Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America by Erica Hannickel (review)

Popular food histories especially those of Mark Kurlansky like Cod (1998) and Salt (2003) have reached a wide-audience of readers by focusing on a single item to unleash a rich narrative regarding the environment and the political economy of food. However, more recently, as food studies has proliferated as an academic field, so too has the quantity of scholarly publications. Like Kurlansky, Erika Hannickel has contributed a work that traces the history and cultural significance of a single food. However, her work is more in line with academic food histories like David Smith’s Eating History (2009) that trace the intersection of foodways and national identity.

Hannickel provides a cultural history of wine that covers American history from the nineteenth century to the present. She emphasizes both the cultivation of the grape as wine and as myth, claiming that the “still-prolific vineyard mythos” continues to be “tangled with the ideology of national expansion and its ideological foundation in manifest destiny” (4–5). Hannickel claims that wine was never perceived as one of life’s essentials to most Americans as it is to the French and Italians. Instead, she claims wine has been bound to a sense of luxury. Americans’ attraction to wine has a strong relationship to a romance of the vineyard as site of a gentle cultivation of the American wilderness. In the early nineteenth century, important horticulturalists like William Robert Prince were instrumental in promoting this mythos. Prince’s nursery in Flushing, New York sold seeds, plants, and vines at first to the Hudson River Valley and later across the country. He advocated for the cultivation of native grapes that would be given American—rather than European—names. Hannickel describes how wine cultivation that began in New York moved west with the country. In her most detailed chapter, she presents the life of the upwardly-mobile Nicholas Longworth, who became a wealthy wine producer and real estate developer in nineteenth-century Cincinnati by cleverly cultivating both the land and the myth. His strategy would be repeated in the twentieth century in Sonoma and Napa Valley by new generations of entrepreneurs.

Empire of the Vines might be a disappointment to wine connoisseurs hoping for detailed account of the development of American wine. While Hannickel occasionally describes many varieties of American wines, her interest is in viticulture and demystification, rather than the finished product. Her final chapter warns about the continuing excesses of the vineyard mythos with a reading of contemporary popular representations of wine and its enthusiasts, including an extended analysis of the film Sideways (2004). Erica Hannickel’s survey of manifest destiny, national identity, and the grape should be of interest to American Studies and Food Studies scholars alike. She convincingly argues that Americans came to realize that their Garden of Eden would not be complete without the ancient vine. By the twentieth century, American wines were produced from coast to coast and, as in the present, in nearly every region of the country.