For two years photographer Charles O’Rear and his writer wife, Daphne Larkin, lived a vagabond life, bumping along country roads, breathing in summer dust and sheltering from spring rains as they criss-crossed the nation searching out unexpected wineries.

As O’Rear prowled basement cellars, converted tobacco sheds, barns and firehouses with Nikon in hand, Larkin interviewed winemakers, winery owners and workers — often one and the same — and tasted the fruits of their labors.

Together the pair set up an impromptu portrait studio fashioned from a length of washable fabric and a jerry-rigged frame. At the end of each day Larkin reviewed her notes — “I wanted to be sure I could read them,” she laughed — and O’Rear sorted through photos, sometimes discarding all but one or two of the hundreds of shots that day.

It was adventure of the best sort, Larkin said recently, as she and her husband geared up to promote the resulting book, a 224-page, coffee table-sized photographic chronicle of their travels, “Wine Across America.”

The book and an exhibition of 60 photographs drawn from it launched at Copia on Friday. The exhibition, curated by Copia’s Director of Exhibitions Neil Harvey, will be on display at Copia through June 2008, and then will tour to various wine venues across the country.

A photo op and wine tasting in Washington, D.C., with Congressional Wine Caucus co-chair Rep. Mike Thompson (quoted on the book’s back cover) and 250 caucus members was held last month. The authors are also talking with television producers about a possible series.

“We had a blast,” Larkin said. “We met remarkable people and there are so many more to meet.”

Wine and inspiration

The book got its start two springs ago with a bottle of wine and a question.

The couple was sitting on the back patio overlooking a neighbor’s vineyard and enjoying some very good, but not California-made, wine and wondering about other wine-producing states. It got them to thinking.

O’Rear, a professional photographer and 25-year veteran of National Geographic magazine with at least seven books on wine and wine regions to his credit, wondered if there was already a book on the subject. There wasn’t.

The next step involved an online investigation, which spurred them to hop in their Ford Explorer and head to Montana. That first 3,000-mile trip included stops in the wine regions of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Nevada as well as Big Sky Country.

“We spent two weeks on the road,” Larkin recalled. “Chuck kept saying, ‘I’m not sure I’m getting the pictures I want.’ When we got back home the big question was, ‘Do we have a book?’ Chuck downloaded all his photographs. We looked at them and we looked at our notes and said, ‘Let’s keep going.’”

Not much planning

They often didn’t know where they were headed, O’Rear admitted.

“There was an element of discovery, an element of surprise. We didn’t know what was going to be there. We just knew we wanted to get here, and maybe over here or over here.”

It was also the biggest project he had ever undertaken in terms of time, money and energy. During the two-year project the pair developed a routine — fly to a major airport, rent a car and spend 10 days driving, shooting and interviewing. They frequently covered 2,000 miles and several states before heading home to St. Helena to regroup. Two years and 80,000 miles later O’Rear had narrowed the 20,000 images to 800 and left it up to the book designer to select the final 300

Meanwhile Larkin, an award-winning reporter, former United Nations journalist and currently a writer specializing in the wine industry, had the task of organizing her extensive notes and setting up the book’s framework.

Larkin laughed as she revealed a behind-the-scenes reality.

“The rental cars often had dents in their roofs from the photographer standing on them to shoot pictures,” she said. “So before we turned them in he’d get inside and literally push the ceiling back into shape.”

Wine for each state

And yes, there are wineries in every one of the 50 states. The last state to join the list was North Dakota in 2003 when Maple River Winery released its first apple wines.

In Alaska, Larkin and O’Rear learned, wine country is likely to be a shopping mall in Anchorage where concentrated juice shipped from Northern California is turned into Alaska wine.

In Hawaii, Tedeschi Vineyards on Ulupalakua Ranch, which sells red, white and sparkling wines as well as specialty wines made from pineapple, passion fruit or raspberries, is one of the most visited wineries in the United States.

