The Wright family has been in Currituck County for seven generations, ever since Jacob Francis Wright shipwrecked off the shores of Duck some 170 years ago and made his way inland to Jarvisburg. They have farmed there for five of those generations — corn, soybeans, cotton, potatoes — and run The Cotton Gin stores in Jarvisburg, Nags Head, Duck and Corolla, the original of which was an actual cotton gin. In 2002 John Wright came home from UNC-Chapel Hill and, with his father Tommy and uncle Jerry, planted a single acre of vines on the family land. It has since grown to roughly 25 acres of sandy coastal soil twenty minutes inland from the Outer Banks. Coastal North Carolina is muscadine country, but Sanctuary bet almost entirely on European varieties instead — Cabernet, Syrah, Tempranillo, Viognier and Chardonnay among them — learning largely by trial and error, and waiting the five years between planting and bottling to find out what had gone wrong.