Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Nonetheless, the quest for American wine continued. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans attempted to produce wine in every part of the country. Wine was made in New York, both upstate and on Long Island. Georgia had its wine period, and Pennsylvania farmers also took a crack at making it. New types of grapes temporarily encouraged winemakers, who often had strong European backgrounds in their craft, to believe that they had finally found the secret to making good wine in America. They were all disappointed.

  The most dedicated wine aficionado of this period was Thomas Jefferson, who became a connoisseur while he was the new government’s envoy to Paris from 1784 to 1789. Jefferson saw wine as an alternative to corn liquor or other high-alcohol drinks, which were widely consumed in the colonies, often to excess. Wrote Jefferson: “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.”

  During his five years in France, Jefferson enjoyed many glasses of France’s best wines and also traveled to the major wine growing areas of Europe. “Good wine is a daily necessity for me,” he wrote in a letter to his friend John Jay, the Foreign Secretary in the pre-Constitution government. When Jefferson was about to return to the United States in 1789, he sent ahead what he described to Jay as “samples of the best wines of this country, which I beg leave to present to the President and yourself, in order that you may decide whether you would wish to have any, and which of them for your own tables hereafter.” Jefferson shipped home 38 bottles of Meursault, 60 bottles of Sauternes, 36 bottles of Montrachet, 36 bottles of Champagne, 60 bottles of Rochegude, and 58 bottles of Frontignan.

  Back in America, Jefferson became the new country’s first Secretary of State, a good position from which to continue his love affair with wine. He sent detailed instructions to the U.S. Consul in Bordeaux about the kinds and amounts of wines to send President Washington and himself.

  Jefferson in 1801 became the young country’s third president and moved into the White House. He spent $7,597 on wine during this first term—an enormous amount since his annual salary, including money for entertaining, was only $25,000. During his eight years as president Jefferson bought more than twenty thousand bottles of European wine. His favorites: Yquem, Chambertin, and Champagne. Jefferson, acting very much like the nation’s sommelier-in-chief, calculated that a bottle of Champagne at official events would serve exactly three and one-seventh people.

  Jefferson long dreamed of making wine at his beloved Monticello estate in rural Virginia. He conducted many experiments there, attempting to grow both European and native American vines. In 1807, he planted 287 vines from twenty-four European varietals. Later he cultivated two native American varietals:Vitis labrusca, the Fox grape, andVitis rotundifolia, Muscadine. Jefferson, though, had no more success than the other would-be American vintners.

  While attempts to make wine on the East Coast were failing, efforts in the Midwest in the early part of the nineteenth century had a little more success. Starting in the 1810s Nicholas Longworth produced a number of wines in the Cincinnati region using Catawba grapes. He also tried growing European vines, but they quickly died.

  It was on the West Coast, though, that American vintners had their first real success. There again the first hope was that the abundant native grapes could be used. On July 3, 1769, Junípero Serra, a Franciscan priest, wrote back to a religious superior in Mexico to report on the area around San Diego, where he was to establish a mission: “We found vines of large size, and in some cases quite loaded with grapes.” Father Serra looked carefully at the area’s wine potential because wine plays a central role in Roman Catholic religious services and the missions would have to make their own. The Franciscan missionaries eventually established twenty-one church settlements—and vineyards—along 650 miles of a coastal road they called El Camino Real. The northernmost mission, San Francisco Solano, was north of San Francisco Bay in what is now the city of Sonoma.

  Just as on the East Coast, however, the native vines produced poor quality wines. Because of its temperate, Mediterranean climate, however, Europe’sVitis vinifera grapes grew well in California. The Spanish padres had success, in particular, with a vine called Mission, which is of unknown origin and had been brought to California from Mexico and probably originated in Spain. Mission grapes remained a mainstay of California wine for the next century and a half. The Franciscan chain of missions and their accompanying vineyards were thriving in 1833, when the Mexican government took over church lands in an attempt to break the church’s secular power. Soon after, the mission vineyards were abandoned.

  Joseph Chapman of Massachusetts started the first commercial winery in California in 1826, planting four thousand vines in Los Angeles. The Frenchman Jean Louis Vignes soon followed with the city’s second vineyard, this time using French vines. Vignes’s wines gained a reputation for quality, and he bravely proclaimed that someday California wines might rival those of his native France. Vignes sent a barrel of his wine to France’s King Louis Philippe in 1842 via a visiting French sea captain, but it was destroyed in transport.

  While southern California produced large quantities of wine, the northern part of the state turned out better-quality, lighter wines that resembled those made in France. The native Indians called the area that would later be known as the Napa Valley the “land of abundance” because everything grew so easily there. George Yount, the first white settler in the Napa Valley, received a land grant of 11,814 acres from Mexican authorities and moved there in 1836. Two years later, he planted the first grapevines in the valley.

  California throughout its history has been a land for dreamers and schemers, acting as a magnet for people who wanted to discover a place of easy wealth. The gold rush starting in 1849 attracted thousands of people from all parts of the world. At the end of 1848, only an estimated 14,000 non-Indians lived in California; four years later they numbered 224,000. The gold rush also helped create a moneyed class in nearby San Francisco, which was soon demanding the good things of life—including wine.

