Wine, Local Food, and Local Resilience, Part 2

In the first post of this series, I mentioned my initial encounter with winemaking and wine drinking on an island in Lake Erie, after which I read anything and everything I could find about wine. One of the first books I read was Leon D. Adams’ The Wines of America, a book long since out of print. While reading it, I was very surprised to learn that Ohio was once the leading wine producing state! Yes, you read that right: for a few decades before the American Civil War, Ohio led all the states in wine production. Adams wrote about lawyer Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati, who in 1825 received some cuttings of a new grapevine called Catawba and established a vineyard on the current site of Cincinnati’s Eden Park, overlooking the Ohio River. By the late 1850s, Ohio was producing almost 600,000 gallons of wine per year, “more than a third of the national total, twice as much as California … [T]he Ohio was ‘the Rhine of America.’ There were 3,000 acres of vineyards along the river between Cincinnati and Ripley, forty miles upstream, and a large acreage under vines across the river in Kentucky” (Adams 95).

What happened to the Ohio wine industry, and the unique challenges facing grape growers in the eastern part of North America, is the subject of this post. (Warning: some of this information may be tedious, but please bear with me. It’s important. I’ll try to be as brief as possible.) In the third post, we will explore what these challenges might mean to would-be grape growers and winemakers in the twilight years of the fossil energy glut.

Failures and Successes
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they encountered “the greatest natural grape-growing areas on earth. More species of the genus Vitis, the grapevine, grow wild here than in all the rest of the world combined” (Adams 4). Grapevines climbed the trees of the forests and lined the riverbanks. Vines were all over the place. Naturally, in view of all this abundance, the settlers thought this North American climate which supports so many wild grapes surely would be an ideal place to grow European wine grapes (all descended from the Old World vine species Vitis vinifera). So they imported cuttings and planted them, figuring that soon, they would have productive vineyards producing good wines like those of France or Italy.

All efforts to grow the European vinifera in the English colonies failed. Totally. The vines would grow, flourish for a while, but then, inexplicably, they would decline, wither, and eventually die.

The soil was blamed; so were the severe winters, which are colder than western European winters. Thomas Jefferson, who counted wine among his many interests, even imported some soil from Italy (along with Italian vineyard workers) in one of his attempts to establish wine grapes at Monticello. This attempt failed just as completely as the other attempts.

Eventually, attempts to cultivate V. vinifera were abandoned and attention was turned to the wild grapes themselves. Perhaps some of them could be cultivated and make good wine. This is where Nicholas Longworth and his Catawba cuttings come in. The Catawba was found growing beside an inn in Maryland and was named for a river in the Carolinas because it was thought to have originated there (Adams 73). It produced a lighter, fruitier wine than most of the wild grapes themselves. It’s likely that Catawba was a chance cross between the wild Vitis labrusca that grows along the eastern seaboard and a European vinifera that someone nearby was trying to cultivate. So Ohio’s early success as a wine producing state was founded on a chance hybrid.

The Catawba vines grew successfully for a time along the Ohio River and the industry prospered. The vine-draped slopes along the river must indeed have reminded the thousands of German immigrants who settled in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky during the 1840s and 1850s of the vineyards along the Rhine. But the success was short-lived. Two indigenous fungus diseases—black rot, which turns the developing berries into empty skins, along with powdery mildew, which attacks the vine’s leaves and stems, caused the decline of the vineyards. The labor shortage caused by the Civil War doomed the southwest Ohio industry, and it never recovered.

The Ohio industry was reborn after the war along the shores of Lake Erie (and on those islands in the lake’s western basin that I mentioned in the first post). Lake breezes helped keep the vines free of disease. The industry flourished again for a while, despite growing competition from California, until Prohibition killed it off once again. When Prohibition ended, the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression, not a good time to re-establish an industry viewed by many as a luxury. After World War II when prosperity returned, California gained the upper hand in wine production and marketing. Ohio’s wine industry, along with those of other eastern and Midwestern states (except the Finger Lakes region in New York), became an afterthought.

