ABOUT

The Story Behind Every Sip

OUR STORY

Wolf Mountain Vineyards began in 1999 when we prepared our 30-acre estate for grape growing and hand-planted our vines. By 2001, our gravity-flow winery was completed, and in that fall, we produced our first vintage. After our inaugural harvest in 2002, we opened in spring 2003 and sold out in just eight months.

Since then, we’ve focused on crafting the highest quality Georgia wines, with limited production making each vintage special. We are grateful for the support of our loyal patrons, as we now produce over 5,000 cases annually.

Just under 60 miles from downtown Atlanta, Wolf Mountain Vineyards & Winery offers an award-winning experience, often compared to Napa's best. With hillside vineyards, a charming fieldstone winery, and inviting hospitality, it's the perfect setting for a vineyard wedding, Sunday brunch, café lunch, or gourmet dinner.

MEET THE BOEGNER FAMILY

Wolf Mountain Vineyards and Winery is a cherished family business. E. Karl Boegner, our Proprietor and Winemaker Emeritus, has dedicated decades to the craft. His wife of 50 years, Linda Boegner, beautifully coordinates the Vineyard’s weddings. Their son Brannon, following in his father's footsteps, manages the vineyard and serves as our Winemaker. Their daughter Lindsey leads the restaurant and event operations as Hospitality Manager, while her husband, Stephen Smith, oversees marketing, the Wine Club, and Tasting Room operations.

The Boegner family warmly invites you to the mountains for a Napa-like experience, where you can savor some of America’s finest wines.


  • When Karl Boegner told friends he was going to North Georgia to open a winery, they were a bit skeptical.

    After all, Karl was a national leader in the hospitality industry with impressive credentials. He helped open Orlando’s Disney World, opened and managed Atlanta’s 1,000-acre, luxury Chateau Élan resort, and successfully managed five hotels.

    Today, Karl’s friends are skeptics no longer. Karl Boegner is Proprietor and Winemaker Emeritus of Wolf Mountain Vineyards and Winery near Dahlonega, Ga., a producer of award-winning wines and one of the South’s premier wedding venues.

THE WINERY

Inspired by European elegance, the Georgia Winery at Wolf Mountain is designed in the style of a raised Craftsman-style cottage, perched above a fieldstone-encased cellar. Spanning 10,000 square feet, our facility includes wine production, a restaurant, and a tasting room.

With breathtaking views of the Southern Appalachian Mountains' foothills, our winery and vineyard offer the perfect setting for enjoying our award-winning handcrafted wines. Whether you’re planning a vineyard wedding, a Sunday brunch, a café lunch, or a gourmet dinner, Wolf Mountain provides an unforgettable experience.

  • You DO NOT need a reservation for the wine tasting unless you have more than 8 guests in your party.

    Due to our hours to the general public we are not available to host private daytime events (i.e. Bridal Showers, Baby Showers, Bridesmaids Luncheons) We only host evening weddings and rehearsal dinners for groups of 75 or more.

    Tastings are offered beginning at 11am (THURS – SUN) with the last tasting starting at 4:00pm (since we close promptly at 5pm.)

    The tasting room is MUCH less busy early in the day, so try to arrive soon after we open at 11am.

    ALL outdoor tables at the tasting room are first come, first serve, so again please arrive early to secure a spot.

    Reservations are not required for the tasting room bar menu, but they ARE required for café lunch or brunch through OPENTABLE.COM.

    There is no outdoor seating available for café lunch or brunch and the brunch is a self-serve BUFFET STYLE brunch.

    Dogs at the Winery: We do allow leashed dogs on our lower level Tasting Room patios.

Perched at an elevation of 1,800 feet atop Wolf Mountain, our vineyard offers a truly unique viticultural site. This mountaintop estate was carefully selected after an extensive search to find the ideal location for growing red wine grapes, prioritizing quality over quantity.

With 10,000 vines hand-planted in small vineyard lots, our property runs east to west with south-facing slopes. This orientation maximizes sun exposure, ensuring the ripest fruit possible. The combination of sun-soaked days and cool mountain nights at our 1,800-foot elevation creates the perfect environment for grape growing. After all, great wine starts in the vineyard.

THE VINEYARDS

  • We cultivate a variety of red wine grapes, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Mourvedre, Tannat, Petite Verdot, Malbec, and Touriga Nacional, which we blend to create our award-winning Estate Red Wines. Among our estate-grown offerings are the reserve Claret, a Cabernet and Mourvedre blend, and the unique Sunset Dry Rosé. Our southwest-facing vineyard slopes are particularly well-suited for growing red wine grapes.

    Utilizing a vertical shoot positioning (VSP) trellis system, we ensure maximum sun exposure and spray penetration. Training our vines up to a four-foot fruiting wire leverages exceptional mountaintop air circulation, helping to combat the Southeast’s humidity and dry the vines after rainfall. In Georgia, excessive rainfall can challenge fine wine grape production. Our mountaintop slopes provide superior drainage, quickly diverting excess water and preventing low-lying areas. By maintaining low crop yields, we produce a limited number of elegant handcrafted wines, ensuring each cluster achieves optimal sweetness and flavor.

