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15 The Southwest; the South; Other States
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15
The Southwest; the South; Other States

Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma

South of Missouri, in Arkansas, the first winegrowing began as almost a repetition of the Missouri development: as Missouri had begun with Germans along the Missouri River, so Arkansas began with Germans (and Swiss) along the Arkansas River. The place chosen, around 1880, was at the high point of the territory along the river's course between Fort Smith, on the western border, and Little Rock, in the center of the state. This high point, logically named Altus, was planted in native varieties such as Catawba, Ives, and Cynthiana (a variety often claimed as native to Arkansas, and just as often asserted to be identical with Norton).[1] The beginning thus made has continued to the present day, and the firms of Wiederkehr and Post may now claim more than a hundred years of operation. The Cynthiana, by the way, is a variety of which we perhaps ought to hear more. According to Hedrick, it is not only a variety distinct from the Norton (so he settles that argument), it is "the best American grape for red wine."[2] This judgment was confirmed in the nineteenth century by the French in their experiments with native American grapes suited to the direct production of wine in Europe. Only a handful of producers now offer a varietal Cynthiana, three in Arkansas and three in Missouri.[3]

A distinctive note in Arkansas winegrowing is provided by the Italians of Tontitown, who varied the otherwise overwhelmingly German character of the industry throughout the Midwest and Southwest. Tontitown, in the far northwestern corner of Arkansas on the Ozark plateau, began as a refuge from a disastrous experiment. About 1895 the New York financier Austin Corbin conceived the idea that his vast


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cotton-growing properties in the swampy flatlands along the Mississippi in southeastern Arkansas could be better worked by Italian immigrants than by the freed slaves who had been the only labor employed before. Accordingly he arranged to have Italians shipped out directly from Italy to the cottonfields of Arkansas.[4] Corbin's plantation was an island in the river, and, ominously, had been a penal colony, though now it was renamed Sunnyside.[5] There the Italians, despite their ignorance of cotton-chopping, met and surpassed all expectations as field laborers. They also met malaria, with fatal consequences: in one year at Sunnyside 130 died out of about a thousand.[6] By 1898 there was almost a panic feeling of desperation; they knew that they had to get out, but did not know how or where. At this juncture the priest of the Sunnyside church, Pietro Bandini, took charge. He entered into negotiations with the Frisco Railroad, whose lines ran through Arkansas and whose officers were eager to encourage agricultural development along their route. One of the properties proposed by the railroad was almost symmetrically opposite from the Sunnyside plantation: it lay in the northwest corner of Arkansas, at the other end of the state from Sunnyside, and it stood high in the Ozarks instead of at water level. The land was poor, but at least it would be free from malaria.

In 1898, under Bandini's leadership, some forty families of Sunnyside Italians made the exodus to the new lands; the men went to work at once in the zinc and coal mines of the region in order to pay the mortgage on the land, and in the intervals of their breadwinning began to plant vineyards. They were, most of them, from the Romagna and the Marches, and so at least by association of birth they were familiar with an immemorial winegrowing tradition. They named their settlement for Enrico de Tonti, the Italian who served as La Salle's lieutenant in the exploration of the Mississippi region, including Arkansas.[7] By degrees, through very hard work, and against much sullen and ugly local opposition,[8] the Italians made their way as farmers and winemakers. The town was not a communal experiment: each householder had his property to himself. But the experience of common origins, common suffering, and common achievement gave the Italians a powerful sense of community. Father Bandini, who had remained with his flock, was rewarded by seeing the growth of a small, but flourishing, town, which to a remarkable degree retained its original Italian character. By 1909 there were seventy families, all Italian, living in Tontitown. They were making wine from their vineyards of Cynthiana and Concord (a trial of vinifera varieties had quickly failed and was not persisted in); and they were soon to form a cooperative association for the marketing of their grapes.[9] In common with almost all the other grape-growing regions of the Midwest and East, the Tontitown vineyards were more and more given over to the production of table grapes, and then of grape juice. Prohibition, which put an end to winegrowing, nevertheless swelled the vineyards—now exclusively Concord—to record size, enabling the growers to survive and prosper but putting an end to the interest of the region from the point of view of this history.[10]