California had (and continues to have) several advantages over eastern and Midwestern grape growing regions. For one thing, nobody had any particular trouble growing the European vinifera there. The fungus diseases that doomed the Cincinnati vineyards are less of a problem in California; they exist, but there they were imported. In the east they are indigenous and more virulent. Also, California’s milder winters are kinder to the vinifera than the more frigid temperatures back east. California vineyards are usually more productive, acre for acre. And California can more easily take advantage of economies of scale (think industrial-scale agriculture). The result is that California can produce quality wine more cheaply and in larger quantities than Ohio, New York, or Virginia can. And for now, because transportation costs are still relatively cheap, California can ship the wine east and still sell it for less than most of the local wines.

The Taste of the Fox
And of course the V. labrusca-based industry in the east and Midwest produced wines of a far different character than the European vinifera-based industry in California. Anyone who has ever drunk a glass of Welch’s Concord grape juice is familiar with the heady, powerful grapy flavor of V. labrusca. For most Americans, in fact, the unique flavor of V. labrusca is synonymous with “grape flavor” (Adams 8). This grapy labrusca flavor is called “foxy,” for reasons nobody is quite sure of, although one of the common names for wild V. labrusca is “fox grape.” To make wine of labrusca grapes like Catawba, Concord, and Niagara, one needs (usually) to ameliorate the must with sugar and water, similar to the way wine is made from fruits other than grapes. Unlike table wines from vinifera grapes, which are normally fermented dry (meaning that nearly all the sugar is converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide), labrusca wines are usually left with some residual sweetness, because to ferment them dry would make them bitter tasting. This is the reason Ohio and other eastern/Midwestern wines have a reputation for being sweet and cloying. (Think of the Concord-based kosher wines like Mogen David and you will get the idea what these wines were typically like.) Although many people like these kinds of wines (and I still enjoy Pink Catawba if it’s well made), those whose tastes in wine were informed by California or European table wines usually find them quite unsatisfying.

The Real Culprits
The colonists were partly right with their assessment of the failure of V. vinifera in the east: cold winters did help doom the tender vines. And the soil was also partly to blame. More precisely, a tiny insect that lives part of its lifecycle in the soil and feeds on the roots of grapevines, was one of the culprits. This insect is the phylloxera (Viteus vitifoliae), a close relative of the aphid but much, much smaller. One needs a good magnifying glass or even a microscope to see it. It’s no wonder that nobody noticed it for a long time; it was first identified during the 1850s, after cuttings of American vine species had been sent to Europe and the vines in Europe began contracting a strange new illness. Phylloxera had hitched a ride on those cuttings and began infesting European soils wherever grapevines were being grown.

As mentioned, phylloxera feeds on the vine’s roots, sucking the plant’s juices (just like aphids do). Susceptible vines experience root death and eventual decline and death of the vine. Over the next two decades or so, phylloxera spread throughout the European vineyards, with devastating results. The European wine industry might have been lost completely if not for some American viticulturalists, notably the Texan Thomas V. Munson and the Missourian Hermann Jaeger, who hit on a solution. They recognized that European V. vinifera roots are highly susceptible to the phylloxera’s root feedings. However, the native North American species’ roots were able to tolerate the insect. So the solution was to graft the European wine varieties to native American vine stocks that were highly resistant to phylloxera. Munson in particular devoted much time to breeding highly phylloxera-resistant rootstocks that were also tolerant of the various soil and climate conditions of Europe by crossing and backcrossing various American grape species. The French hailed Munson and Jaeger, as heroes for “saving the French vineyards.” Munson and Jaeger even received an award from the French government in 1888 (Adams 207).

Black rot and powdery mildew, along with a third fungus disease called downy mildew, like phylloxera, are also indigenous to eastern North America and, like phylloxera, also found their way to Europe. Vinifera are highly susceptible to them. The solution found was to spray the vines with sulfur and/or a mixture of copper sulfate and lime called Bordeaux mixture. These chemicals counteract the fungi, although buildup of toxic copper salts in vineyard soils has become a concern.

(Phylloxera, along with the three fungus diseases, has also invaded California; most California vines are grafted on phylloxera-resistant rootstocks. A few vineyard regions in the world, notably Oregon, Chile, and parts of Australia, are phylloxera free, and vinifera grapes in those regions don’t require grafting.)

