Missouri Wine Country

About Missouri Wine Country

Missouri wine has a claim that no other American wine state can make: its Augusta AVA was the first federally recognized wine appellation in the United States, designated in 1980 — three weeks before the Napa Valley. But Missouri's wine history goes much deeper than an administrative date. Hermann was the second-largest wine-producing area in America in the 1860s. German immigrants who arrived in the 1830s and 1840s recreated the Rhine Valley in the Missouri River bluffs, and their descendants still make wine from the same hills today.

Stone Hill Winery in Hermann is Missouri wine incarnate: established in 1847, once the largest winery in the world, shuttered during Prohibition and used as a mushroom farm for decades, then restored in 1965 and now producing award-winning Cynthiana and Vidal Blanc from a historic underground vaulted cellar complex that is one of the most extraordinary wine tourism experiences in America.

Missouri's Cynthiana/Norton grape is the state's calling card — a native North American variety that produces deeply colored, tannic red wines with a character unlike any European variety. Missouri winemakers, particularly those in the Hermann and Augusta wine corridors, have spent four generations mastering a grape that grows wild in Missouri's forests and delivers something genuinely original in every bottle.