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117
Father Pietro Bandini (1853-1917). the priest under whose leadership 
Italian immigrants established Tontitown, Arkansas, and made it a 
center of winegrowing. (From Giovanni Schiavo,  Four Centuries of 
Italian-American History
 [1952])

The ill-fated Sunnyside plantation was the source of two other small winegrowing colonies of Italians, both of these in Missouri. In Father Bandini's original negotiations with the Frisco Railroad, an offer had been made of land at Knobview, Missouri, along the route of the railroad as it ran southwest out of St. Louis. Bandini and that part of his flock who went with him to Tontitown rejected the offer, but a group of some thirty families closed with it and made the migration to Missouri in 1898.[11] Who the effective leader of the Knobview Italians was is not known—it would be interesting to identify who it was that took the initiative and made the crucial arrangements.[12] In any case, after hard days of struggle, the Knobview group, like that at Tontitown, began to prosper. At first many of them did track work for the Frisco in order to support their families while the slow work of agricultural development went on. Their town, which they later renamed Rosati, after the first bishop of St. Louis, did not flourish, most of its functions being absorbed by the neighboring town of St. James, so that Rosati lost its post office, its schools, and its stores. But the grape growing did well, so well that it managed to survive Prohibition and to serve as the basis for a newly revived winemaking industry around St. James in our day.

The third Sunnyside colony was the tiny town of Verdella, Missouri, consisting originally of only twelve families. They, too, devoted themselves to winegrowing, but beyond that their story remains obscure.[13]

In Texas, largest and among the most varied of the contiguous forty-eight states, the history of grape growing and winemaking was very much like what it


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had been in the earliest days of colonization: full of unmistakable promise but hard to bring to success. Over much of the state, especially in the eastern half, wild grapes of many varieties abounded—indeed, one expert affirms that Texas has "the most diverse population of wild grapes in the world."[14] The explorer sent out by the U.S. government in 1857 to report on the grapes of the Southwest found that in parts of Texas the Mustang grape "is multiplied to an extent almost incredible."[15] The grapes and wines of El Paso, at the far southwestern tip of the state, went back to the first days of Spanish colonization, but, as we have seen, that start was not carried further after the annexation of Texas. Even before that annexation, German immigrants in eastern Texas made repeated trials of vinifera varieties, with the predictable result. Texas, like Missouri, was the scene of very early and considerable German settlement, otherwise rather unusual in the Southwest. Much of this settlement was organized by a group of wealthy men in Germany for speculative purposes, beginning in the early 1840s.[16] The colonists they sent out scattered over an area of southeastern Texas that now centers on San Antonio, and there they founded their towns, giving them such names as Fredericksburg, Weimar, and New Braunfels. At the same time, but under different sponsorship, a settlement combining Alsatians, Germans, and Frenchmen was made at Castroville, a little west of San Antonio.[17] The speculative hopes of the promoters of these places were not realized, but the Germans continued to come anyway. By 1860, it is said, there were some 20,000 of them in Texas.[18] Germans and Frenchmen alike hoped to make winegrowing one of their important businesses and almost at once set out vines brought from Europe. When these failed, they turned to the unimproved native grapes and made wine from them, sometimes in commercial quantities.[19]

The Mustang grape (V. candicans ) was the main variety used, and from all reports, it made a tolerable red wine, requiring added sugar but without the foxiness of labrusca.[20] Since it was so abundant a grape, it was natural to hope that it might also be a good wine grape. One Dr. Stewart, writing from Texas in 1847, reported that a "French wine maker and vineyardist" from Kentucky had come into Texas and pronounced the Mustang to be "the port wine grape, and of superior quality and yield." On this testimony, Dr. Stewart was moved to exclaim, "What resources our country possesses in this respect, if this be the fact, for the mustang grows every where in our fair land."[21] It is hard not to smile now, since the hope was so wide of the mark, but where little is known much may be hoped, and experts are not immune to the desire to please. It is probably also the fact that there are great opportunities for winegrowing in Texas that are only now beginning to be grasped.

