Horse Creek Winery owner Ed Perry at his Nashville vineyard.

Along Georgia Grown Trail 37, you’ll find a mix of businesses both old and new, from family farms that have been running for more than a century to businesses that have been running for a decade or two.

You’ll also find businesses old and new reinventing themselves, whether it’s planting new produce or starting new industries.

Take Still Pond Winery in Arlington.

Tucked away down a dirt road, the Cowart family and Still Pond have been in the grape growing business for decades, ever since Charlie Cowart Sr. started growing 40 acres of muscadine grape in the late 1960s.

That 40 acres bloomed into 180 acres through the years. Still Pond sold mostly to grocery stores, but it also sold some grapes to wineries that need muscadine grape juice.

That got Charles Cowart Jr. thinking.

When Charles started running the business in the early 1990s, the fresh fruit market was changing, but the demand for juice was growing.

“Our telephone was ringing off the hook with people looking for muscadine juice to make wine,” said Charlie Cowart, son of Charles Cowart Jr.

After his father was called crazy for trying to grow grapes in Georgia in the 1960s, Cowart Jr. received similar comments when he decided to start producing wine in the early 2000s.

But in the first year, Still Pond made 2,000 gallons of wine.

Fast forward 10 years and Still Pond produces 20,000 gallons of wine per year.

And much like his grandfather stepping out on a limb to grow grapes and his father making the leap to making wine, Charlie Cowart is adding on to Still Pond.

Still Pond gets its name from a nearby spring-fed pond. During Prohibition, the banks of the pond housed a few illegal moonshine stills.

That’s where Charlie found inspiration to start Georgia’s first combination winery and distillery, a distinction that caused difficulty.

“In Georgia, there’s laws for wineries and laws for distilleries, but there aren’t laws for both. We literally threw the Department of Revenue a curveball.”

The problem was that laws for distilleries specified that distilleries could not have a retail store.

Still Pond’s retail store didn’t sell any alcohol except for wine, but the distillery was connected to it.

It took a while to straighten out, but eventually the law was changed to allow a combination winery and distillery to run, provided that distilled spirits were not sold in the winery retail store.

In 2012, Still Pond produced its first moonshine and this fall it will release a grape-based vodka, which will join the peach, muscadine and barrel-aged moonshines.

Down towards the other end of Trail 37 is Horse Creek Winery.

With a long history of growing cotton and tobacco, Ed Perry started growing grapes at Horse Creek in 1992.

At first, Horse Creek produced fresh fruit for Harvey’s grocery stores, but the Perrys slowly started selling to wineries.

A few years later, Perry considered going into the wine business.

Since making the first wines in 2008, Horse Creek’s wine business has tripled.

Perry credits this success to the quality of the wines, which in turn he credits to three main keys.

The first key is the harvest.

Each grape is handpicked at Horse Creek. It costs more than having a mechanized harvester, but Perry finds it pays off in quality.

Second is Horse Creek’s specific climate, a mix of good sunlight and soil similar to a middle Georgia piece of clay heel.

And third is how Horse Creek approaches pest control, eschewing herbicides, relying on constant mowing  and wind flow to control pests.

Horse Creek still sells whole grapes. Seventy percent of its crop is sold as fresh grapes. Twenty percent is used to make wines and the final 10 percent is sold to other wineries.

“It’s not like you have to have a whole valley to have a winery. It doesn’t take that many acres. On the flip side, I hope that our demand does grow and our business grows. Then we’ll do less fresh fruit and more wine.”

Perry is a big believer in Georgia Grown; for Horse Creek’s five fruit wines — blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, peach and watermelon — Perry gets juice from Georgia farms.

He’s also a big believer in Trail 37.

“A road seems to bind together different communities with common interests,” said Perry. “Particularly in agriculture.”