His death plunged Mrs. Beall into a role she had never imagined. She’s a private person, and the first to tell you she is not as good at prioritizing as her husband was.

But now she is the one hosting winemakers and explaining the Blackberry philosophy at events like the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen. The future of the multimillion-dollar family business is in her hands, and so far, she can barely keep up with the meetings.

In the horrible first days after the accident, Mrs. Beall was so focused on the kids, the funeral and her own grief that she hadn’t thought much about who might run the place. Shortly after her husband was buried, her father-in-law walked into the couple’s bedroom.

“Mary Celeste, you know you auditioned when you got up at the service to speak,” he told her. “You know you have to run Blackberry.”

Over a recent breakfast in the sunny dining room of the 1930s farmhouse that remains the farm’s center, Mr. Beall conceded that the conversation may have come sooner “than anyone with more sensitivity might have done.”

But there were guests to care for and a family empire to protect.

“She knows, like we all know, that Blackberry will be in our family forever, forever and another forever and another forever on top of that,” he said.

Image Mrs. Beall with two of her daughters, Josephine, middle, and Lila, picking lunch ingredients from the Blackberry Farm garden. Credit... Shawn Poynter for The New York Times

Mr. Beall and his first wife, Kreis, bought the little inn tucked up against the Great Smoky Mountains in 1976, the year Sam was born. They kept adding land and rooms, and serving food that punched above its weight. In 1998, they turned what had become a Relais & Châteaux resort over to Sam and his younger brother, David. But it was Sam who made the place his life’s work.