The Mustang was the dominant native grape of Texas winemaking but not the only one used. Judge J. Doan, in the Texas panhandle, made well-regarded wine from a species of wild grape in Texas and Oklahoma Territory named after him Vitis Doaniana .[22] But such local and limited successes with the indigenous vines were disappointing when the early hopes had been to discover the Eden of the grape in Texas. Individuals continued to experiment through the rest of the century, trying all the native hybrids developed in the older eastern and southern states and gradually determining that the traditional southern varieties of aestivalis,


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118
Thomas Volney Munson (1843-1913), of Denison, Texas, nurseryman, 
grape hybridizer, ampelographer. For nearly four decades Munson produced
 a steady stream of native hybrid grapes and showed by his work the possibilities 
latent in the grapes of the American Southwest. (From T. V. Uunson,  Foundations 
of American Grape Culture
 [1909])

like the Lenoir and the Herbemont, seemed best suited to large parts of the state.[23] Nor did people entirely resist the seductive attraction of trying to grow vinifera: after all, such grapes were already long proven around E1 Paso. By the end of the century we hear of large plantings—200 acres—of vinifera around Laredo, on irrigated lands bordering the Rio Grande, of a group of Italians attempting to grow vinifera around Gunnison, Texas, and of a group of forty-seven French winemakers brought over by the Texas and Pacific Railroad to grow grapes in the alkali desert around Pecos.[24]

The more discreet growers contented themselves with the safer native varieties from the South, however: the oldest commercial winery now operating in the state, at Val Verde on the Rio Grande, goes back to 1883, and is still making its wines


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from vineyards of Lenoir and Herbemont grapes.[25] The success of these and other related varieties led one of the persistent German growers of the state to declare that they "make of nearly the entire state of Texas a natural wine-producing region of enormous capacity."[26] By now we know that no claim to "natural" status is worth very much, but the proposition is an interesting one once again now that very powerful interests in Texas, including the university in its character as a great landholder, are investigating anew the chances of winegrowing in Texas.[27] That those chances were never realized in the nineteenth century is clearly affirmed by the French viticulturist Pierre Viala, who found abundant native grapes on his visit of exploration to Texas in 1887, but who noted that "Texas is one of the least viticultural regions of the United States."[28]

Apart from its wide open spaces, its abundant native grapes, and its large promise, Texas's greatest claim to attention in this history is the work of a single man, Thomas Volney Munson, of Denison, on the far northern edge of the state. Munson (1843-1913), a native of Illinois, was educated at the University of Kentucky and worked in Kentucky as a nurseryman for some years.[29] He was thus familiar with the many native vines of the Midwest and upper South, and began to take a keen professional interest in their possibilities. In 1873 he migrated to Lincoln, Nebraska, to continue his business as a nurseryman. He experimented with grapes in the frigid blasts and searing droughts of that country of extremes for a few years, but was then glad to accept the invitation of a brother to transfer his business to the north Texas town of Denison, on the Red River. This he did in 1876, and for the next thirty-seven years, until his death, he operated the firm of T. V. Munson & Son and indulged his passion for collecting, describing, and hybridizing native American grapes.

