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12 A NEW DAWN (II) The South MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA Maryland, quite apart from anything else that might be accomplished there, will always have an important place in the modern history of American winegrowing as the scene of Philip Wagner’s pioneering and deeply influential work.1 Starting in the early ’30s Wagner was the inspiration and the guide for countless enthusiastic grape growers and winemakers throughout the East. Wagner’s own winery, Boordy Vineyards (established in 1945), was run on sound commercial lines and paid its own way, but it was never Wagner’s ambition to make a lot of wine. On the contrary, he wanted more than anything to set an example of domestic winemaking, to show his countrymen that they might have good, sound wine of their own growing. As he put it strikingly: “The finest wines in the world are homemade wines”; and if he included the great château wines of France among the “homemade,” he was at least technically right. “Wine,” he said, “is made in the home, whether the home be a farmhouse, a peasant’s cottage, or a great estate, and is made of grapes grown on the place.”2 His example inspired any number of others to try winemaking; the few who went into business did so, as Wagner would have wanted, on a very modest scale. There are two notable constraints on winemaking in Maryland. One of them is the climate, described byWagner as a rich compound of storms, wildly varying temperatures, floods, droughts, lethal winters, hail, and other a›ictions: “Anything that survives in Maryland is worth trial anywhere this side of the Arctic circle.”3 But with only a little modification, this description could be applied almost anywhere 286 in the East. Maryland had another set of obstacles in its regulations, complicated by local prohibition. One law restricted winery sales to “one bottle of one label to one customer per year.”4 Tastings at the wineries were not allowed. It was of such restrictions as these that Wagner was thinking when he wrote that “some few states have regulations so stringent and arbitrary that they have you licked before you start.”5 A limited winery act was secured in 1976, and its effect is visible in the fact that fourteen of the nineteen wineries opened in Maryland since Boordy was founded date from 1976 and later. There are now several o‹cial bodies concerned with winegrowing: the Maryland Grape Growers Association (1981), the Association of Maryland Wineries (1984), and the Maryland Winery and Grape Growers Advisory Board (1987) in the Department of Agriculture. But the scale of the industry remains very small indeed: at the end of the century there were about 250 acres of wine grapes in the state, supplying twelve wineries whose sales ran to 100,000 gallons.6 The first new winegrowers were faithful to Wagner’s legacy and planted mostly French hybrid vines; one of them, Hamilton Mowbray at Montbray Cellars, also planted vinifera and had Riesling and Chardonnay to sell by 1971. Since then most of Maryland’s wineries have offered wines from both sorts of grapes—Cabernet franc has done well among the vinifera, Chambourcin, Seyval, and Vidal among the hybrids. But about half the crush in Maryland is of grapes grown in other states. Maryland wine can be very good, but it is not yet made in very substantial quantities. In 1946 a German named Urban Westenberger, from the great wine district of the Rheingau, immigrated to Virginia and settled on the slopes of Massanutten Mountain above the Shenandoah River in the northern part of the state. There were already a vineyard and a wine cellar on the property, and before long Westenberger, without troubling the state and federal authorities for licenses and permits, had wine for sale—some 8,000 gallons of Virginia burgundy, rhine wine, and rosé by 1953. Two years later the revenuers shut him down until such time as he could obtain a license and pay his taxes. This Westenberger managed to do, but he remained vulnerable to inspection and so was soon in trouble again. When the inspectors analyzed samples of his Lorelei Vineyards wine taken from store shelves, they found that it was unclean, cloudy, moldy, high in acetic acid, and actively fermenting—a kind of dirty vinegar rather than a palatable wine. They closed him down again, this time for good; Westenberger departed Virginia for Florida, the winery fell into decay, and...

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