Melvin Wine

As of 1991, Wine had been diagnosed with black lung disease and also suffered from arthritis. Wine died on March 16, 2003 of complications from a stroke, at age 93.

Wine and his music was the subject of a 2002 book titled Fiddling Way Out Yonder. A 2011 children's book titled Passing the Music Down was about the relationship between Wine and his protégé Jake Krack, and was the official West Virginia entry into the 2011 National Book Festival.

Wine was a recipient of a 1991 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Etta Wine had a stroke in 1983 and was partially paralyzed as a result. She died in 1992. Melvin was remarried to Anna Wine, who died in 1997. As of 2002, Wine also had 30 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren.

Wine was the first recipient of West Virginia's Vandalia Award, in 1981. The award is presented at the Vandalia Gathering, sponsored by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, and held on the state Capitol grounds as "a free celebration of the arts, music, crafts, and food that reflect West Virginia's heritage".

While working on his farm, Wine continued to play the fiddle and his reputation in the area grew. Starting in the late 1950s, he performed at the West Virginia State Folk Festival in Glenville, eventually becoming the most frequent winner of that festival's fiddling contest. Since the late 1960s, Wine was regionally well known for his lively style of old-time fiddling. He has also been recognized for his versatility on the fiddle and is "renowned for his deft bow work, and the immensity of his repertoire, including varied melodies and tunes of his youth, many of which date back more than 200 years to the earliest Appalachian settlers".

Melvin Wine met and married Etta (pronounced Etty) Singleton in 1930. Etta played banjo and guitar and frequently called square dances. Together they had 10 children, and sometimes took other children into their farmhouse in Copen. On their 120-acre farm, they raised cattle, chicken, and hay.

Melvin Wine (April 20, 1909 – March 16, 2003) was an American Appalachian fiddler from the state of West Virginia. He was a lifelong resident of Copen, in Braxton County, West Virginia.

Wine was born in Burnsville, West Virginia to Bob Wine, a fiddler, and Elizabeth Sandy, a singer of ballads and hymns. His grandfather John Nelson "Nels" Wine was not a string musician but learned to whistle and sing his father's tunes. The Wine family fiddling tradition began with Melvin's great-grandfather David S. "Smithy" Wine, who was born in 1829.