Like his good friend Hermann Jaeger, not far away in southwestern Missouri, Munson was an indefatigable field worker; for many years during grape season he rode on horseback through the woods and fields of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in quest of new varieties. Travelling by train, he carried his search into all but six of the United States and into Mexico, hunting, as he tells us, from train car windows, jumping off to collect specimens at every stop, scheduled or unscheduled.[30] Munson was active in assisting the French in their great struggle to understand and to exploit the characters of native American vines for their own ravaged vineyards. For his contribution he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1888. Munson also did notable work in the description and classification of native varieties and in publicizing the results of his work. He made an ambitious, comprehensive display of the native and foreign grape for the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, and he wrote several treatises on grape classification and grape varieties.[31] All this would have been work enough for a man who had his living to make as a practical nurseryman. But Munson's great passion was not for selling stock or for making classifications. It was for breeding native grapes. This is the work for which he is remembered today, work that he began soon after he removed to Texas and continued until his death. In that time he introduced about


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three hundred new varieties, derived from crosses making use of a large number of native vines.

Munson's objects were several: for one thing, he tried to create a series of grapes ranging from early to late so that the whole of a growing season would be filled with successively ripe grapes. Like every American breeder, he dreamed of creating grapes that would defy the endemic national diseases—the rots and mildews that had oppressed American viticulture from the beginning. And he also aimed at creating a series of wine grapes suited to all the varying conditions of the country.[32] He accomplished none of these things, but the example of his energy and resourcefulness in the work was widely impressive. No hybridizer before him had provided so large and steady a stream of new varieties. There were so many, in fact, that Munson had difficulty in providing names for them; many are named for his family or friends, and others have singularly graceless names, suggesting exhaustion of the poetic power. Who would be tempted to drink the wine of "Headlight," "Lukfata," "XLNTA," "Armalaga," or "Delicatessen"? These and others are all recorded in Munson's Foundations of American Grape Culture , a retrospect of his work that he published in 1909.

One of Munson's distinctive additions to the repertoire of American grape hybridizing was his extensive use of native southwestern varieties, especially those of the species V. lincecumii (Post Oak grape), V. champini , and V. candicans (Mustang). It is fitting therefore that he should be especially honored in the South, as he has been in recent years. The eclipse of experimental grape growing during Prohibition meant that many Munson varieties almost disappeared from knowledge and were in some danger of disappearing for good. In the past decade, however, a small and enthusiastic group has devoted itself to rescuing Munson's work from oblivion. Led by W. E. Dancy, an Arkansas businessman and amateur grower, they have succeeded in discovering living instances of most of the Munson hybrids. They have also established a Munson Memorial Vineyard, where the Munson hybrids are grown and propagated, in his home town of Denison. Another tribute to him has been paid in South Carolina, where a "Munson Park" vineyard of thirty-three Munson varieties has been planted at the Truluck Vineyard of Lake City. It is even possible, still, to buy wine from Munson grapes: the Mount Pleasant Winery of Augusta, Missouri, offers red, white, and rosé wines made from the Munson variety Muench (named for the venerable Missouri German winemaker Friedrich Muench); and the St. James Winery of St. James, Missouri, makes (or did make) a dry wine from the variety called Neva Munson, after one of Munson's daughters. So Munson's name is still alive in the land, as are his grapes.

Oklahoma, or the Indian Territory, where Judge Doan found his supply of Vitis Doaniana for winemaking, was not without some production of its own. In 1890, only a year after the territory was opened to white settlement, Edward Fairchild, a transplanted winegrower from the Finger Lakes of New York, acquired land near Oklahoma City for a vineyard and orchard. In 1893 he constructed a substantial cellar of native sandstone, and there, for the next fourteen years, he


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made wine for the local trade from Concord and Delaware grapes.[33] When Oklahoma Territory became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, it entered the Union as a Dry state. That put an immediate end to Fairchild's winemaking, and to any other such enterprises that had grown up in the brief history of Oklahoma settlement. It is a startling fact that, according to the census of 1910, Oklahoma had over 4,000 acres of vineyard, putting it eighth among all the states. Yet perhaps we ought not to be surprised. No less an authority than T. V. Munson pronounced Oklahoma to be a splendid grape-growing region.[34] In recent years the Fairchild Winery has been carefully restored and entered in the National Registry of Historic Places.[35] The restoration makes it possible to get an unusually distinct and accurate idea of the details of the actual operation.

