Songfacts®:

• This is a song about a girl's first love. The title is a reference to Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, a very inexpensive and fruity wine that is popular with teenage girls getting their first sips of alcohol. The wine, like the first love, is sweet and intoxicating, providing a valid metaphor for the song.
• This was the first single from the album, and it went to #1 on the US country chart. In 1997, the Country Music Association named it Single of the Year. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Stephanie - Thurmont, MD
• The song was written by Matraca Berg and Gary Harrison and tells of Berg's own coming of age as a teenager outside of Luck, Wisconsin. She and her friends would sneak off and drink strawberry wine, often getting sick in the process but making indelible memories.
  
  Berg recalled to AOL's The Boot: "My dad is a farm boy from Wisconsin, and I used to go up there and stay with [my grandparents] Inga and Elmer Berg, and I met a boy up there.My Grandma Berg just kept having babies, so my aunts were my age. So we used to run around and get in a lot of trouble together, chase boys and whatnot. I told Gary this story, and he latched right onto it. We wrote it quickly, in about three or four hours. We really liked it but we thought nobody else probably would. Pat [Higdon, my publisher] was having this tent showcase with label people and artists coming to listen to the new stuff that we'd all written. And that was the only new song I had. I looked at the floor the whole time, because I was so nervous. When I looked up after playing the song for him, he was grinning from ear to ear. Deana Carter was there, and she was the only artist that showed up. She wanted the song for her first record. The song had made the rounds for a little while before she recorded it, and everybody passed on it [including Trisha Yearwood]."
• Though Deana Carter didn't contribute to the writing of the song, she drew inspiration from a high school romance to sing it. So which first love is the country singer remembering when she performs "Strawberry Wine"? It turns out its actor James Denton, who played Mike Delfino on Desperate Housewives. The two dated in the early 1980s when they were teenagers growing up in Nashville.