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32 FROM THE DISCOVERY TO THE REVOLUTION French vignerons lay out vineyards. The portrait shows him as he appeared around 1696. (Drawing by Francis Place; Historical Society of Pennsylvania) colony, Penn recorded that he had drunk a "good claret" made of native grapes by a French Huguenot refugee, Captain Gabriel Rappel.107 He wondered then whether the future of American winegrowing might not lie with the native varieties rather than with the European vinifera: Tis disputable with me, whether it be best to fall to fining the fruits of the country, especially the grape, by the care and skill of art, or send for foreign stems and sets, already good and approved. It seems most reasonable to believe, that not only a thing groweth best, where it naturally grows;but will hardly be equalled by another species of the same kind, that doth not naturally grow there. But to solve the doubt, I intend, if God give me life, to try both, and hope the consequence will be as good wine as any European countries of the same latitude do yield.108 The idea of developing the native grape of course occurred to others too. Around 1688 Dr. Daniel Coxe, a large New Jersey proprietor resident in London, describWilliam Penn took French vines I O with him toPennsylvania in 1682, his first trip to the colony he had founded, and in the next year had his 10 THE BEGINNINGS 33 ing the wealth of his lands, wrote that they abounded in grapes, from the best of which was made "very good wine" and, from the less good, brandy. "It is believed by judicious persons, French vignerons and others, that some sorts of them improved by cultivating would produce as good wine as any in the world."109 Possibly, if Penn had in fact turned to the "fining" of the native vine, he would have developed a successful viticulture. But he seems to have concentrated on vinifera instead. Before he left England on his first voyage to Pennsylvania, Penn had sent for vines from Bordeaux to be taken with him.110 These he had had planted for him by a Huguenot refugee named Andrew Doz on a spot now a part of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, along the banks of the Schuylkill.111 Like all other such trials, this one had no immediate success, though it had later results not dreamed of at the time. Penn also took an interest in the work of Francis Pastorius, leader of the Pietist German settlers at Germantown, who in 1691 chose for their town seal a device showing a grapevine, a flax blossom, and a weaver's spool. The meaning of the seal, Pastorius wrote, was to show that "the people of this place live from grapes, flax, and trade" (that is, the weaving trade).112 Though the community flourished, the grapes did not. And Penn, who kept a cellar in his Philadelphia house, had to furnish it, not with the vintages of Germantown or the Schuylkill, but with the produce of Europe. Perhaps he was not sorry to do so, despite that "good claret" he once drank from his own woods. The favorite wines of the Penn household, we are told, were "canary, claret, sack and madeira."113 Pennsylvania was in no way ready to yield such wines. Many miles south of Penn's woods, some twenty years before Philadelphia was laid out, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of Maryland,in 1662 instructed his son the governor, Charles Calvert, to plant a vineyard and to make wine. To the original 240 acres of vineyard on the St. Mary's River (in the far south of the colony, just across the Potomac from Virginia) another hundred acres were added in 1665.114 Wine made from this is reported, with the uncritical optimism of all such early responses, to have been "as good as the best burgundy."115 In 1672 Lord Baltimore sent over a hogshead of vines to the colony, but his son reported in the next year that every one had perished, frustrating his hope to be able, in a few years, "to have sent your Lordship a glass of wine of the growth of this Province ."116 Tobacco established itself so quickly and overwhelmingly as the dominant crop in seventeenth-century Maryland that viticulture, whether as good as the best in Burgundy or not, had no chance. Passing by Virginia,whose struggles with the grape we have already seen, we arrive at the...

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