Other States

Here, at the end of this narrative of America's long struggle to discover the ways and means of winegrowing, what can be said about those states that have so far received no mention? In a few cases, almost nothing. So far as I know, the states of North and South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana do not figure even in a token way in the story I have to tell.^[67] But given the meager historical materials on this subject, that is hardly a decisive statement. Much may have been done without having made its impress upon the record. All the rest of the contiguous forty-eight states have some experience to contribute to the general record, and most

have, by this point in the book, been mentioned in one connection or another. New Hampshire and Vermont have not been so mentioned, but might well have been. They figure repeatedly in the discussions of grape growing and winemaking carried on in the agricultural and horticultural press of the nineteenth century. Both the Vergennes and the Green Mountain grapes, varieties of some commercial importance, originated in Vermont.^[68] In the South, Mississippi had its share of viticultural experiment, though I have said nothing of it.^[69] And, after its creation during the Civil War, so, too, did West Virginia, especially along the Ohio River, where grape growing was carried on when the state was still a part of Virginia.^[70]

Another omission is Minnesota, but of course Minnesota contains wild grapes, and of course the first settlers tried their luck with cultivated varieties. They had success enough to encourage commercial grape growing at least in a modest way, for in the 1880s considerable quantities of local Delaware grapes were being sold in the markets of Minneapolis.^[71] There was also some work done towards hybridizing grapes to withstand the Minnesota winters: the variety called Beta, for example, from a riparia-labrusca cross made by Louis Snelter of Carver, Minnesota, and another called Beauty of Minnesota, a labrusca-Bourquiniana cross made by J. C. Kramer of La Crescent; and there were others.^[72] There is precedent, then, for the work towards developing a native hybrid fit for Minnesota conditions now being carried on by the University of Minnesota and by the Minnesota Grape Growers' Association.^[73]

In the West, Utah, despite the prohibition of alcohol among the modern Mormons, grew grapes and made wine in the region called "Dixie" around St. George in the southwestern part of the state. Moreover, this work was carried out under the directions of Brigham Young himself, who wanted the wine both for use in the communion of the Mormon church and as an article of commerce.^[74] A Bavarian-born Mormon, John Naegle, built a winery in 1866 at Toquerville in the Dixie region; this operated only briefly, but winemaking continued on a smaller scale thereafter.^[75] Arizona, which has had no previous mention, was a place of grape growing long before it became a state. J. De Barth Shorb, of the San Gabriel Winery, had property interests around Phoenix in the 1880s and sent cuttings to be planted there. They did well enough so that in 1890 the Arizona Fruit Growers' Association seriously thought of promoting dessert wine production, and some 25,000 gallons of wine were made in the state that year.^[76]

In Oregon and Washington, the history of winegrowing is practically a reversal of what happened in most other states. Usually, men tried to grow grapes in regions where they would not succeed; in Oregon, especially, but in Washington as well, Vitis vinifera will grow more or less unaided, but there were few who made the effort to grow it. Thus, though the possibility was always there, and though it was pretty clearly recognized in theory, no significant commercial winemaking developed in the Pacific Northwest until the second half of the twentieth century. The story of the region before that time is an irregular chronicle of isolated experiment.

Both Washington and Oregon are sharply divided, north to south, into coastal

and inland regions by the Cascade Mountains. The narrower coastal part is wet, temperate, and fruitful; the high and wide inland regions, in the rain shadow of the mountains, are dry, hot, and barren, except where water for irrigation can be had. The coastal region was, of course, the earliest settled part of the Northwest, and the history of horticulture there goes back to the Hudson's Bay Company's establishment at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River—actually in what is now Washington but belonging to the region of metropolitan Portland. Grapes were raised there from seed brought from England in 1824, and some of those vines were still living early in the twentieth century.^[77] Since they came from England, they were presumably vinifera, and since they lived so long, they evidently took kindly to their situation. When the American settlement of Oregon Territory began in the 1840s, the Americans, familiar with the native grapes of the East, and no doubt taught to believe that vinifera would not grow in this country, did not follow the lead set by the English. Instead, they sent for cuttings of native vines: the first planter of record, the pioneer nurseryman Seth Lewelling, of Milwaukie, Oregon, came from Iowa, and the first vine that he planted, in 1847, was an Isabella.^[78] From native vines the Oregon people made wine at least good enough to compete in California. William Meek, of Willamette, Oregon, took a special premium in 1859 at the California State Fair for his Isabella white wine; Oregon wines were also exhibited there by Lewelling and by A. Stanborn.^[79]

The chances of vinifera were not entirely overlooked. At least as early as the 1860s, A.R. Shipley of Oswego, an enthusiastic amateur horticulturist, imported some vinifera as well as native vines into the Willamette Valley.^[80] Both vinifera and native grapes were shown at the Oregon State Fair in 1869, and the fair offered premiums in the seventies for "foreign" as well as "American" grapes.^[81] But in the next decade the "foreign" grapes disappear from the competition, while the number and variety of natives grows steadily: in the 1900 fair list, prizes were awarded for a whole spectrum of the familiar American varieties, now evidently well settled on the Pacific coast: Agawam, Concord, Delaware, Niagara, Worden, Diamond, Catawba, and others. These were, of course, mainly grown for the table; so far as I have been able to determine no commercial winemaking was carried on in the Willamette Valley, the main region of settlement and of fruit growing, in the nineteenth century.

