Southern Wine Country
Map

The long view

A short history of Southern wine

Wine in the American South is older than the country itself — a four-century arc from wild muscadines on the Carolina shore to one of American wine’s fastest-growing frontiers. Here are the milestones that got us here.

  1. 1584

    So full of grapes

    When Sir Walter Raleigh’s scouts reached the Carolina coast, they described a shore so thick with wild grapes that the vines seemed to run into the surf. Those were native muscadines — the grape that had flourished across the Southeast long before any European vine arrived. 1

  2. Since the 1500s

    The Mother Vine

    On Roanoke Island, North Carolina, a sprawling scuppernong known as the “Mother Vine” is, by local tradition, celebrated as perhaps the oldest cultivated grapevine in North America. Its reputed four-century age is beloved legend more than documented fact — but the vine itself, and the muscadine’s deep Southern roots, are real enough. 2

  3. 1619

    Ordered to plant vines

    At Jamestown, Virginia’s first General Assembly passed “Acte 12,” commanding every household to plant and tend ten grapevines. Wave after wave of imported European vinifera failed in the humid South — felled by disease and pests — and the colonists turned to tobacco instead. 3

  4. 1820s

    The Norton grape is born

    In Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Daniel Norton bred a hardy native-derived red — Norton, also called Cynthiana — that shrugged off the heat, humidity, and disease that killed European vines. It became the first great American wine grape. 4

  5. 1840

    The South leads the nation

    By the 1840 census, North Carolina ranked as the country’s leading wine producer, its vineyards flourishing across the state on the strength of the native scuppernong. The South was, for a time, a genuine wine power. 5

  6. 1873

    A Southern grape conquers Vienna

    Norton went global when a wine made from the Virginia-born grape — carried west to Missouri by German immigrants — took a gold medal at the Vienna World’s Fair, judged among the finest wines on Earth. 4

  7. 1904

    Virginia Dare, America’s wine

    North Carolina’s Paul Garrett built an empire on the scuppernong, and his sweet “Virginia Dare” became the best-selling wine in the United States — grand-prize winner at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. For a moment, a Southern muscadine was America’s favorite. 5

  8. 1920

    Prohibition guts the vineyards

    National Prohibition flattened the South’s wine industry: vineyards were torn out, wineries shuttered, and much of the craft bent toward moonshine. Muscadine survived mostly in backyards — a table grape and homemade wine — waiting out the dry years.

  9. 1950

    Vines back in the ground

    Recovery was slow. In 1950, farmers in Onslow County, North Carolina, planted 25 acres of scuppernong and opened a winery to sell the crop — one of the first post-Prohibition wineries in the state, and a sign the native grape had never really left.

  10. 1976

    European vines return

    Italian vintner Gianni Zonin founded Barboursville Vineyards in Virginia’s Piedmont and became the first in the modern era to grow European vinifera commercially in the state — realizing, two centuries on, Jefferson’s dream of fine Virginia wine.

  11. Early 1980s

    The first appellations

    As the revival took hold, the federal government began mapping the region’s terroir. Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Rocky Knob became among the earliest federally recognized wine regions in the Southeast — formal proof the industry was back for good.

Today

The modern Southern boom

The Southeast is now one of American wine’s fastest-growing frontiers. Virginia alone has gone from six wineries in 1980 to more than three hundred, and new appellations keep arriving — the Virginia Peninsula AVA joined the map in 2021. From the mountains to the coastal plain, Norton, muscadine, hybrids, and hard-won vinifera now share the modern Southern cellar. 6

Sources

Grounded in state history encyclopedias, extension programmes, and primary records. A few dates and superlatives are, by nature, tradition rather than fact — noted as such above.

  1. North Carolina History — State Fruit: Scuppernong Grape.
  2. North Carolina History — The Mother Vine.
  3. Online Library of Liberty — Laws of the First General Assembly of Virginia, 1619 (“Acte 12”).
  4. Missouri Wine — Norton: The Story of an All-American Wine.
  5. NCpedia — Wine and Wine Making (North Carolina).
  6. Federal Register — Establishment of the Virginia Peninsula Viticultural Area (2021).

Keep exploring: how wine is made · the winery map →