The South

In the Southeast, as in the Southwest, the general picture in the period after the Civil War was one of widely scattered local enterprises in grapes and wine. The South had much to contend with: the economic and political disruptions of the war and Reconstruction, obviously; but besides that, the destructive effects of cotton culture, the bad old system of tenant farming, the backwardness of methods, and the poverty of things generally made any new venture precarious. And quite apart from economics and politics, the South was a place where nature itself had many kinds of bad news for grapes: humidity, heat, black rot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, anthracnose, Pierce's Disease, phylloxera, nematodes—after running the gauntlet of that list of afflictions, few vines that people wanted to grow for wine were likely to be left alive. Nevertheless, people did persist, and the conclusion one finally draws from the record is that the hope of making a success of winegrowing is indestructible, no matter what the obstacles and the defeats. What follow are examples of this general proposition.

In Florida, for instance, a state largely developed after the Civil War by an influx both of dispossessed southerners and of northerners looking for sun and land, there was a small sort of grape boom in the last thirty years of the century. The northerners, clustered around Orlando in the middle of the state, tended to plant the labrusca varieties; the southerners, in the north and panhandle of the state, were loyal to their native muscadines. By the 1890s, the high point of grape planting, there were about five hundred acres in the region of Orlando. Florida made 20,000 gallons of wine in 1890; by 1900 the figure was 31,000 gallons.[36] Much of what was made doubtless went unreported, however, for the muscadine growers in the north of the state were rarely more than household winemakers, a circumstance that probably has been true in the South almost from the beginning. By the end of the century, despite modestly rising production figures, it was clear that the northerners' idea that labrusca varieties would prosper in the humid warmth of Florida was a mistake. Inevitably, Catawba and Concord succumbed to


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fungus diseases, while the invulnerable muscadines continued to spread vigorously over the rambling trellises that supported them. Florida winemaking went on as it had begun; that is, as a domestic affair usually based on the possession of only a very few muscadine vines. Commercial production was carried on at the Ponce de Leon Wine Company of St. Augustine, which had a winery at Moultrie.[37]

One grower of distinction did emerge from Florida's brief affair with the grape. This was Emile Dubois, of Tallahassee, who was respected enough to be among the wine judges at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and whose produce from his San Luis Vineyard of Cynthiana and Norton varieties was good enough to win a medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900. But Dubois was, ultimately, compelled by endemic diseases to give up his Florida vineyards, in common with less notable growers.[38]

Alabama, to take another sample of the South, might very well have developed a small, steady trade in wine but for the obstruction of prohibition. Two small colonies on Mobile Bay, named Daphne and Lambert, were founded in the 1890s for Italian immigrants by an Italian-American newspaper editor from Chicago named Alessandro Mastro-Valerio. Both colonies grew grapes and made wine as part of their general plan to make a living from truck gardening and fruit growing. The wine made in these small communities had some success in the markets of Mobile, but local prohibition put an end to viticulture in the pine lands along Mobile Bay.[39]

An entity called the Alabama Fruit Growing and Winery Association was incorporated in 1894 to exploit 20,000 acres in Cleburn County, in the northeastern part of the state along the Georgia border. This was a speculation headed by investors from the Chautauqua grape belt in New York State, including Garrett Ryckman of the Brocton Wine Cellars. The New Yorkers hoped to promote immigration to the district and to develop fruit growing through a cooperative scheme. They named the town on their property Fruithurst, and by 1896 the planting of native grapes—Ives, Delaware, Concord, Niagara, and other familiar varieties better suited to the North than to the South—was under way. Fruithurst attracted a good many settlers, among them a group of Scandinavians. At least one winery was built and wine produced, but marketing difficulties, the shadow of prohibition in the South, and, above all, the native vine diseases had made the enterprise uneconomic by the turn of the century.[40] In 1898 another outfit, called the Alabama Vineyard and Winery Company, promoted a property called Vinemont in the north central part of the state.[41] The hamlets of Vinemont and Fruithurst remain on the Alabama map, but these undertakings, so far as I can learn, have left no other trace and are interesting chiefly as evidence of the persistent glamor of the idea of winegrowing, even where history was not encouraging and local sentiment positively hostile.