South of the Willamette Valley, in the Roseburg and Grants Pass areas, things were a little different but not much. The region is essentially an extension of the coastal valleys of California: Vitis californica is native there, and so is Sequoia sempervirens , the redwood. Here the Van Pessl brothers planted vinifera in the 1880s, and at least one winery, that of Adam Doerner, opened in the 1890s and operated until 1965.^[82] Thus a beginning in winegrowing was made, and though it had not grown beyond those beginnings when Prohibition cut off all development, it is fitting that the revival of Oregon winegrowing should have begun in these southern valleys in the 1960s.^[83]

The potential economic importance of grape growing was recognized in 1890,

when a vineyard was established at the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station;^[84] but the already flourishing wine industry in California, the remoteness of Oregon from the important markets, and the continued mistrust of vinifera all made wine-growing look too risky for almost anyone to venture. There were, of course, bold individual exceptions: one Oregonian took a silver medal for his riesling at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.^[85] In 1910 Oregon had some 381,000 bearing vines planted, enough to rank it eighteenth among the states; and in 1915, in a report presented to the International Viticultural Congress at San Francisco, both southern Oregon and the Columbia basin were identified as "splendid" locations for growing vinifera.^[86] About that time the chronicle ends, not to be resumed for many years.

The beginnings in Washington were just as tentative as those in Oregon, and were not made so early. Still, they were early. Some vinifera were being grown at Walla Walla in 1869, and about the same time German settlers planted vinifera at Tampico.^[87] The first vineyards leading to commercial production were in the wet western, not the dry eastern, part of Washington, and they were not of vinifera but of native American varieties; these were on Stretch Island, at the south end of Puget Sound, planted in 1872 by one Lambert Evans.^[88] When the beginnings worked out well, other vineyards were planted on the Stretch Island site. The favored grape in the Puget Sound region was an eastern hybrid called Island Belle locally but known elsewhere as the Campbell Early, a black grape of labrusca parentage, introduced in 1892.

In eastern Washington fruit growing, including grape growing, could not develop in advance of irrigation works. When large-scale development of water resources began in the Yakima Valley in 1905, grapes soon became an important crop; but the grapes were largely Concord and they were destined to become grape juice rather than wine. By 1910 Washington had a respectable total of nearly 700,000 grapevines officially recorded—say about a thousand acres. Grapes grew at other places dotted around the great Columbia basin, even as far east as Idaho, along the Clear Water and Snake rivers, and some of them were vinifera intended for wine.^[89]

The pioneer grower at Lewiston, Idaho, was Louis Delsol, a Frenchman, who planted vines there in 1872 and opened a winery not long after. Robert Schleicher, an Alsatian, began his Lewiston vineyard in 1880, and made wines that attracted attention in Portland, Seattle, and beyond.^[90] But for Idaho, Washington, and Oregon alike, the dominance of California and the threat of prohibition made the risks of winegrowing too great. Washington was to develop as a source of grapes for the table and grapes for juice; it was thus relatively unaffected by Prohibition, but its promise as a winegrowing land was effectively unrecognized for the better part of a century.

At least forty-three of the contiguous forty-eight states had made some sort of beginning in grape growing and winemaking before the end of the nineteenth cen-

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The pioneer of grape growing in western Washington, Lambert Evans, a former Confederate 
soldier, planted vines on Stretch Island in Puget Sound. He sent his grapes to market in 
Olympia; winemaking came later. (From J. Elizabeth Purser and Lawrence J. Allen,  The 
Winemakers of the Pacific Northwest  [1977])

tury, and in at least a dozen of those states winegrowing had become an established enterprise. Now, in our day, there has been a return to the beginnings that were cut off by Prohibition. Societies of grape growers and winemakers are springing up in states that have long been wrongly supposed to have had no history of winegrowing: Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Minnesota, for example. At the same time, both viticulture and enology, after long neglect by the state universities and agricultural experiment stations (except for those of California and New York), are being energetically taken up by those institutions in such states as Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Virginia, and Washington. State legislatures in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maryland, and a number of other states have in very recent years passed legislation enabling the operation of so-called farm wineries, so that the small grower-producer can sell his wine directly and without the burden of heavy licensing fees. These changes are both a response to the country's newly broadened interest in wine and a cause of it. Everything considered, the current scene in this country is more active, more exciting, and more promising than at any time since the middle of the nineteenth century, when successful winemaking had

at last been established and when the economic possibilities of newly settled regions were being explored for the first time. The point I especially want to make is that the current ferment of interest in wine in America is not so much a new thing as it is a return to and a continuation of an earlier state of things. Prohibition and its lingering effects have obscured that fact from us. It is now time to consider what Prohibition was, where it came from, and what it did.