, so he began making capsules from the seeds.
When Chris and I moved back home in 2002, I was teaching while he started Muscadine Products Corporation, with a focus on creating value-added products from muscadines, like juice and dietary supplements. After staying home with our two older boys for several years, I helped out on the farm coordinating food safety audits and handling all the paperwork that goes along with that. I hated it! So, I went to work with some friends, serving in and managing their small cafe. Along the way, I started writing blogs, helping with social media, and making jams and jellies for their store as well as for Paulk Vineyards. I also helped plan and serve at events held in their 100-year-old building..
In addition to making ingredients for manufacturers of dietary supplements, Chris began selling tankers of muscadine juice to wineries all over the southeast. Before Papa Jacob passed away in 2017, he and Chris agreed that it was time to start making our own wines. Fast-forward to today, and I now manage the retail store and tasting room here on the farm, and I plan multiple events held here throughout the year.
Our Paulk Vineyards wines are named for members of our family and roads or locations on our farm. Our second line of wines, called Sweet Tree, are muscadine based wines that are infused with fruits that we don’t grow. While our award-winning wines are enough to set us apart, it’s our stories that truly make us unique. We love telling the stories of our family members and how the wines and their names came to be. For example, Sweet Tree comes from the Native American word “scuppernong” which is the name many people call the green/bronze muscadines. Translated into English, scuppernong means “sweet bay tree” referring to the vines that grow and curl among the branches of the trees that hang over many rivers and creeks here in the south.
I am quite proud of our estate-bottled wines, but my biggest accomplishment would be the successful events we’ve hosted. Of course, I cannot take full credit for these events because we have built an amazing team of employees who help make thing run smoothly, but the planning and preparations start way in advance, and we learn from every event we host. Our largest events include the South Georgia Wine Festival, held the second Saturday of March, and the Georgia Muscadine Festival, held the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Those events have grown to 600-700 people attending. Smaller events throughout the year include Murder Mystery Dinners, painting or flower arranging classes, candle or earring making parties, as well as afternoons of live music from local musicians and bingo nights. We try to keep something going on to give people another reason to come out to the middle of nowhere!
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like most people, throughout my adult life, I have had several situations in which I had to pivot. First, whenever Chris and I moved back home to start Muscadine Products Corporation, it was a completely different direction than we thought we were headed. We were both working in the Atlanta area, me as a teacher and him as a civil engineer, but we also were in the process of fundraising to go to Brazil as missionaries. We actually thought we would just go home and get things started, then continue with our plan. As we continued to pray about what God would have us do, we actually felt called to stay rather than go and share our faith through our business and with our family of employees.
Another situation in which I had to pivot was whenever I decided to stop working with the family business and start working with The Cafe. I knew if I stayed where I was, I would never be fulfilled in my career, and it would take its toll on my marriage and our family. After a couple of stints as a long-term substitute teacher, I also realized that I was not cut out to use my degree as a teacher. Once I started working in The Cafe, I really felt like I was finally where I belonged. I learned what kind of work culture was important to me and what I really enjoyed doing. After 8 years, my pivot became more of a boomerang, as the opportunity to really build up our Tasting Room came about. All the work I had done now seemed like training for the role I am meant to play here in our family business.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Like most people, 2020 was a difficult year for me personally. I transitioned into a full-time position managing the Tasting Room in February of 2020. At the same time, my father underwent surgery to remove his pacemaker/internal defibrillator due to having staph infection. He had battled staph a couple of times before, the first of which was his bypass surgery 10 years earlier. After a week in the hospital two hours away, he was sent to a nursing home for rehabilitation for 30 days with an external defibrillator called a “life vest”. Once his time was up, they sent him home with that life vest, and two days later, he was found passed out near his truck. The timing of this could not have been worse, as this was Friday, March 13, 2020. On that very day, the local hospital had just enacted a new policy that as long as a patient was conscious and able to communicate, he could not have any visitors, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By the time he was in the ER, he was able to talk, so I was not allowed even to see him.
