The High Country Continues

In 2014 the Upper Hiwassee Highlands was established as an American Viticultural Area, Georgia’s first. It covers portions of Union, Towns, and Fannin counties, and Cherokee and Clay counties in southwestern North Carolina. The name comes from the upper Hiwassee and the high country around it. In 2018 the Dahlonega Plateau was recognized, covering portions of Lumpkin and White counties. For people who farm these mountains, the paperwork confirmed a place that was already there.

An American Viticultural Area is a federal line. It marks ground where climate, elevation, soils, and terrain make a shared growing place. It does not rank the wine. It does not say that fruit outside the line cannot be distinctive. It lets a label state where the grapes were grown. That is the whole of the claim, and it matters here.

The Upper Hiwassee Highlands sits at the north of North Georgia Wine Country. Some of the most careful plantings are just outside the line. They have the same ridges, the same hollows, the same cool nights. They are not a second choice. The boundary was drawn for a label. The high country is larger than that.

The better vineyards, inside the line or just past it, come from choices about slope, aspect, and drainage, and from the slow work of getting a vine established on hard ground. Most plantings stay small. The land does not offer long unbroken blocks. Forest, pasture, and orchard are still in the view. That mix is not a lack. It is how this country looks, and it keeps the place from reading as a wine district built for the brochure.

What the appellation does give is a northern mark on the map, and a name taken from the river and the highlands rather than from a town or a slogan. A resident can point to it. A visitor can find the northern part of this country and see that it belongs to a particular landscape, shaped by height, by forest, and by people who have worked the ground for a long time.

The next note is elevation, and the weather it makes. The Upper Hiwassee Highlands is a formal name for a place that already had a character. The high country is still larger than the line.