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Lance Hiatt loves the season-capping satisfaction of autumn at his Marked Tree Vineyard, when grapes are harvested and made into wine at Flat Rock, North Carolina.
Photo Above: On June 20 at the Marked Tree Vineyard, the sun rises and sets on opposite sides of the tasting room.
Photo Courtesy of Jared Kay.
Of course, autumn also leads to the spooky season, when the winery’s “Ghost House” variety may be most popular — a wine that takes its name from a long-gone house on the winery property.
But scroll back the calendar to the summer solstice, and you’ll see — by both moon and sun — how Hiatt’s architectural artistry captures celestial sensation at a 2,300-foot elevation atop the Eastern Continental Divide.
“As farmers, we work with the movement of the sun,” says Hiatt, an architect. “The summer solstice — the beginning of summer — is kind of the beginning of our whole season up here.”
To celebrate, Hiatt aligned the winery’s tasting room building so that the sun sets on the summer solstice from one side of the building to the other. This year, that’s June 20, the longest day of the year. And, what’s new, he’s done the same for a second structure that marks its grand opening on May 2 in time to coincide with a wine festival in nearby Hendersonville, North Carolina.
“The sunset will shoot straight through the entire building,” Hiatt says. “It’s kind of cool — you have that orange light shooting through the building, and you have that ball of the sun just sinking behind the mountains.”
It’s also a spectacle that keeps the doors open until 9 p.m. so visitors can see the sun set on one side of the hill and the moon rise on the other at the same height, says Hiatt’s business partner, Tim Parks.
“Sometimes, you don’t know where to look,” Parks says. “It’s like a tennis match. You can just go back and forth, back and forth.”
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2025 issue.
