SPARTA, Ga. - Produce stands and their homemade signs are common along Georgia's two-lane country highways, put there by locals usually selling peaches, tomatoes, watermelons and boiled peanuts.
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Beau Courson takes a sample of a new jug of wine, which he ferments at his business in Hancock County.
Johnny Edwards/Staff
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But there's a sign along the route to Milledgeville that prompts a double take - "The Best Little Winery in Georgia," boasts Beau Courson's red-lettered sign posted along Georgia Highway 22.
Central Georgia is a lot of things, but one thing it isn't is a winemaking region.
Mr. Courson, a 34-year-old blackberry farmer who once worked as a Sparta police officer, doesn't make the kinds of wines turned out in the vineyards of France, California or north Georgia. Hancock County's Devereux community, about 10 miles southwest of Sparta, is far too low in elevation to cultivate vinifera grapes used for merlot and chardonnay.
Instead, Mr. Courson makes the kind of Southern table wine his great-grandfather made, using muscadines, scuppernongs, peaches, apples, plums, blackberries and blueberries.
"What we're trying to do is capture that feel of a homemade wine, a lighter, fruitier, sweeter wine," said Mr. Courson, who grew up in Devereux.
Before he became a winemaker, Mr. Courson held several jobs just to earn enough money to keep his family blackberry farm going, including stints as a police officer and a probation officer. He also held security positions at a hospital and a college and worked as a lumber inspector at a sawmill.
One year, he figured he would make enough off his crop to quit working and become a full-time farmer, but a long tropical storm soaked his blackberries and ruined them for fresh fruit sales.
"I started thinking, 'What can I do to keep from having a loss like this again?'" Mr. Courson said.
Friends suggested he turn to wine, an idea he had been tinkering with for a while.
"What everybody was telling me was, it's the rotten fruit," he said.
Courson's Winery has been open for nearly two years, operating out of two toolsheds fronting long rows of muscadine vines, with a picnic area under a vine arbor. In one shed, he and his girlfriend, Toni Williams, 23, run the business, and in the other he ferments and ages fruits in 55-gallon plastic barrels, then bottles his wines one bottle at a time.
His wines, with names such as Courson's Blush, Governor's Mansion and Alberta's Gold, sell for $10 a bottle, or $50 for a case of six.
According to local lore, there was a large winery in Devereux in the late 1800s that shipped wine all over the world. Mr. Courson hasn't reached that point, but he says business is picking up. He expects this year's revenue to double last year's, and on a weekday last month, a steady flow of customers dropped by and drove away with bottles.
Mr. Courson said that when he was growing up, all he wanted was the city life of Milledgeville, but when he got there, he was turned off by the stressful pace and office politics.
"Out there pruning those muscadines, I don't have to worry about anything," Mr. Courson said. "The way I look at it, I'm either going to get rich or have a lot to drink."
Beau Courson
Age: 34
Occupation: Winemaker, berry farmer
Quote: "The way I look at it, I'm either going to get rich or have a lot to drink."
Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.
