About Place

If wine is the curriculum, then the land has the syllabus. Here are some wine-adjacent things I've learned about western N.C.

I.

“The present Southern Appalachians have a wealth of plant forms unsurpassed in any area of its size in the world and greater than that of the entire continent of Europe,” writes Ora Blackmun in Western North Carolina: Its Mountains and Its People To 1880. The last ice age pushed massive ice sheets down from the northeastern part of North America over hundreds of years. It stopped short of the Appalachian mountain range. In response, the plants and animals migrated southeast over hundreds of years in search of a more hospitable environment.