SPENCER — If you stand next to one of the stainless steel vats in the fermenting room at Chateau Laurinda and listen quietly, you can hear the yeast eating the grapes.

The sound is smooth and constant like a slow fizz or light rain on a rooftop. Each vat has its own tone and, together, they are music to Linda Ehlers’ ears.

“If they’re not making noise, you’ve got a problem,” she says.

Linda and her husband, Laurence, came up with the name Laurinda by combining their first names.

Their Chateau Laurinda opened the first of March in the old truck weigh station at 1625 N. Salisbury Ave. in Spencer, but it actually began much earlier in China Grove.

That was where the Ehlerses moved from New Jersey 15 years ago. “We got tired of the rat race,” Linda says.

The Ehlerses were familiar with the area, having made quite a few trips to Kannapolis to buy tires for their racing team and others in their division.

Pete Faggart and his family were among the neighbors Linda and Laurence, who goes by Larry, met when they moved to town. Every year, Faggart made wine out of the muscadines that grew on his property behind the Ehlers’.

“Pete used to talk to my husband about making wine,” Linda says, “and Larry was up there a couple of times when he was making it.”

When it was done, Faggart would share the wine with the Ehlerses. “It was a really sweet muscadine grape wine,” she says. “That was just the way he made it.”

After Faggart died in 1990, the muscadines started going to waste. Larry Ehlers offered to use them to continue the wine-making tradition, and Faggart’s family agreed.

“I wasn’t excited to begin with,” Linda says, “because he used to do it in my kitchen and it stunk up the house.”

But the wine was a big success. When Larry gave some to his co-workers at Shoffner Industries in Dallas, where he works as a maintenance supervisor, they liked it so much that they urged him to make it to sell.

The Ehlerses started experimenting making wine from other fruits.

After a while, “we just decided to try getting licensed,” Linda says. “And believe me, that’s not an easy task.”

The process took well over a year. As part of the application process, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division of the U.S. Treasury Department conducted a thorough background check on Linda, whose name was on the application. They reviewed her bank accounts to make sure she wasn’t laundering money and even interviewed her co-workers at N.C. Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, where she works as an X-ray technologist.

“It was kind of embarrassing when they walked into the hospital clinic and flashed their badges,” she says.

The couple started their winery in the meat shop where Pete Faggart was a butcher, but found out during the licensing that the property wasn’t zoned for business use. Apparently, Faggart was allowed to operate his business because he had started it before zoning was implemented in the town.

They looked for a new location to rent and settled on the old weigh station. Steven and Melissa, who got involved about the time the licenses were issued, now run the Spencer winery while Linda and Larry are at work.

The family is looking for an old farmhouse they can buy and convert into a bed and breakfast and permanent home for the winery. “We also want to grow some blackberries,” Linda says.

“We got our blackberries from one of our neighbors,” Linda says. “She picks them every year and brings them to us.”

Chateau Laurinda is the only one of 12 wineries in North Carolina to make blackberry wine, and its bestselling “Blue Fox” label won a bronze medal at the 1999 N.C. Tanglewood Wine Competition. “It was kind of exciting,” Linda says, “our first year in business, to win an award.” Blue Fox is one of three wines to be sold in cobalt blue bottles. “People buy them for the bottle sometimes,” Linda says.

Chateau Laurinda sells three brands of white wines: Roman Delight, a light, semi-sweet apple wine; Seyval Blanc, a semi-dry, smooth, fruity white wine; and Chardonnay, a full-bodied, intense, dry, citrusy white wine.

Blush wines include: Red Rose, a semi-sweet blush with smooth wild cherry flavors; Cranberry Delight, a semi-sweet, very tangy cranberry strawberry wine; and Harmony Blush, a semi-sweet blend of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon wines.

Blue Fox is among the red wines as well as: Crimson Passion, a semi-sweet, very smooth muscadine scuppernong wine; Harmony, a bold, semi-sweet blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc wines; Cabernet Sauvignon, a full-bodied, dry red wine with a slight bite; Chambourcin, a dry, fruity, purple-red, very rich and aromic wine; Lady in Red, a sweet red grape wine with a big, fruity flavor of Chambourcin grape; and Merlot, a full-bodied, dry red wine with smooth wild cherry flavors.

Orange Blossom, the winery’s only dessert wine, is a sweet orange and honey mead wine.

Prices range from $9 to $12 for a regular-sized bottle, and $5.50 to $7 for a smaller, 375 ml bottle. Anyone who buys six bottles gets a 10 percent discount, while those who buy a case get 15 percent off.

Steven designs the labels for the wines and submits them to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division for approval, after which the state must also approve them. All of Chateau Laurinda’s wines are unfortified with an average alcohol content of 11.5 to 12 percent.

The label for Lady in Red features a Southern woman in a long red dress, holding a red umbrella with a gazebo in the background. Linda Roberts of Winston-Salem, a friend of Linda Ehlers, did the painting.

The Ehlerses purchased a crusher last December, which separates the stems from the grapes before crushing them. Before that, they did it all by hand.

Once the grapes or other fruits have been crushed, they are put in 100-gallon vats with yeast, citrus, other natural ingredients and enough water to achieve the correct pH level.

After seven to 10 days in the heated fermenting room, the skins are separated and the wine is put in large, glass jugs in a cooler room, where the fermentation process continues.

Fluorescent lights mounted on the wall behind the clear jugs shine on the wine so that customers can see it during tours.

Linda points out the different flavors by the shades of translucent red, orange, yellow and purple. Some of the paler colors are blush wines made by fermenting grapes a second time. “You still get the taste, but you don’t get the color,” she says.

Fermentation can take from six months to a year depending on what grapes or fruit they’re using.

In an adjacent room, the Ehlerses pour the wine in bottles and package the bottles, 12 to a case, upside down so the corks will stay wet.

They have 200 cases or 2,400 bottles of wine on hand and travel to shows all over the state selling it. They set up at home furnishings shows as well as holiday and seasonal shows. The most successful show they’ve done to date was last year’s Southern Christmas Show in Charlotte, where they sold 35 cases in six days.

“When we go to a show, we allow tastings,” Linda says, “and people seem to enjoy this.”

Melissa Ehlers says they also allow tastings at the winery if a customer is trying to decide which wine to buy.

Also for sale in the display room of the winery are various wine accessories, including three sizes of wine glass racks made by Steven Ehlers. They range in price from $50 to $70.

Wooden wine bottle holders and a wooden gift box with a birdhouse painted on the front sell in the $10 range. A gift set featuring a handmade wooden mailbox, three small bottles of wine, two glasses and a personalized Chateau Laurinda cork puller sells for $30.

The winery also sells candles in wineglasses, including one designed especially for the millennium. The winery’s personalized cork pullers sell for $4.50, while assorted pewter corks sell for $10.

Steven designs gift cards, including some shaped like wine bottles, to accompany wine as gifts for various occasions.

Plum wine nearing the end of its fermentation will be bottled and labeled as the winery’s Christmas wine. Linda is planning to sell picnic baskets packed with the wine, glasses and cheese for holiday gifts.

“I think people will buy it just for the changeover,” Linda says. “Everybody’s so hyped up over the millennium right now.”

Linda plans to resign her job in Winston-Salem and go into the wine business on a full time basis in October. She hopes to market the wine to restaurants and specialty shops.

A Harris Teeter representative has already approached them about selling the wine in the grocery stores.

One of the things the Ehlerses did when they started the winery was to pay tribute to the man who inspired their new venture. They rebottled the wine Pete Faggart had made in sealed bottles for his family to keep.

“It’s kind of a memento,” Linda says.