Cape Fear Profile: Beck-Lopez shares her love, knowledge of wine
Purchasing a bottle of wine should not be a scary experience, at least not in the eyes of Jerrie Sheree Beck-Lopez.
Beck-Lopez, the owner of Bob & Sheree’s Wine Shoppes on Raeford Road and Hay Street, doesn’t see wine as a symbol of pretentiousness. For three decades, she has urged local residents to taste and learn about the world of wine.
Her shops carry more than 3,000 varieties from all over the world, along with more than 400 imported beers and ales.
The soft-spoken Beck-Lopez approaches customers with a gentle smile and a wealth of patience. If you aren’t sure which wine to buy or what you’d like, she is more than willing to help you figure it out.
Learning about wine makes it not intimidating, she said.
“Knowledge is power; even in its simplicity. That is a gift to give someone – a gift of knowledge to speak in any circle.”
Beck-Lopez has been in business for more than 32 years. The Office, her pub located next to her Raeford Road shop, is one of the oldest bars in town.
While she is known locally as a wine expert, there’s more to Beck-Lopez than meets the eye. Her life story is as complex as a vintage bottle of Château Pétrus – filled with savory tales of humble beginnings and topped off with an unexpected finish of romance.
Beck-Lopez had no idea that she was poor. She grew up on Mill Hill in St. Pauls, where many transient mill workers lived.
She and four siblings were raised by her mother, Mattie Beck, and father, Jerrie, a supervisor in a Burlington Mills textile plant in the Robeson County town.
Everyone pitched in. Beck-Lopez was picking cotton with older siblings by the age of 6. Later, she worked in the tobacco fields. She does not regret the hard work.
“I don’t remember playing with doll babies, and I never missed playing with baby dolls,” she said. “I didn’t have the need for ‘Let’s pretend.’ That ideology didn’t work for me.”
Beck-Lopez always had the mind of a businesswoman, according to her youngest sister, Anita.
“She was always an entrepreneur ever since we were little. If we had childhood games, she knew how to make it a business,” Anita said. “She was the owner of whatever we’re doing, and we’d have to pay for her service, whether it was a dime or a quarter.”
Her work ethic continued in school, where she was an honors student. She excelled despite an assumption that she’d end up working in a textile plant.
“To have the life of never being fulfilled, I thought that would be the cruelest thing that I could ever do in my life,” she said. “I knew the mind that I had. And my mind was about how to achieve. … I was never going to be in a textile mill. … I did cotton, I did tobacco, I bused tables, I washed dishes, I cleaned other people’s houses. When it came time to leave that spot in my life and leave that town, I wanted something else. And I knew it was obtainable.”
She set her sights on a college degree and decided that California was where to get it. And she had a plan to raise money for her goals: buying properties and renting them out.
She was 16 at the time.
With her father’s support, she went to a local bank for a loan. The banker, she said, told her: “You’re not old enough to buy anything in this town.”
She disagreed. “Sir, you’re wrong,” she told him. “I am, and I will. I will buy this piece of property. I will not buy it here; I will not buy it with you. But when you see my name popping up in the register’s office, you’re going to call me.”
By the end of the day, Beck-Lopez and her father obtained a loan from a different bank.
By 17, she had graduated from high school early and owned more than a dozen properties. She used the income to pay her way to Los Angeles.
Beck-Lopez’s game plan for California was a simple one. She’d take enrichment courses and learn about horticulture. She had a head for business, but her roots were on the farm. Plus, she had a fascination with wine and wine-making.
“We had a farm that grew vegetables, grew chickens, hogs, and we slaughtered all but the vegetables,” she said. “I knew how to grow and grow well. I had a green thumb. So, I wanted to figure out how did the masters make the wine grow?”
Beck-Lopez enrolled in winemaking courses and studied with various masters, including Giovanni Costa, the master blender for Louis Jadot vintners.
The real lessons, she said, came when wine was poured and tasted. She likens herself to a wine glass into which her teachers poured their knowledge.
She later sought part-time work as a bartender in hopes of serving wine to fellow enthusiasts. While searching for a nice restaurant to work in, she came across a club by mistake. She discovered far more than just a job there.
“As I’m in there, I heard a man with a beautiful laugh across the room,” she said with a smile. “There was a lot of people there, but his laugh was above the rest. It was a belly roll. I turned to see where the voice was coming from, and there he was.”
The man with the laugh was the club’s owner, Bob Accetturo. Not only did she get a job, but the two became instant friends.
Accetturo taught Beck the ins and outs of running a business, and she soaked it all in. The two began dating, not bothered by the fact that Accetturo was 20 years her senior.
They wed in 1978 and ran several businesses together before Beck-Lopez decided that it was time to return to North Carolina.
The couple originally intended to open a restaurant in Fayetteville and visited the city several times before moving back in 1979.
But the opportunity to purchase a local restaurant fell through, so the couple decided to open a wine and beer shop instead.
It was a novel idea for Fayetteville, and it took the community some time to warm up to what Beck-Lopez had to offer at her Raeford Road shop.
She prided herself on her wine offerings and refused to offer popular varieties that didn’t meet her standards.
The local customers were not used to the higher prices for good wine. She remembers a woman who wanted a white wine. Beck-Lopez offered several varieties that ranged from $50 to $500. She handed the customer a modest bottle for $53, but the woman recoiled.
” ‘No, no, no, I want a big bottle of Ernest and Julio Gallo,’ ” the customer said. Beck-Lopez told her she didn’t carry bulk wines, and the woman turned on her heels and left.
“So, I knew I had another job to do. I had to get the Fayetteville audience to trust me and make them believe that I knew what I was doing, because I did,” she said.
Beck-Lopez started selling bulk wines in a small section of her store, but only if the customer would agree to taste a better wine.
The interaction allowed her a chance to cultivate a relationship with wine drinkers. Soon, business was booming, and she was able to open The Office pub in 1983.
In 1987, she and Accetturo divorced, although they remained friends and continued to use the name Bob & Sheree for their businesses.
Accetturo died in 2005. The couple had one child, a son named Nunzio, who is now 27.
For two years, Beck was a working single mother who remained fixated on her career. When she met Steve Lopez in 1989, her focus was the first thing that caught his attention.
Lopez, deputy chief of the Hope Mills Fire Department, said he visited her shop often for its imported beers. He often observed Beck-Lopez and was impressed.
“She had traits that I admired, she was a very compassionate person. She treated her employees very, very well. And her family, she holds them very close and very dear,” he said. “She was an amazing person.”
Beck-Lopez was equally enamored of Steve Lopez and said she felt butterflies from the first day she met him.
“I thought, ‘Girl, you need to get off this wagon. This is not high school.’ “
The two fell in love and married in 2004.
Now, she says she has a new passion that trumps even her love of wine.
“It was the wine business that formed my adult woman, but it’s still No. 2 to him,” she said.
But her love of wine remains fervent. For six days a week, she can be found at one of her wine shops, training employees or working on a catalog system that identifies the ingredients and flavors in each of her imported beers in stock – a project that’s taken more than two years to complete.
She hopes the project will help others understand and appreciate wine and beer. But unlike the experts she worked with during her days in California, she hardly considers herself a master at the craft, even after three decades of success.
“I wouldn’t presume to be the master, but I am not the glass or the container either,” she said thoughtfully. “I am the wine. So drink me, taste me, think about me, talk to me.”
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