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Fine Georgia wine, great food and live music are the expected attributes of the Georgia Wine Country Festival, and this year’s celebration will once again live up to that reputation.

Doug and Sharon Paul, owners of Three Sisters Vineyards & Winery in Lumpkin County, said their venue’s signature event will take place the weekends of Saturday and Sunday, June 2-3, June 9-10, June 16-17, and June 23-24, and  Saturday, June 30. Hours are on Saturdays from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. and Sundays from 11:30 a.m.-6 p.m.

The face of the Southern electorate is changing, and perhaps nowhere is the shift clearer than Florida and North Carolina. In the two critical battleground states, the share of white voters has shrunk since the last presidential election in 2008, and the number of African-American, Latino and other people of color voters has steadily grown.

But while the numbers show key Southern states continue to move towards an increasingly diverse electorate, new voting restrictions could undermine its political potential.

My friend told me before I left home that “Just because it isn’t glowin’ doesn’t mean it’s not hot.”

So the next day I set out from the mountains of northeastern West Virginia along the Shenandoah Valley to the John C. Campbell Folk School (Folkschool.org) in the hills of far western North Carolina to take a week-long class on the basics of blacksmithing.

Frank Adams begins each day with a bowl of cereal. He used to eat a larger breakfast, complete with a serving of bacon or sausage – which he now calls “dead animals” – but he changed his ways years ago when his wife’s morning sickness kept her from cooking for him.

Now 74, Adams has continued to eat light, stay out of the doctor’s office and avoid prescription drugs. As founder of Keep Chatsworth-Murray Beautiful, his job allows him walks around the mountainous county he calls home. On those walks, he’s seen that his lifestyle is anything but normal for Murray County.

Butler’s Swamp has gone. Confined, sanitized and renamed Lake Claremont, it has been incorporated into a ritzy housing subdivision with its own golf course.

I once covered every square foot of that old swamp in a tin canoe, exploring its reed beds and mud-bars, looking for water rats and reed-warblers’ nests and hoping against hope to encounter a norn – a black tiger snake – lying in wait for some unsuspecting frog. At dusk, squadron upon squadron of little black and little pied cormorants flew in from the Swan River to roost in the paperbarks and drowned gums.

Julie wouldn’t look me in the eye. She tore off bits of paper napkin and rolled them into little balls. Every few seconds she’d glance at her girlfriend pleading for help. She was trying to explain what happened to her marriage. And then she broke down. Tears welled up in her eyes and she put her head on my shoulder. Her girlfriend reached out and stroked her blonde hair.

Julie’s 41 with two teenagers and she’s alone and scared, not to mention devastated. A neighbor ended up with her husband. The road to love and happiness: what a brutal road.

The recent elections on the other side of the Atlantic continue to cause concern around the planet and news coverage in the United States is both short on explanation and perspective. That is why I asked Dr. Bill Downs to help sense of it all. Downs serves as Associate Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Georgia State University and is the author of numerous books and articles on contemporary politics in Europe. His most recent book, Political Extremism in Democracies: Combating Intolerance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) examines xenophobia and anti-immigrant parties across the continent.