A day trip to some North Georgia wineries

In our effort to get out more and explore where we live, Mac and I drove a few hours to check out a handful of North Georgia wineries over the weekend. While wine tasting wasn’t on our “official” Georgia bucket list, we both really love wine tasting and wanted to make the most of Virginia Tech’s open weekend. We decided to visit the wineries around Cleveland. When we were looking at the map, we planned at least 20 minutes to drive between each winery. In reality, these three were under ten minute drives from each other, so we could have visited more.

CeNita Vineyards

Our first stop was CeNita Vineyards. We popped in not too long after they opened and tasted eight of their wines. CeNita gives you a complimentary plate of bread and olive oil to go along with your tasting. You could also purchase a meat and cheese board. This winery had the best view, so we went outside to explore. They also had a wedding venue that we could see from the tasting room. Sadly, it started raining as soon as we walked outside, so we decided to head to our next stop.

Yonah Mountain Vineyards

From CeNita, we drove across the highway to Yonah Mountain Vineyards. Yonah is incredibly beautiful: they have a gorgeous tasting room, a large outdoor seating area with fireplaces and heaters, and an event venue. They also had live music. While the ambiance and setting were great, their wine was a bit underwhelming. We tried the white wine flight. If you’re feeling peckish, Yonah sells a variety of snack plates and baskets in their tasting room.

Serenity Cellars

Our final stop was Serenity Cellars. This winery sits back from the road through a neighborhood. It had the smallest tasting room of the three and had a great patio area. We liked Serenity’s wines the most. So we bought a few bottles. Serenity also offered an amazing chocolate-infused red wine. If we didn’t already have a bottle of dessert wine from our trip to St. Augustine, we would have bought a bottle. As with the others, Serenity sells light snacks. We wound up buying a meat and cheese snack because we were starting to feel the wine (low-carb problems).

After Serenity, we drove up the road to Helen and stopped at Muller’s Fried Cheese Cafe, the same place we ate when we visited Helen’s Oktoberfest last year. We planned to stop at Habersham Winery, but the lines were crazy. Habersham sits right outside Helen, so it gets a lot of foot traffic from people doing wine tours and people in Helen for Oktoberfest. We waited about 30 minutes before we decided to hit the road for our three-hour trip home. While we weren’t huge fans of the wines, we really enjoyed wine tasting. Georgia has a decent number of wineries, so we may have to make another trip up to North Georgia to try some of the others.

What are your favorite North Georgia wineries?