Mississippi Delta AVA
American Viticultural Area

Mississippi Delta is an American Viticultural Area (AVA) on the left (east) bank of the Mississippi River, between Memphis, Tennessee, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. It includes portions of the Mississippi Delta landform and the watershed of the lower Mississippi River in the states of Louisiana (west bank), Mississippi, and Tennessee. The wine appellation was established as the nation's 68th and each state's initial AVA on August 30, 1984 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Treasury after reviewing the petition submitted by Mr. Samuel H. Rushing, of The Winery Rushing, proposing the viticultural area in northwestern Mississippi, with minute segments in Tennessee and Louisiana, to be known as "Mississippi Delta."
The Mississippi Delta viticultural area is leaf-shaped and extends for a length
of about 180 miles (290 km) with a maximum width of about 65 miles (105 km) encompassing approximately 3.8 million acres (6,000 sq mi). The area is a flat, alluvial plain with extremely rich soil. Topsoil in the area is often 35 feet (11 m) deep. The area is one of the more highly productive agricultural regions in the United States. Growing conditions are favorable to a wide variety of crops. Major crops are cotton, soybeans, grain, sorghum, and rice. To a much lesser extent, the area is also a grape-producing region.
The public source identifies “Mississippi Delta AVA” as american Viticultural Area. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mississippi, Delta and American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6879116. Authority coordinates are 34.000, -90.500. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mississippi Delta AVA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.