The French Hybrids

The French were not completely satisfied with having to graft their vines, however. Many wanted vines that could be grown on their own roots, like during the good old days before the phylloxera invasion. So some of them began crossing their favorite wine grapes with the native American vines brought over as rootstocks. These rootstocks didn’t include V. labrusca, by the way: since Jaeger and Munson were working in the midsection of the continent, where V. labrusca does not grow, they used other species: Vitis rupestris, V. aestivalis, and V. riparia, among others. These species do not have the “foxy” flavor of labrusca. By the 1920s and ‘30s, and after a series of crossings and backcrossings, these French grape breeders developed various hybrid varieties that tolerated phylloxera and also produced decent, vinifera-style table wine. These varieties are known in France as direct producers; here in North America, they’re normally called French hybrids (or French-American hybrids).

During the 1950s and 1960s, a few individuals, most notably Philip Wagner, a newspaper editor from Baltimore, imported some of these French hybrid varieties to see how well they might grow in the humid, disease-ridden climate of the eastern seaboard. They found significant success: the vines not only possessed the phylloxera resistance they were bred for, but also had inherited from their American ancestry some disease resistance and winter hardiness as well. Wagner began a nursery, Boordy Vineyards, to propagate and sell hybrid vines to anyone interested in trying them out, and he also built a winery to demonstrate that dry, European-style table wines could be made in the humid eastern states. (I bought the vines I grew in Bowling Green from Wagner’s nursery.) Some of these French hybrid varieties have since become standard wine “varietals” in vineyards from New England to Ontario to Missouri and beyond: Seyval, Chambourcin, Vidal, Foch.

Breeding work continues, though not in France. This work is now being carried on primarily here in North America (but also in Germany). Institutional breeders include Cornell University’s Agriculture Experiment Station in Geneva, New York; the University of Guelph’s Vineland, Ontario, campus in Canada, not far from Niagara Falls; and the University of Minnesota’s grape breeding program. Another program at the University of Arkansas has focused on breeding seedless table grapes. Private breeders, most notably Elmer Swenson of Wisconsin and Byron T. Johnson of Cincinnati, have also carried on the quest of seeking of better wine quality along with better disease and winter cold resistance. We will discuss grape breeding in a bit more detail in the nest post.

Vinifera in the East

Finally, to round out the story of wines in eastern North America, we need briefly to discuss the modern successes in growing V. vinifera. Now that viticulturists know what caused the colonists’ failures, they have been able to counter the disease and winter tenderness problems and produce true European-style table wines like California does. The pioneer was Dr. Konstantin Frank, an immigrant from Russia who had grown grapes in the Ukraine, and who, in the 1950s, arrived at the Geneva, New York, Agriculture Experiment Station, where he scoffed every time he was told, “It’s too cold to grow vinifera around here.” His reply: “The winters in Russia are even colder and we did it there!” He was convinced that keeping the vines disease-free, which can now be done with modern chemicals, will help them survive winter cold spells better (Adams 132-33). He was allowed to demonstrate that it could be done, which he did. He eventually opened up his own wine cellar on Keuka Lake. Liz and I visited him in 1980 and had a fascinating time. He died in 1985.

In 1968, one of Dr. Frank’s students, an engineer named Arnie Esterer, moved to Conneaut, Ohio, along Lake Erie, and established Markko Vineyard. He grew Riesling and Chardonnay; thus, he was the first to grow vinifera successfully in Ohio. Others have followed suit throughout the eastern and Midwestern states: besides Esterer, most notable here in Ohio is Ron Barrett and Nancy Bentley, Oregon grape growers who in 1999 founded Kinkead Ridge Vineyard in Ripley, pioneering vinifera winegrowing along the Ohio River valley and sparking a revival of wine production in the very region where Ohio wine began with Nicholas Longworth 185 years ago. Vinifera table wines grown in the eastern and Midwestern states, including Ohio, are as fine as those grown in any other region of the world.

Next post: what all these facts might mean for winegrowing and winemaking at the end of the age of cheap energy.

