10 Great Places to Retire for Wine Lovers

It all starts with grapes, of course. Fields of them that stretch beyond your line of sight. And when these tiny bits of fruit are baked in the sun just right and then fermented under the correct conditions, they taste exactly like the ideal retirement. One person who discovered his retirement dream in a bottle of wine is Chuck Johnson. A former vice president for a transportation company in Omaha, Johnson, 47, retired from the corporate world and bought a 10 ½-acre farm in Yadkin Valley, North Carolina's wine country. Now Johnson, his wife, Jamey, and their two teenage sons tend vines and mow grass at Shadow Springs Vineyard. In a brick-and-stone tasting room, they chat about their latest creation, a bold red wine blend infused with dark chocolate called Dark Shadow.

But like many jobs, planting a vineyard as a retirement career also casts a shadow, and not a chocolate-flavored one. "For a guy coming from the corporate life with hundreds of people working for him, having to do everything is a really daunting task," says Johnson. "I'm working 70 hours a week, seven days a week. At 3 a.m., before I open, I am trying to program the cash register." There's a lot more to retiring in wine country than just watching grapes grow.

[See a slideshow of the 10 great places to retire for wine lovers.]

U.S. News asked a handful of wine experts how wine lovers should decide where to retire. (You can make a personalized list of best places to retire using this search tool.) "If you are a real wine lover and you know a lot about wine, California offers the most intellectual stimulation in terms of the number of different and magnificent wines you can taste," says Karen MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America and author of The Wine Bible. In California's wine powerhouses, Napa and Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, you can sip a glass of world-class locally grown wine with every meal. But that luxury comes with an exceptional price tag that could keep fixed-income retirees out of the area.

Luckily, many other wine-producing regions in the United States offer exceptional beauty and a low-key lifestyle coupled with a much more affordable cost of living. Ithaca, N.Y., and Jefferson City, Mo., both have median home prices below $200,000 while surrounded by gorgeous farmland. "You could probably do well financially if you retire there because it's not that glitzy yet," says Mary Ewing-Mulligan, president of the International Wine Center and coauthor of Wine Style: Using Your Senses to Explore and Enjoy Wine, about the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York "I just tasted a whole lot of Finger Lakes Rieslings, and the wines are very exciting."

The remoteness of many vineyards is both a perk and a drawback. It can be useful for retirees to maintain at least some proximity to a city for medical care, access to airports for travel, or even to enjoy the bright lights and amenities on occasion. "It gets pretty wearing if you have to drive down an unbelievably mountainous road to get a quart of milk," says MacNeil. "You may not want to be so far from civilization." One winemaking region that offers a nice mix of proximity to a major city and plenty of lush vineyards and farmland is Leesburg, Va., which is about an hour's drive from Washington. Austin suburb Georgetown is also close to the 24 wineries of the Texas Hill Country without being too remote. Bill Mateja, a retired director of consumer affairs for Montgomery Ward, and his wife, Susan, moved from West Palm Beach, Fla., to the Sun City Texas retirement community in Georgetown four years ago. The couple get out to the Texas Hill Country about once a month for black bass fishing, antiquing, and tours of the region's famous wineries. "We will go out to the Hill Country just to inhale the beauty of it," he says.