But top honors go to a North Carolina winery on the grounds of the 8,000-acre Biltmore Estate in Asheville, which draws an estimated 600,000 of the 1 million people that visit every year.

“Basically we think there is an American wine revolution going on, changing America’s lifestyle,” Larkin said. “It’s not just Californians but Floridians and Georgians and Minnesotans who are having wine at night with their meals.”

Various varietals

And it isn’t always wine from familiar cultivars — cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, merlot, sangiovese or sauvignon blanc — being sipped.

In Florida, Larkin’s home state, the St. Petersburg citrus stand where her family stopped during her childhood is now a winery making orange, grapefruit and strawberry wines.

“That’s what’s happening,” Larkin said. “If they can’t grow Vitus vinifera (the domesticated winegrape), which a lot of states cannot because of the weather and the terroir, then they do what their grandparents did, they take whatever fruit they have and create wine. I want to tell you in that winery in Florida and in many other wineries, they can’t make it fast enough.”

In states such as Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia, they came to understand that regional pride is strong and “Watch out, California” was a common sentiment.

During their travels Larkin and O’Rear found wineries in barns, sheds, stables converted motels, schoolhouses and churches, in the shadow of towering desert mesas, in the swamps of Florida and the highest reaches of the Rocky Mountains.

They learned that grapes are being grown in fields once planted in tobacco, cotton and soy. Firemen, farmers and foreign correspondents have given up past occupations to become winemakers and winery owners.

Surprises and discoveries

The St. Helena couple discovered, to their amazement, that the first designated American Viticultural Area was not in California but in Missouri.

“The surprises are what kept us going,” said O’Rear, when his wife teased him about being ready to give up after visiting only 20 states. He talked about driving out to Mount Pleasant Winery on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, where they wandered through 126-year-old caves.

In Talladega, Ala., they met the equivalent of a one-man-band — a retired Birmingham fireman who grows, prunes and picks grapes grown on the family farm and ferments, bottles and labels his wine in the basement of his home.

Under the towering red spires of Castle Rock outside Moab, Utah, they found tiny Round Mountain Vineyards, which produces 100 cases of chardonnay a year. In Tennessee, O’Rear’s camera caught a worker at Strikers Premium Winery labeling bottles by hand.

The pair visited wineries in New York’s Finger Lakes region as well as the site of Thomas Jefferson’s first vineyard in Virginia and a family operation in Texas where everyone, from 83-year-old Oma Switzer to her three sons and her 10-year-old granddaughter, Chardonnay, pitch in.

California, too

Wineries in California’s foothills, central coast and Napa and Sonoma valleys get their share of attention, too. St. Helena’s Otty Hayne is shown walking through his vineyards in the fall. Al fresco diners raise their glasses in a toast at Honig Vineyards in Rutherford. There is also a tip of the hat to vintner Robert Mondavi, and the pair credit his timing, energy and generosity with starting the current trends in winemaking.

“Someone else might have come along but they certainly wouldn’t have had his pizzazz,” O’Rear said. “You could put 10 people together and still not have his pizzazz.”

The book’s focus on wine regions other than Napa’s has caused concern in some areas, he added.

“Some people have asked if we are betraying our friends in the Napa Valley,” he said. “I don’t feel that way. We’d like the book to be a catalyst for people to appreciate the wine in their community.”

“Certainly we’re making the best wine in the country,” Larkin said, “but from the little bit of tasting I did there are some fabulous wines on the Arizona/New Mexico border and a beautiful pinot noir is being made in the Rocky Mountains and world-class rieslings are being made in the Finger Lakes of upstate New York and world-class pinots are coming from the Willamette region in Oregon.

“What people are doing is so creative, so American,” she added. “It’s not just the rich, the snobby, the wine connoisseurs — everybody is drinking wine and everybody is making it. You don’t have to have $5 million to open a boutique winery, or $10 million or $20 million. You can make it in your basement. You can grow grapes in your cotton field.”