Pioneering American Wine: Writings of Nicholas Herbemont, Master Viticulturist

Introduction

Introduction Nicholas Michel Laurent Herbemont (1771–1839) styled himself a “visionary,” an “enthusiast of the vine.” He prophesied a day when American wine making would equal that of his native France. In the late 1820s he won recognition as the finest practicing vigneron—winemaker—of the early United States. Gideon B. Smith, editor of the country’s foremost agricultural journal, the American Farmer, and a Maryland connoisseur who had sampled wine from all the reputable vintners of the nation—including John James Dufour, John Adlum, Thomas McCall, George Fitzhugh, and Nicholas Longworth—in 1832 voiced the verdict of his generation: “The wine that Mr. H. calls the white wine, is really the most delicate and delicious flavored of any we ever tasted.”1 Smith and his circle of Maryland grape growers implored Herbemont to publish his method of wine making. This Herbemont did in a two-installment treatise, “Wine Making,” published in February 1833 in the American Farmer. The journal declared, “We consider it very far superior to any treatise extant”—a significant assessment since American Farmer had reprinted in its pages the works of John Adlum, John James Dufour, and William Prince, the other patriarchs of American viticulture. Reissued in pamphlet form and reprinted in several magazines, “Wine Making” would stand as the most widely read and reliable American guide to the art of producing potable vintage for a generation.2 As a vigneron, Herbemont radiated a confidence in his art that could have only arisen with mastery: “If Bachus himself could condescend to pay us a visit and drink some of my wine, he would readily acknowledge that he never had drank better in his lifetime, and not often as good!”3 No aesthetician of taste had a more profound influence for the good in the early republic. By tireless campaigning— screeds, manifestoes, instructions—he nudged the country (winemakers and consumers ) from its penchant for fortifying wine with brandy and taught it to savor wine born of “the juice of the grape.” He tempered American winemakers’ too liberal use of sugar to boost the alcoholic content of wine (Major John Adlum used three pounds of brown sugar per gallon of juice) and championed delicacy as a quality. He insisted on science in agriculture and boldly challenged custom in vineyard management, testing experimentally the most widely held methods of growing, pruning, processing, and fermentation in Europe to see which proved effectual in the southern environment. By these efforts he overthrew the European Introduction 2 practice of growing grapes close to the soil and popularized high trellising, a technique that maximized air circulation and contributed substantially to the control of black rot, the chief fungal affliction of American vineyards.4 His practice of grafting scions (cuttings) on native roots, begun on a large scale in 1819, countered the depredations of the vineyard’s most fearsome insect scourge, phylloxera. His directions on grafting became the standard instruction of antebellum viticulture.5 He cultivated a host of native and imported varieties (over three hundred in the course of his career) in a garden the size of a city block in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and in a vineyard at Palmyra, his plantation , among the sand hills on Camden Road in Richland County. Knowledge, rather than wine wealth, drove his efforts. Though he championed the commercial development of wine making by Americans and sold wine to the public from 1823 to the end of his life, he loved experiment more than profit. He never expanded his vineyard much beyond ten acres total, while Abraham Geiger in Lexington County, South Carolina, tended forty acres and James McDonnald in Aiken over sixty. His vineyard and garden produced modest quantities of wine from half a dozen varieties and permitted the study of a multitude of grape varieties in southern soil and climate.6 He declined to form business partnerships of the sort that pioneer vintners Peter Legaux and John James Dufour devised to float their vineyards. Nevertheless, Herbemont knew that his most avid disciples desired wealth from vineyards planted with hundreds of acres in two or three kinds of saleable wine or table grapes, and he wrote to encourage these wishes. As a commercial vintner, his practices were inconsistent. He sold his wine at a price (two dollars per gallon) higher than that of any other winemaker in the country, yet he sold his vine cuttings at cost and distributed sample demijohn bottles of his vintages gratis to an international network of “scientific and...