Carter Farms Red Wine: Vinted and Bottled by Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia 1998.

Carter inherited the family winemaking tradition from his grandfather, who cultivated some fifteen acres of grapes in Georgia, and from his father and uncle, from whom he received the original five-gallon glass jugs and the family recipe. Beginning around 1990, he produced approximately one hundred bottles every five years, working from a wine press said to be roughly two hundred and fifty years old and from equipment largely of his own construction. As he explained to Wine Spectator in a 2005 interview, he revised the inherited recipe substantially, consulting French winemaking literature and Georgia commercial vintners in order to reduce the residual sugar that had characterized earlier family vintages and to produce a drier wine more aligned with contemporary palates. The grapes are local Scuppernong and Muscadine, both indigenous to the American South and historically central to Georgia viticulture; Carter never employed conventional vinifera grapes. The labels, designed and presented to him as a gift by his children, render each bottle a small artifact of presidential domestic life as well as of regional American winemaking.