  On March 10, 1852, a member of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Commission visited the Napa Valley and was amazed at the lush vegetation he saw in this earthly paradise. He later wrote these impressions: “The hills on both sides as well as the valley were covered with a luxurious growth of wild oats, and immense herds of cattle were roaming about feasting on them. Wild flowers of varied hues were thickly scattered around.”

  If he had recognized it, the commission member could also have noted that the valley’s soil, climate, and topography are almost ideal for growing wine grapes. The valley had been formed several million years ago by the collision of the North American and Pacific plates, which caused numerous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The area’s still active geysers and hot springs are remnants of past geothermal action. All that geological turmoil created soils rich in minerals and sediment. The two sides of the valley are made up of oceanic crust that had thrust its way toward the sky. Some of the most complex land is found in the alluvial fans, where streambeds come down from the hills and spread out onto flatter land.

  By the mid-1850s winemaking was booming in northern California. And even then, California winemakers were boasting that they could produce wines as good as those made in France. On February 2, 1854, San Francisco’sAlta California newspaper wrote glowingly about George Yount’s wine, saying, “[It] bears a good deal of resemblance to the Bordeaux wines…[W]ith more age, and, perhaps, a little better management, [it] would equal the best French wines.”

  Among the newcomers arriving in California were a large number of Europeans. After failing to make their fortunes in the gold fields, some turned to wine in the nearby Napa and Sonoma counties. Englishman John Patchett built Napa Valley’s first real winery, a stone structure, in 1859. German immigrants Charles Krug and the brothers Jacob and Frederick Beringer also settled in the Napa Valley and started wineries.


  The most flamboyant winemaker of the day was Agoston Haraszthy, who had come from Hungary to California via Wisconsin, where he had first tried to make wine. After those vines failed, he moved to the West Coast in 1849, first stopping in San Diego, where he was elected sheriff. Haraszthy soon traveled north, eventually buying 560 acres in Sonoma County, and in 1857 established the Buena Vista winery, a Roman-style villa that fit perfectly with a promoter who had a lot of P. T. Barnum in him. Haraszthy was variously called Count and Colonel, but deserved neither title.

  Despite his extravagant style, Haraszthy helped bring California wines to their first flowering. In 1858, he wrote for the state legislature a “Report on Grapes and Wines in California,” the first treatise on the subject. Haraszthy was an outspoken advocate of improving the quality of California viticulture by using better grapes. Vintners still largely depended on the lowly Mission grape, but Haraszthy argued that California wine would not achieve its full potential until winemakers began using Europe’s best grapes. Haraszthy also advocated blending wines in the European style to smooth them out and help them achieve more complex flavors.

  Governor John Downey in 1861 appointed Haraszthy to make a trip to Europe, asking him to research “the ways and means best adapted to promote the improvement and growth of the grapevine in California.” The governor simply wanted a report, but Haraszthy had other ideas. Using Paris as a base, he roamed the Continent from Spain to Germany, spending most of his time buying vine cuttings to plant when he got back to California. He later claimed to have collected 100,000 vines from 1,400 varieties. The numbers were undoubtedly inflated, but Haraszthy had nonetheless opened California to new and better varieties of vines. In his report he advocated many of the things that in later years helped develop California wine, including the establishment of state agricultural experiment stations for viticulture research.

  Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in his short 1883 bookThe Silverado Squatters gave a colorful description of California wine at the time. He began the chapter entitled “Napa Wines” by lamenting the phylloxera-caused disaster in French vineyards: “Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhône a mere Arabia Petraea. Château Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage—a hermitage indeed from all life’s sorrows—lies expiring by the river…It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.” The future of viticulture for the entire world, Stevenson wrote, would be “decided by Californian and Australian wines.” He thought, though, that California would not be ready for a while. “Wine in California is still in the experimental stage,” he wrote. “Bit by bit they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.” Nonetheless, Stevenson liked what he tasted, writing, “The wine is bottled poetry.”

  In the 1870s and early 1880s, many immigrants and wealthy businessmen from San Francisco moved into the Napa and Sonoma valleys, anticipating that California would soon become the vineland of the phylloxera-ravaged world. In 1880 there were 49 wineries in the Napa Valley; six years later 175.

  One of the newcomers was Gustave Niebaum, a Helsinki-born fur trader who had made a fortune in Alaska. He bought the land that would become the Inglenook estate in the Napa Valley town of Oakville and turned it into California’s first world-class winery.

  The California wine boom, however, came to an abrupt end in the late-1880s, after Europeans saved their vineyards by grafting their vines onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstock. Following the comeback of French wine, California was left with lost potential markets, dashed dreams, and a huge surplus of wine. Soon wineries were closing.