In South Carolina, where the tradition of experiment with winemaking goes back to the beginnings in the seventeenth century and where, as we have seen, a great variety of men had tried a great variety of different approaches to the challenge, things were not much different than in the rest of the South. The vineyards


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at Aiken, established with such buoyant hope shortly before the Civil War, were still there afterwards, but the heart and means to develop them seem to have disappeared.[42] In the seventies there was a brief burst of activity in grape growing in a new region, the Piedmont area around Greenville in the far northwestern corner of the state. Here, it had been discovered, was a favored spot, a "thermal belt," where the climate just suited the grape and where, for a time, the quickly established vineyards yielded immense crops. Then, in the late eighties, black rot appeared and grape growing faded away.[43] A good instance of the optimism that prevailed for a time around Greenville is a M. Carpin, who came from France, where he had been a viticulturist, to the neighborhood of Greenville in 1876, determined, he said, to "make a wine farm on the French plan." He bought a hundred acres of hilly woodland, cleared it, and set out a mixture of native vines—Norton, Clinton, Concord, Ives, Martha, and Pocklington among others. By the end of a decade he had a vineyard of 80 acres and plans for 150 more; his wine production was 40,000 gallons annually, all of it disposed of through a Boston firm and most of it consisting of a dry red blended wine called "Bordeaux." Carpin himself, it was reported, was "much better pleased with the results of his labor than he ever was in France," and would "listen to no suggestions of failure."[44] Whether Carpin in the event did fail I do not know. Bordeaux mixture may well have arrived in time to save him (South Carolina was one of the first places where it was tried in this country),[45] but its effect was not powerful enough to preserve the Greenville area as a permanent center of winegrowing.

There were more positive developments in the South, too, though they were never quite uncomplicated or straightforward. In Virginia, for example, it might have seemed for a time that the spirit of Jefferson redivivus was at work. For there, in Jefferson's old territory in Albemarle County, grape planting and winemaking had been started afresh immediately following the Civil War. Just after the war, the Virginia farmers, with slavery gone, were forced to find a new basis for their work, and were desperately looking for different crops from those that they had used to grow. Grapes for wine were one of the first suggestions to be made: an advertisement in the American Agriculturist for July 1865, for example, invites investment from interested parties in a scheme for winegrowing in Virginia and North Carolina. This was within three months of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. One of the places where vineyards actually were planted was at Charlottesville, and, as so often was the case, the pioneer was a German. William Hotopp, a native of Germany then residing in Hudson, New York, came south immediately after the war, in 1866, and bought land near Charlottesville on which he planted vines. Other Germans followed him, and by 1870 Hotopp ventured to build a winery.[46]

In 1873 a much larger enterprise, the Monticello Wine Company, was founded by a group of farmers led by another German, Oscar Reierson. The company built a four-story winery of 200,000 gallons' capacity to handle its native wines, and in only a few years was able to obtain awards at international expositions—such awards were apparently required of any American winery seeking respectability.


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119
Advertised in The Southern Planter  of 1875. this "wine and cider mill" shows that winemaking 
was still alive in Virginia, though such crusher-presses no doubt saw many more apples than grapes.

