A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present

8. Back East

8 BACK EAST TWO SORTS OF WINE The immediate postwar years are a convenient point from which to take a survey of American winegrowing outside California. In common with their California counterparts, the winegrowers in the rest of the country had had to endure Prohibition, struggle through the Depression years, and hang on during the war. Now, in the first moment of the postwar era, they shared the same euphoria. “Everyone connected with the industry is optimistic ,” a writer on winegrowing in Arkansas reported in 1946, “and, to the last man, the belief is that the State is but at the threshold of a great development.”1 But what, we may ask, had in fact survived through these years, and in what condition? What expectations could be reasonably held? On what basis? The answers to such sober questions were not particularly encouraging, though few paused to ask them. Commercial winegrowing had been established in the eastern states in the first half of the nineteenth century after more than two centuries of hopeful experiment and repeated , comprehensive failure.2 Beginning with small successes in Ohio and New York, winemaking in some form had, by the end of the century, been carried on in almost every state east of the Rocky Mountains, from the Atlantic Coast westward to Kansas, and in the Southwest as well. Almost all of the many wineries in question had only a local trade, and most of them had a very uncertain tenure on life. But a pattern had gradually been established before being obliterated by Prohibition. In the northern parts of the region, exposed to the extremes of continental weather, the tempering effect of water was crucial . Thus the Great Lakes states dominated: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michi161 gan. The Missouri River region from Omaha to St. Louis was a district of persistent and varied enterprise in grape growing and winemaking; so was the Ozark region, both in Missouri and in Arkansas. There was a marginal commerce scattered over Texas and along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. On the East Coast a small but distinctive industry existed in New Jersey. Generally, the South lagged behind, though the operations of Paul Garrett in North Carolina and Virginia, based on the rotundifolia grapes native to the region , were an exception. At the opposite corner of the country, in the Northwest, there were significant plantings of grapes in Washington and Oregon from which some wine was made, though the trade was dominated by wines made from the local fruits and berries. Such, roughly, was the scene up to Prohibition. After Repeal, the recovery of winemaking activity was slower and less complete than in California, where it had been far more extensive and economically important than in any other state. But the old pattern dimly reemerged: the Great Lakes states, the Ozarks, certain spots in the South, and the northwestern corner were still where grapes were grown and where what might emphatically be called American wines were made. For all of the wine made outside California came from pure native varieties (the muscadines in the South, the Concord in the rest of the country) or from the so-called native hybrids, containing more or less vinifera admixture in their blood. More precisely, the wines sold as eastern wines could and did contain up to 25 percent of California wine, and the rest came from native varieties.3 There were thus two distinct sorts of American wines offered to Americans, but they were not identified as different. They went to market under the same names: New York made and sold “sauterne,” as did California; there were Ohio ports and California ports, Michigan burgundies and California burgundies—to say nothing of the genuine Sauternes , Burgundies, and Ports from France and Portugal—working to the greater confusion of the American wine market. For if California sauterne (the final s was almost invariably omitted in American practice) had little resemblance to what came from the banks of the Ciron, it was equally different from the New York wine of that name. Perhaps it was even more different, because the wines from native grapes and from vinifera are as different as, say, orange juice and grapefruit juice. If you are expecting the one and get the other, you are likely to be unpleasantly surprised; and if you grow up thinking that the one is the other, you will certainly be confused. The case either for varietal naming or for clear regional names...