The Winemaking Cook
Carl Cook’s Cash Winery & Vineyard is crushing it in the Cash community of Chesterfield County.
Carl Cook, owner of Cash Winery & Vineyard, squeezed in some time to chat with us about his recent bounty of success before he had to drive to Columbia the next day to pick up 500 pounds of strawberries to crush into his next batch of wine.
Winemaking began as a hobby for Cook about a decade ago, he says, but it got more serious about two and a half years ago when the metal building that the winery is now housed in went up on his tree farm 
in the Cash community just outside of Cheraw. The building has a fermentation room, but he plans on adding a tasting room and some office space.
“My first batch of wine turned out pretty good,” says Cook. “I just bought a kit and I had my buddies came over and they drank it, so I kept making more wine. People are liking it! I’m getting good comments on Facebook. I mean, nobody’s complained to my face!”
Cook has an agriculture degree from the University of Georgia and says he “just likes science and learning how to do stuff,” so he taught himself how to make wine from the muscadine vines and small blueberry patch growing on his family’s tree farm lined with pines and hardwoods.
“worked out an agreement with his grandmother that if he earned a college degree, he could take over managing the farm”
The farm, rooted in quite the history, has been in the family since before the Revolutionary War, says 
Cook. And Cash, in fact, is named after his great, great, great grandfather, Colonel E.B. Cash. Cook worked out an agreement with his grandmother that if he earned a college degree, he could take over managing the farm.
Which Cook has done, and is now growing it in new directions with the winery and vineyard, which has been a journey of learning and lessons of the actual winemaking process, federal permitting, and licensing. But it’s a journey that Cook continually likes to follow, as one of the (good) challenges he faces is the need to hire more help with the increasing demand of his wines both locally and out of state. He currently offers bottles of red and white muscadine wines, a blush, a soon-to-be strawberry wine, and he hopes to use other local produce in the future as it comes available.
“We ended up putting a 1905 photo of an actual railroad depot that was here in Cash on my label,” says Cook. The bottles are available for sale in the main area of the winery.
Cash Winery & Vineyard doesn’t have any set hours at this time, but check Cook’s Facebook page each Thursday for weekend hours, which is usually Friday, 5-11 p.m., and Saturday, 4-11 p.m.
The winery’s website is being built to launch soon, but until then visit the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CashWinery/ or call 843-910-0417.“