The Monticello Wine Company picked up its obligatory prizes at Vienna in 1876 and at Paris in 1878.[47] Charlottesville wine was largely sold in the New York market, and trade was brisk enough so that by 1888 there were 3,000 acres of vines planted in Albemarle County and a Grape Growers' Association had been formed.[48] The local boosters proclaimed Charlottesville the "Capital of the Wine Belt of Virginia," a modest enough boast, and no doubt true.[49]

An advertisement for the Monticello Wine Company in 1888 lists its products as delaware, catawba, Norton, cynthiana, clinton, Ives seedling, Virginia claret, "Extra Claret," and brandy.[50] Other establishments in the new Virginia wine industry presumably grew more or less the same varieties and made comparable wines. Among those others were Frash & Company in Orange County, Heineken & Peters in Prince William County, and Fritz Baier in Nelson County. In 1890 Virginia recorded a wine production of 461,000 gallons, fifth among all the states. And


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then the crash. The numbers for 1900 were a pitiful 38,000 gallons.[51] In 1910 Virginia reported nearly 50,000 gallons of wine produced, far behind such states as Iowa, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Indiana.[52] What had happened? Diseases, as always, were part of the answer; trade depression another part; and competition from California yet another. Finally, and probably most destructive of all, came the growing encroachments of local prohibition, culminating in a statewide measure in 1914. The combination was too much, so that the sources of Virginia wine dried up, not to be renewed until very recent years.

North Carolina, like its neighbor state to the south, had long been the scene of varied experiments aiming to prove that the state could have a profitable wine industry. Some of this experimenting continued to be carried out on a purely fanciful basis, with costly results. A Swiss named Eugene Morel, a pupil of the great French viticultural scientist Jules Guyot,[53] settled near Ridgeway, North Carolina, in 1870, convinced, as he later ruefully recalled, that the vinifera varieties of central and southern France would certainly do well there. He persuaded a group of French settlers to join him, and together they planted 100,000 cuttings of Aramon, Mourvèdre, Grenache, Carignane, Cinsaut, Mourastel, and Clairette vines. Five years later the failure was obvious. A penitent Morel moved on to California, where he employed his skills as a winemaker first in the Napa Valley and then, before his early death from tuberculosis in 1884, in Fresno for the pioneer vineyardist Robert Barton.[54]

When the French viticultural expert J.-E. Planchon visited North Carolina in 1873 he found considerable interest in winegrowing, stimulated by Morel's plantings at Ridgeway (Planchon was rightly skeptical about them). The successful vineyards, he observed, were given over to Scuppernong, and some of these were quite substantial plantings. Everywhere, however, he noted that the winemaking methods and machinery of the state were "entirely primitive."[55]

North Carolina's great success after the Civil War had direct links to a successful antebellum enterprise. The vineyards of Sidney Weller at Brinckleyville, where Weller had carried on a prosperous winemaking business for three decades before the war, were bought in 1867 by two brothers named Garrett.[56] They continued the winegrowing that Weller had begun, selling both still and sparkling wines, mainly from Scuppernong, the rotundifolia variety whose wine Thomas Jefferson had favored early in the century. In 1877 the firm was joined by Paul Garrett (1863-1940), the son of one of the Garrett brothers, and its transformation began. Paul Garrett was evidently born to be a salesman, and since wine was given him to sell, sell it he did. His ability to sell was so far in excess of the winery's ability to produce that he eventually left it to operate on his own as Garrett & Company, founded in 1900.[57] At first he contracted to sell New York State wines as well as those of North Carolina, but he soon determined to concentrate his efforts on the wine from the Scuppernong grape of his native state. He was inspired to call his most popular Scuppernong wine Virginia Dare, after the first child born to English


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settlers in this country, on the island where the Scuppernong vine itself was supposed to have originated.[58] So popular did Virginia Dare become, in fact, that its sales outstripped the supply of Scuppernong grapes. Garrett had constantly to exhort the farmers of North Carolina to plant more to feed his presses, and when his efforts fell short of his needs he had to resort to changing the formula: Virginia Dare may have begun as a pure Scuppernong wine, but as its popularity grew so did the volume of bulk California wine that Garrett was forced to add to it. In the end, it had only enough Scuppernong juice in it to "tincture the flavor."[59] Only less popular than Virginia Dare were other Scuppernong wines called Minnehaha and Pocahontas. Garrett also made wines from other native varieties, a claret from Norton and Ives grapes, for instance; but these were by the way.[60]