  Partially in appreciation for the role the U.S. played in saving French vineyards from phylloxera, the French invited California vintners to send samples of their wines to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. To everyone’s surprise the American wines, in particular those from the Napa Valley, did very well in competition with French wines. California wineries won 34 awards for their wines, brandy, and sparkling wine, with Napa Valley wineries picking up 20 prizes, including 4 golds.

  It was a high point for Napa Valley wines, but it also marked the beginning of a long and steady decline. During the next forty years California wine was hit with a series of natural and man-made calamities.

  First came natural disasters—severe frosts and a California outbreak of phylloxera, which wiped out vineyards planted with European cuttings and required massive and expensive replanting. Then in 1893 came a depression, after a sell-off of stocks turned into a financial panic. Thousands of businesses were forced to close, and many banks failed. Wealthy San Francisco businessmen were drinking less wine and also leaving the wine business.

  On April 18, 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake hit at 5:12 a.m. Both the tremor and the resulting economic troubles were felt fifty miles north in wine country. San Francisco was the center for blending and shipping wine as well as the financial capital of northern California. Wine stored in cellars was lost when barrels and bottles broke or were crushed. The California Wine Association, a recently founded group that owned more than fifty wineries, alone lost 10 million gallons, and the total amount that perished is estimated to have reached 30 million gallons.

  The most devastating development, though, was man-made. Ever since colonial days, the U.S. had been a hard-drinking country. But in the early twentieth century a movement to ban alcohol gathered strength, and one by one states began outlawing its production and consumption. Beer and wine producers tried in vain to distinguish their lower-alcohol drinks from hard liquor, but the difference between wine with 12 percent alcohol and whiskey with 50 percent was lost on those who wanted to ban any and all intoxicating beverages.

  Following the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919, national Prohibition officially started on January 16, 1920. Millions of gallons of California wine in storage or aging barrels was shipped abroad, having to be on board and out of port before January 16. Both the Drys, those favoring Prohibition, and the Wets, who opposed it, held large celebrations to mark the end of one era and the beginning of a new. At the time 700 wineries were operating in the U.S., with 120 of them in the Napa Valley. Most people in the wine trade thought that the “noble experiment,” as President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition, would be short-lived and that they would soon be back in business.

  The Volstead Act, the enabling legislation for the Eighteenth Amendment, had a few loopholes that allowed limited wine production. Wine, for example, could be produced for religious and medicinal purposes, and the male head of a household could get a permit to make two hundred gallons per year for the family’s own use.

  Eventually some fifty wineries produced sacramental wine. The most successful was Beaulieu Vineyard, which not only survived but also prospered during Prohibition. The winery, located just south of Rutherford, had been founded by Georges de Latour, a wealthy Frenchman whose family winery in France’s Périgord region had been wiped out by phylloxera. He came to the U.S. in 1883 and in 1899 began buying land to start his own winery. De Latour acquired property next to Gustave Niebaum’s Inglenook, following the belief that good wine property is usually located right next to good wine property. De Latour, a leading figure of the Catholic community in San Francisco, was able to obtain endorsements from the religious hierarchy for the wine he sold to churches all around the country. Beaulieu stationery of the day proudly proclaimed it was “The House of Altar Wine.”

  Making wine at home was an old tradition among immigrants, especially Italians who came to the United States in large numbers in the early 1900s. The amateur production of wine picked up as early as 1915 in anticipation of Prohibition and exploded after it became law. University of California agricultural experts estimated that homemade wine production increased from 4 million gallons in 1915 to 90 million gallons in 1925. This first led to sharply higher prices for both grapes and farmland and then to overplanting and finally to the crash of grape and land prices.

  Ingenious businessmen developed ways to get raw materials to home winemake
rs. Grape juice and concentrate were sold under names like Forbidden Fruit, Vine-Glo, and Moonmist, which often carried very specific instructions on their containers about how to turn the product into wine. Other instructions took the form of negative warnings: “Do not place container in room with a temperature over 60 degrees or contents may ferment.” In some parts of the country, trained winemakers made house calls to start the fermentation of grape juice into wine.

  The quality of homemade wine left many consumers yearning for a bottle of Inglenook, California’s best pre-Prohibition wine. An author in the December 1928 issue ofHarper’s magazine wrote: “There are probably few Italian-American families that do not make their own wine; but the wine they make, as a rule, can be endured only by stomachs toughened by a racial experience of hardships dating back to the Punic Wars.”

  Frank Schoonmaker and Tom Marvel in their 1941 classicAmerican Wines wrote: “Unquestionably, most of the homemade wine of the Prohibition era was bad; it was produced by people who knew little about wine making, and less about grapes.” Years later Ernest Gallo, cofounder of the Gallo wine empire, told a meeting of enologists, “Some of you may remember what homemade wine was—something like grape juice in December and something like vinegar in June.”

  Homemade wine had a deleterious effect on the types of grapes being grown. High-quality wine grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon do not travel well because they have thin skins and are easily damaged in transport. Home winemakers wanted large, thick-skinned grapes that could survive long railroad trips across the country. And since their wine was often watered down, home winemakers needed grapes that produced very dark juice that would still be red after being diluted.