We’ve all heard about the famous vineyards in California, in the luscious wine regions of Sonoma and Napa Valley in the Northern part of the State. However, it’s startling how few people know about the wine regions on the East Coast of the U.S. Georgia is known not only for peaches, cotton and Southern Belles, but for the surprising number of wineries that produce scrumptious wine.
As a matter of fact, these wine makers have been harvesting grapes and creating bottles of wine as far back as the days of early exploration to America. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Hungarian immigrants established working wine communities, although the Georgia Prohibition Act of 1907 put a damper on production until the mid 70’s into the early 80’s when a handful of winemakers chose to revive the wine-making industry.
Georgian wine has a sweet taste that is gaining popularity with wine connoisseurs worldwide. Much like the territories near San Francisco, the wine tours are popping up for wine lovers to visit those vineyards and sample the fruitful flavors for themselves. New wineries are emerging every year, as Georgia becomes more and more well-known as an agri-tourism hotspot. According to the websites promoting wine territories throughout the State, wine is expected to multiply in the upcoming decade as more people become aware of its existence on the East Coast.
The city of Dahlonega, Georgia celebrates its growing reputation as the premier site for wine lovers to visit – with a yearly ‘Georgia Country Wine Festival’ that takes place in the early part of summer. It seems appropriate that this city, once known for its hydraulic gold mining field; has a new treasure in the form of delicious sweet grapes. It seems that this Georgian wine must be “as good as gold”; figuratively-speaking!
Really, it makes perfect sense that wine would be harvested in the rich soil of Georgian farmland. Throughout the State there are approximately (50) known wineries that can be visited by enthusiastic tourists, who may wish to catch a sample of the sweet berries harvested and distilled to make sparkling wine, red wine and zinfandels that can be sampled during certain times of year that the wine tours are made available. Although the majority of the wine vineyards are located in the Northeast area of the State, there are a handful of winemakers in other regions of Georgia, as well.
For those people who won’t have a chance to make it to the West Coast to see the renowned wineries of Northern California, it may behoove them to take a closer look at the undiscovered region of Georgia as it becomes the next ‘Great Wine Country’ of America.
