A History of Wine in America, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to Prohibition

1. Forms of Life in a Dry World

PREFACE of how many comparable points remain to be investigated critically for the first time; the three articles in question set an admirable standard for further such work. I have been fortunate in having two notable experts read the larger part of this history in draft: Dr. John McGrew, formerly research scientist with the Department of Agriculture and the final authority on eastern American viticulture, and Leon Adams, whose comprehensive Wines ofAmerica does not begin to exhaust the knowledge of American winegrowing that he has acquired in a lifetime of association with the industry. It goes without saying that they have to do only with such virtues as my book may have and not with its defects. It would be wrong to conclude the many years of pleasant work that I have spent on this history without at least a summary acknowledgment of the libraries upon whose resources I have largely depended. In England, for the colonial period, the British Library and the Royal Society of Arts yielded a number of interesting finds; as in this country, for the national period, did the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, the NationalAgricultural Library, and the Kansas State Historical Society. In California, the Bancroft Library of the University of California and the Special Collections of the Library of the California State University , Fresno, were of particular value; I would like to single out Ron Mahoney of Fresno State for the freedom he generously allowed me to ransack the shelves of the library's rich collection, originally formed by Roy Brady and greatly extended under Mahoney's direction. Beyond all of these excellent libraries, I have depended on the Huntington Library 's splendid collection of American history to provide the information out of which this narrative has been constructed. It is people rather than institutions who ought to receive dedications, but if this book were to be dedicated to an institution, it would have to be to the Huntington. Finally, I should like to make grateful acknowledgment to a writer personally unknown to me, Philip Wagner. For more than fifty years he has been writing gracefully, originally, and authoritatively about American wines and vines, and no one else now living can have done so much through his writings to foster an intelligent interest in wine among Americans. xvii This page intentionally left blank P A R T FROM THE DISCOVERY TO THE REVOLUTION 1 This page intentionally left blank The Beginnings, 1000-1700 T he history of the vine in America begins, symbolically at least, in the fogs that shroud the medieval Norsemen's explorations. Every American knows the story of Leif Ericsson, and how, in A.D. 1001, he sailed from Greenland to the unknown country to the west. The story, however, is not at all clear. Historians disagree as to what the records of this voyage actually tell us, since they are saga narratives; they come from a remote era, from a strange language, and are uncritical, indistinct, and contradictory . Most experts, however, will agree that Leif—or someone—reached the new land. There, at least according to one saga, while Leif and his men went exploring in one direction, another member of the company, a German named Tyrker, went off by himself and made the discovery of what he called wineberries —vinber in the original Old Norse, translated into English as "grapes."1 The Norsemen made Tyrker's "grapes" a part of their cargo when they sailed away, and Leif, in honor of this notable part of the country's produce, called the land "Wineland." As a German, Tyrker claimed to know what he was talking about: "I was born where there is no lack of either grapes or vines," he told Leif. But the latest opinion inclines to the belief that the vines of Leif Ericsson's "Wineland"—most probably the northern coast of Newfoundland2 —were in fact not grapes at all but the plants of the wild cranberry.3 Another guess is that what the Vikings named the land for was meadow grass, called archaically vin or vinber, and misinterpreted by later tellers of the saga.4 No wild grapes grow in so high a latitude. Though it is powerfully 1 3 FROM THE DISCOVERY TO THE REVOLUTION A modern rendering of the joyous moment at which Tyrker the German found grapes growing in Vinland. The episode begins the history of wine in America; the...