Work Cited

Adams, Leon. The Wines of America. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

Wine, Local Food, and Local Resilience: Part 1

A few weeks ago, the sustainability media outlet treehugger.com ran an article titled “Is Biodynamic and Organic Wine Still Green If It Is Shipped Halfway Around The World?” Author Lloyd Alter discusses the carbon footprint of wine shipped from different parts of the world and questions whether wine shipped from such far-off places as Australia, even if it’s grown “organically,” can be considered “green.” As it turns out, wines that come to us by cargo ship from Australia or Chile actually are “greener” than trucked-in wine from California.

Of course, the carbon footprint of a bottle of wine can’t be measured by shipping method and/or distance alone. Wine, like almost all agricultural products of our industrial age, is produced with fossil fuel inputs from the get-go, beginning with the fertilizers and sprays used in the vineyard all the way to the temperature controls during fermentation and aging, and, finally, the industrialized bottling processes. The bottles themselves are also products of industrial production using fossil fuels, and they have to be transported to the wine cellar from wherever they were made, using even more fossil fuel.

The questions that trehugger.com raised regarding whether and to what extent wine can be considered a “green” product at all have raised some additional questions in my mind. As I have watched the imminent end of cheap energy unfold and contemplated what this will mean for agriculture, I have realized that the wine industry will similarly have to change: we will no longer be able to count on the ready availability “two buck Chuck” at Trader Joe’s or similarly inexpensive California wine in our neighborhood groceries. We will soon have to begin relying on locally produced wine, made with locally grown grapes, just as much as locally produced lettuce.

But Ohio wines, at least the ones available in the Giant Eagle store, are sweet, cloying, grape juice-like products, aren’t they? Yuck. They hardly deserve to be called wines! Give me a good sip of Cabernet or Pinot Gris any day over that syrupy stuff! California, Chile, and Australia produce the best wines, unless, of course, price is no object and one wants to pay the premium for fine French or Italian vintages. But Ohio wine? Fuggedaboudit! Is it even possible that local winemakers in Ohio and other eastern and Midwestern states can produce wine from locally grown grapes that will satisfy the palates of those whose tastes in wine were forged with Californian, Chilean, or Australian vintages?

I will be addressing that concern, as well as some others, in the next few postings. Along the way, we’ll explore the complex (and fascinating) history of wine in the humid eastern part of North America, especially the particular challenges faced by anyone who wants to grow good wine grapes around here. Before we begin our survey of wine history, however, I would like to explain my interest and background in wine.

But first, some assumptions:

· I’m limiting this discussion to wine from grapes. Yes, wine can be made from other fruits, or even from non-fruits like dandelion blossoms, and many of these wines are very good, but usually sugar and water need to be added to the mashed fruit (called must, by the way) to achieve the right sweetness-acidity balance and to produce enough alcohol to preserve the wine. Grapes are the only fruits normally capable of achieving this balance without additives or amelioration; this is why grapes are the traditional favorite for wine production.

· If the global production of petroleum energy has not yet begun its irrevocable decline, it will do so within the next few years. I’ve already detailed some evidence for this in my earlier postings; here’s another report, this time from British insurance giant Lloyds.

· This means that petroleum fuels will never again be cheap; shipping costs will become an increasingly large percentage of the cost of any commodity delivered from faraway places, if it makes economic sense to ship them at all.

· American wine lovers’ appreciation for and dependence on wine shipped from places like Australia and Chile is likely to end in the next few years. Even California wines may become too expensive to afford or may even be largely unavailable east of the Mississippi. As our food supplies become increasingly localized, the need for wines from local sources will increase, if we are to have any wines at all.

· Additionally, agricultural inputs, especially fungicides, that help make viticulture and wine making possible in the humid East, may be in short supply or unavailable because of energy depletion. (I will discuss the reasons for viticulture’s dependence on these materials in a later post.)

· Wine can and should remain an important part of our diet and culture and is useful for other things in addition to its use as a beverage: most notably as an antiseptic and as a food preservative (especially for fruit).