Ironically, Garrett's growing success was matched by the growing power of prohibitionist sentiment in North Carolina. As district after district voted to go Dry, Garrett escaped the net by moving his operation over the line to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903. There, in an imposing five-story winery, the fresh juice of North Carolina grapes was turned into Virginia Dare wine. But the dessication of the South continued its inexorable spread, and Garrett was forced in 1912 to move again, this time to Penn Yan, in the Finger Lakes of New York.[61] By then he had expanded and broadened his operations in many ways, with large interests in wineries and vineyards in all the major winegrowing states: California, New York, Missouri, and Ohio, as well as in the muscadine-producing states of the Southeast. Thus, as the sources of the Scuppernong grapes with which he had made a national reputation progressively shrank, and as he had to move his operations farther and farther from their point of origin, his business persisted in growing. The eve of Prohibition found Garrett presiding over a complex of winegrowing establishments with a storage capacity of 10,000,000 gallons. But the North Carolina part of this empire was by that time only a minor territory.[62]

Garrett was not the only producer of native wines in North Carolina, only the most successful. 'In the 1870s wineries specializing in Scuppernong wines were founded at Whiteville, in the southeastern corner of the state, and at nearby Wilmington. The Bear Winery, also at Wilmington, flourished in the late nineteenth century, and by 1912 had reached a capacity of 200,000 gallons a year, mostly muscadine.[63] Fayetteville was another active center of winegrowing, dominated by the Tokay Vineyard of Colonel Wharton Green, whose hundred acres of vines yielded twenty to thirty-five thousand gallons of wine each year. The colonel made wine not only from the Scuppernong but from a varied mix of native grapes: some of the wines were labelled simply Dry Red, Dry White, Sweet Red, and Sweet White; others carried varietal names, such as Norton's Seedling and Delaware.[64] Around Raleigh there were some substantial vineyards, as there were also in the far western corner of the state at Tryon.[65] In 1893 the State Horticultural Society officially reported that the winemaking of North Carolina had "grown greatly in the past few years;"[66] it seems likely that if the growers had not been beset by Prohibition


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Starting from a small North 120 Carolina winery that went back to Sidney Weller in the 1830s, 
Paul Garrett (1863—1940) eventually became the most successful of eastern winegrowers before
 Prohibition. His Virginia Dare wine, based on the native Scuppernong grape of the South, became 
the most popular of American wines. (From Clarence Gohdes,  Scuppernong: North Carolina's 
Grape and Its Wines
 [1982])


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121
A bottle of Paul Garrett's Virginia Dare wine, from a company brochure 
published around 1913. The quantity of Scuppernong juice in the blend 
grew steadily less as the sales of the wine outstripped the ability of southern 
growers to supply the grapes, Virginia Dare, for whom the wine was named,
was the first English child born in the colonies. (California State University, 
Fresno, Library)

they would have continued to develop what they had so well begun. It is notable, however, that the most solid successes of North Carolina were all with Scuppernong wines. Without prejudice to those who admire these, it is possible to hint a doubt as to their acceptability nationwide and over the long run. Against that skeptical remark, though, one must set the fact that Paul Garrett's Scuppernong-based


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122
The Garrett Winery at Norfolk, Virginia, where, to escape prohibition in North Carolina, 
Paul Garrett moved his headquarters in 1903. According to company claims, the new 
building had "the largest clock on earth" and a wine capacity of four million gallons. 
But by 1912 prohibition in Virginia had forced Garrett to move once more, to New 
York State. (Huntington Library)

Virginia Dare, in versions both red and white, was the most popular American wine both before Prohibition and immediately after.

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


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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


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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,


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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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123
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


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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.


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