America's first successful efforts at winemaking lead to the destruction of French vineyards. Second in a series on the development of America's midwestern wine industry.
For over a century every effort to produce palatable wine in America failed, due to the climate of the eastern seaboard, which favored native grapes over the European vinifera. The European grapes were uniformly unable to survive long enough to produce a crop; and the American natives were unsuitable for winemaking, due to their coarseness, high tannins, and "foxy" flavors.
The First Success
Vineyardists continued to rave about the obvious potential for grape growing everywhere from Massachusetts to Georgia. The trouble was, their inspiration was kindled by the wrong varieties. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, writing home to his brother Samuel in 1736 offered this poetic assesment:
"With nobler Products see they GEORGIA teems,
Chear'd with the genial Sun's director Beams
There the wild Vine to Culture learns to yield,
And purple Clusters ripen through the Field."
The purple clusters, of course, were suitable only for table grapes.
The first real success came in 1740 when a natural cross pollination occured between a native grape and a vinifera grape in William Penn's vineyard. The new hybrid was named after its discoverer and became known as the Alexander grape. It was the first of a long series of semi-successful efforts to cross American and European varieties. A two acre vineyard near Annapolis, MD, was planted to the Alexander grape and a new chapter opened on the American wine scene.
American Hybrids Destroy French Vineyards
The French took a passing interest in the new developments in the New World and some of the early hybrids began turning up in Bordeaux. Despite the American vines' natural resistance to pests, some of the nasty critters survived their trans-oceanic voyage and took a liking to the tender roots of the European vinifera vines. By the 1860s the plant louse phylloxera had destroyed most of the vineyards in Bordeaux. What vines survived were subject to black rot and downy mildew, fungal diseases also brought over on American vines.
But there was a bit of a silver lining to this dark cloud. French viticultural scientists set about making thousands of crosses between vinifera and native American grapes. Most of these were unsuccessful, but several became varieties of choice for cold climates and are grown today in New York State and Canada. Most notable of these is Seyval Blanc and Vidal Blanc. These grapes produce some of the world's most prized ice wine from vineyards in Ontario's Niagara Peninsula.
The French Solution
The French Hybrids, as they are known today, were suitable only for regions where vinifera struggled to survive and never became popular in France itself. As a matter of fact, the French government disallowed them in any Appellation Controlée region, and still does. French vineyardists found a different path to success by noting that American rootstocks were resistant fo phylloxera, pulled up nearly all their vines in the Bordeaux region, and replanted using age-honored French vinifera vines grafted onto American rootstock.
By the 1990s the resistant American rootstocks used in many regions of California, notably Napa Valley, fell prey to a new generation of phylloxera and the French experiment was repeated in California using newer types of resistant rootstock.