· Winemaking is similar in many respects to other forms of food preservation: canning, cheese making, pickling, etc., and is not a difficult skill to learn. I am assuming that an eventual return to home-produced wines will be not only possible but in some ways preferable to reliance on commercially produced wines.

· I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on wine; far from it. I wish only to present my thoughts in hopes of starting a conversation about wine, local food, and local resilience in the face of energy depletion. Please feel free to correct any errors or post additional thoughts, opinions, or contemplations, in the comments.

Okay, now for my story. As many who know me well are quite aware, wine has long been one of my interests. This interest began soon after Liz and I were married. Just before she began her graduate studies at Bowling Green State University, we took a field trip to one of the islands in the western basin of Lake Erie. When we arrived on the island, we rented bicycles so we could explore the island more easily than on foot. It was quiet that day because the main tourist season had ended and it was a weekday. One of our stops was a winery that offered a visit to a cave on the premises, throwing in a tour of the wine cellar for a single admission fee. All I can remember about the winery tour is that it felt rushed and I don’t think we learned all that much about the winemaking process. But we got to taste some of the wines, and when we left we had to bicycle past their vineyards. The air was full of the sweet, pungent aroma of ripening grapes. Adding to that, these wines were not readily available on the mainland at the time, so finding a source for them became somewhat of a quest.

I was hooked. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about wine. I also began purchasing wines from as many winegrowing regions as possible, wines made from different kinds of grapes. I can recall offering, out of my ignorance, some odd bottles and/or odd combinations of wines at dinner parties we hosted for friends. I’m sure they wondered at times what I was up to! We also hosted some wine tastings at our house.

A few years later, when our first child was on the way and we were ready to move into our newly purchased house, I ordered some vines from a nursery. I asked permission to plant the vines in the back yard before we actually closed on the house (the home we were buying was unoccupied). I grew grapes there for seventeen years, until we moved from Bowling Green to Columbus. The wine I made was mostly drinkable; little was memorable, though I recall two or three batches that I thought were rather good. I even won an award or two at the county fair’s homemade wine judging. I learned a lot about the winemaking process, even though I remained and am still a novice at the craft.

Although I don’t grow grapes now (though that will likely be changing soon), we still visit wineries on occasion, and I have maintained my interest in the subject by frequent readings and, of course, by sampling all kinds of wines.

From the beginning, I was fascinated by the geography of wine—the different regions of the world where wine was made, the kinds of grapes grown in each region, and the particular character that the local sun and soil imparts to the finished wine. I reveled in trying out wine from odd corners of the world. Yet for some reason, I always came back to Ohio and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the other eastern and Midwestern states. Perhaps it’s because Ohio wines don’t often get much respect, as I already indicated, but also perhaps it’s because of my recognition that local food products go best with locally produced vintages.

Yes, food and wine are partners and always have been. The French and Italians know this very well. And they also know that the local wines almost always pair best with the local food specialties. They have had centuries of experience matching the local cuisines to the local vintages. Go to a restaurant in France or Italy and almost all the wines offered will be local. But here in North America, our cuisines are largely imported—from places like France and Italy, not to mention China, Mexico, Thailand, etc. So maybe it should be no surprise that, except in California and the Pacific Northwest, Americans seem to think that a wine from an exotic location like New Zealand must be better (or at least more interesting) than a wine produced locally from locally grown grapes. For example, the largest winegrowing region east of the Pacific states is the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Yet how many restaurants in, say, Albany or Syracuse, offer any Finger Lakes wines on their wine lists, let alone specialize in them? You’re more likely to find Yellow Tail from, literally, halfway around the world. How many residents of Manhattan, I wonder, know that premium wines are being produced on the eastern end of Long Island and in the lower Hudson Valley, both regions only two or three hours’ drive from the City?

Premium Ohio wines are even harder to find in Ohio’s restaurants, groceries, or wine shops. This is a curious situation, but one that is likely to change in the next several years. One of the most important reasons for this odd state of affairs is the fascinating and complex history of wine in eastern North America. Some of that history will be the subject for my next post. (In the meantime, hold your glass up to the light to check your wine’s clarity, swirl it around, and then put your nose in the glass and take in the aroma. Until next time, enjoy!)