At this time, we didn’t even understand what was going on in regard to the pandemic. I was also consumed with my first major project at work, which was planning our first ever South Georgia Wine Festival. We had received phone calls all week asking if we were going to cancel, but we really had no idea why we would need to cancel. The festival was scheduled for Saturday, March 14, 2020 – the day before Disney World closed. That’s when we realized this was really something big going on. We decided that as long as Disney was still open, we would continue as planned. So, we ended up going out with a bang, with probably 350 people attending, which at the time was the most people we had ever had out here! Fortunately, as far as we know, no one got sick as a result of attending.
While we were celebrating a tremendous success for our first festival, I was personally dealing with the idea that my father might not come home from the hospital. After about a week, we were given the idea to take an iPad to the hospital to be given to him so that we could FaceTime with him. I’m so grateful for the nurses who cared for him and cared enough to take the time to set up the calls and keep me informed of his illness. He remained very confused and frustrated with me for not visiting and even asked me to just leave his vehicle at the back door so he could get out of there since he had business to attend to. Each call would leave me in tears, wondering if he would recover and worrying that I might not ever see him in person again.
Many times, these FaceTime calls would occur while I was at work, trying to hold it together and be professional while serving customers. Although my position was not completely new, one of my goals was to incorporate new events merchandise in the tasting room. There was a lot that could only be done by myself. Because our farm offered pick-your-own strawberries, then blackberries, then muscadine grapes, we actually never completely shut down the tasting room. Every day, we moved the register and some merchandise outside onto the porch. Right about 11-11:30, we would see the mothers who had now been thrown into home-schooling their
children thanks to the pandemic show up for a field trip to pick strawberries and get slushees – juice slushees for the kids and wine slushees for the moms! We offered an activity that got the kids outside, helping them learn how plants grow and where their food comes from, and it gave the mothers a bit of a break.
While we were of course thrilled that we could continue to work and that we could provide such an opportunity for our community, I did not get such a break. Working full-time, then coming home to cook dinner for my kids who had been stuck at home all day with no sports or other activities, all the while concerned about my father and his fate, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic was a difficult place to be. Did I mention that at the time, my boys were 16, 13, and almost 2? I felt pulled in so many different directions, and without the support of my husband and mother (who had long ago divorced my father), I really don’t know how I would have survived. So much was unknown, and being a person who likes to make plans and at least have some certainty, this was such strange territory.
Around the second week of April, a month after Daddy was admitted to the hospital, two months after his surgery, I received a call to come in and meet with the palliative care team. Daddy was adamant with me that he did not want to go on hospice because he wasn’t ready to die. I hated so badly to leave that day, but based on our conversation, I thought he would be able to come home soon. We were even making plans to move him in with us since he would no longer be able to take care of himself. About a week later, the doctor called to tell me that Daddy was not getting better, and that he wouldn’t be coming home. In fact, she suggested that it was time to start “comfort measures” rather than continuing to treat the staph infection which was not responding to the antibiotics. Since it was likely his last 24 hours here on earth, the doctor allowed my brother, sister, and me to visit with Daddy. He passed on the next morning on Sunday, April 19, around 9:00, around the time his beloved church service started.
Losing my father, with whom I had a complicated relationship, affected me more than I really thought it would. I had been his primary caretaker for the last 15 years as he battled heart attacks, strokes, staph infection, and multiple surgeries. I thought I was ready to let him go, but there was no way to really be prepared for it. I found myself a bit lost without him, but I found comfort in nature, watching birds like he loved to do.
What I learned in 2020 is that even though everyone in the world experienced the same pandemic, everyone had a unique, individual experience that affected each of us differently. We all had to dig deep and work to get through some of the hardest times many of us have ever faced, but it was still different for everyone. I learned how to deal with my grief whenever it washes over me, sometimes catching me by surprise. I learned that there are times to push through, but there are times to hold back. More than anything, I learned that everyone is dealing with something, and I try to extend a little more grace than maybe I used to. Life is hard enough, and the ebb and flow of what we’re all going through means that many times I have the opportunity to be the light that someone else needs. Every customer who steps through our doors and every employee on my team deserves my full attention and a smile on my face.
Contact Info:
- Website: paulkvineyards.com
- Instagram: @paulkvineyards
- Facebook: facebook.com/paulkvineyards
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/paulkvineyards
- Twitter: twitter.com/paulkvineyards
- Youtube: @paulkvineyards3174
- Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/paulk-vineyards-wray