WINEMAKING

For the past two decades, Brannon Boegner, our winemaker and vineyard manager, has devoted himself to cultivating and producing premium vinifera still and sparkling wines at the 1800-foot elevations of the Dahlonega Plateau. Brannon, alongside his father Karl, established Wolf Mountain Vineyards and Winery in 1999. Together, they collaborated with consultants from the California and Virginia wine industries to develop the estate vineyards and refine their winemaking techniques and philosophies.

Brannon took over as head winemaker in 2010 and has since earned hundreds of medals at the most prestigious wine competitions in California. He became the first winemaker on the East Coast to be awarded Best of Class and Double Gold Medals at the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco International, and Los Angeles International Wine Competitions in the Premium Sparkling, White, and Red Wine categories.

  • The Old World ambiance of our Cellar and Cask Room sets the stage for our labor intensive protocols which focus on a less invasive use of gravity, minimizing the need for filtration and aggressive processing that sacrifice quality. Our Award Winning wines are hand crafted with emphasis focused on making the highest quality wines possible.

    All of Wolf Mountain’s Estate Vineyards are harvested by hand and then sorted into small lugs. The lugs are then brought to the winery crush pad for processing. Our state of the art Europress by Scharfenberger is one of the highest quality presses available. The press features multiple computerized pressing cycles specifically designed for different styles of wine such as a very long and delicate press cycle for sparkling wines that avoids crushing grape seeds which impart a distinct bitterness to the final wine.

    All of our white wine production is hand sorted to remove leaves, raisins, and damaged grapes. After sorting the grapes are whole cluster pressed instead of crushed and destemmed, this causes less damage to the fruit and preserves the delicate flavors and aromas that the local Georgia fruit offers. Once pressed, the juice is gravity fed into one of the fermentation tanks located 14 feet below in the cellar. These steps ensure only the highest quality juice is used to produce our award winning wines.

    Red wines are hand sorted as well, gently destemmed and gravity fed from the sorting table to one of the red wine, open top fermenters located in the cellar below. When the tank is full, the must (mix of grapes and juice) is chilled to the appropriate temperature and prepared for fermentation. Once fermentation begins and the skins separate from the juice, we begin the Old World technique of punching the resulting caps down by hand with a stainless steel mallet.

    We ferment approximately 3 tons of red wine fruit in each of our 800 gallon stainless steel tanks. The tanks ratio of height to width is specifically designed to allow us to punch the caps of the fermenting red grapes by hand, gently mixing the skins with the fermenting wine. This is done four times a day with additional pump-overs twice daily. These techniques allow us to extract exceptional color and flavors from the fruit. Once fermentation is over, the wine is racked off (transferred) to a settling tank and the remaining skins are gently pressed. The wine settles for a few days in a tank and then it is barreled down for aging in our cask room.

    The wines at Wolf Mountain are more European in style than Californian. As a result, we use French, Hungarian and American Oak Barrels for the aging of all our wines. The emphasis is on the rich fruit flavors our terroir offers and not on excessive oak flavor. Our philosophy is to blend our grape varieties to achieve more complexity, as is done throughout Europe, where the climate is similar to the North Georgia Mountains.

  • Wolf Mountain Vineyards produces four types of sparkling wines using the French-style Méthode Champenoise. This multistep process, developed in France’s Champagne region, puts the still wine through a second fermentation in the bottle.

    Méthode Champenoise Defined

    Wolf Mountain Vineyards produces three types of sparkling wines using French-style Méthode Champenoise.

    While many wineries inject still wines with carbon dioxide (CO2) gas to render them effervescent, Wolf Mountain Vineyards produces sparkling wines using the French-style Méthode Champenoise. This multistep process, developed in France’s Champagne region, puts the still wine through a second fermentation in the bottle.

    Méthode Champenoise is the traditional French method for producing sparkling wine. Originally developed by Dom Pérignon and his fellow monks, and refined over the centuries by the many important sparkling wine producers that followed. One of three ways of making sparkling wine, it is by far the most complicated and labor intensive.

    It starts with making a base wine from grapes that are picked about a month earlier than table wine grapes. This produces a high acid, low alcohol wine. Once the wine has been clarified and is ready to be bottled, yeast and cane sugar is added to the wine and mixed thoroughly. The wine is bottled and finished with a crown cap producing a seal strong enough to withstand the high pressures generated.

    While in the bottle, the yeast consumes the sugar and produces more alcohol and carbon dioxide. However, being a sealed bottle, the CO2 has nowhere to go and dissolves into the wine. After about 60 days the alcohol has reached 12% and the pressure has reached 120 psi. The bottles are then stored on their side for 6 – 18 months. This time is called tirage and the longer a wine is en tirage the more complex and bready the wine will be.

    Finally we have to finish the sparkling wine. However, we must remove the yeast first through a process called riddling. We invert the bottle on a riddling rack and twist each bottle ¼ of a turn every day for one to two months. This works the yeast into the neck and we can then remove the bottle and put it into a bath of food grade glycol that is chilled to -2°f. The necks freeze and capture the yeast allowing the bottle to be turned upright with out the yeast clouding the wine again. The bottle is then disgorged, meaning the cap is removed quickly and the pressure in the bottle shoots the plug of ice and yeast out at high velocity. If done correctly the sparkling wine stays in the bottle.

    We finish the process by replacing the lost wine with dosage made up of sugar syrup and wine. The recipe for the dosage determines the style of sparkling wine being produced. After a week in the bottle, it’s ready to be chilled and served.