S2 EP0033 - Travelogue - Intro to The Yadkin Valley, North Carolina

Travelogue Series: I start a multi-episode travelogue exposition in 2022, by visiting North Carolina and the Yadkin Valley. In this multi-part series on North Carolina, we&#8217;ll explore the Yadkin Valley, meet with producers, and feature several interviews for the YouTube portion of the show with those producers. We will feature Finger Lakes producers in between, and ultimately also explore The Hill Country in Texas, and the wine-growing regions of Idaho. <br/><br/>Please excuse errors in the text, this was dictated and gently edited.<br/><br/>North Carolina<br/><br/>When I moved to the Finger Lakes a decade ago, I was hungry to find as much information as possible about the region. I wanted to find books magazine articles, podcasts, and nearly anything that would shed light on the history of the region that I was moving to. At that time, there really weren&#8217;t very many publications. At the very least, I couldn&#8217;t seem to find a short history of how the finger Lakes and become one of the most discussed emerging regions in the United States. There was of course the wonderful book, Summer in a Glass, by Evan Dawson, in which he follows a number of different winemakers through the growing season 2009 in the Finger Lakes. In the absence of such a book, I set out to write one of my own, with much more of an eye towards content marketing for our new winery, and dug into all of the old journals, periodicals, and textbooks on American wine I could find. I published A Sense of Place in 2014, and have been able to use it as a great tool to help educate customers and even tasting room associates. I wasn&#8217;t able to find anything quite like that on North Carolina, and realized a lot of the lessons I would learn would have to be done on the ground.<br/><br/>The Yadkin Valley is vast, covering more than 1,300,000 acres. With such a large span of land, I knew that there was going to have to be variation in the topography, and even the climate to a certain extent, within the AVA. I was a bit surprised flying