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Missouri's Weinstrasse (German for wine road)

Grape growing and wine making in Hermann and the
surrounding countryside have been ongoing since the
arrival of the first German settlers in the early 1800s.
Hermann has been in the forefront of the Missouri wine
industry since 1837, a year after the town was founded.
Today, there are seven award-winning wineries within a
15-mile radius of Hermann and more than 40
throughout the state. Early in 2005, the seven local
wineries formed the Hermann Vintners’ Association.
Together, they promote the Hermann Wine Trail and
sponsor special events throughout the year.

Wine. It's been an element of civilized culture for millenniums.

Unlike other beverages and spirits, wine imparts a unique legacy to a community where vineyards flourish. Such is the case in Missouri, where grapes and wine
have contributed to its culture since the first established settlements of the Creole French along the lower Mississippi River. From those first colonial settlements it
would take almost a hundred years for Missouri's wine industry to become firmly rooted. Its establishment is owed first to the German immigrants of Hermann and
Augusta, which were later followed by the Italians in the 1880's in the Ozark Highlands. By the 1880's, wine connoisseurs in America and Europe were enjoying over
two million gallons of Missouri wine each year.

Grape Varietals

European wine varietals like Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon couldn't withstand Missouri's cold winters and hot summers, thus traditional European grapes
failed. Throughout the nineteenth century vintners developed techniques for grafting local rootstock with European vines that would flourish in the midwestern
climate. These newly developed vines improved wine quality and production. The result was a new wine style.

Of those first cultivated grape varieties Isabella, Virginia Seedling, Catawba and Delaware found vineyard success along with rootstock developed by George
Husmann. Husmann was a self-taught scientist whose father had purchased a Hermann lot while the family was still living in Germany. Husmann studied soil types
and crossed wild and cultivated grapes to create hybrids that could tolerate Missouri's hot, humid summers and freezing winters. Some of his Norton vines still thrive
today at Oak Glenn Winery. Popular varietals grown in Missouri today include French-American hybrids as Chambourcin, Seyval, Chardonnel, Vivant, Vignoles, and
Vidal Blanc.

Saving French Vineyards

Husmann's research proved invaluable in the 1860s when the vineyards of southern France were devastated by phylloxera, a tiny root louse. Unlike Missouri
rootstock, the French vines had no resistance to phylloxera. Husmann and Missouri state entomologist John Reily recommended sending phylloxera-resistant
American/Missouri rootstocks to Europe for grafting with French rootstock in an effort to save its vineyards. Missouri grape growers shipped 17 train cars of
phylloxera-resistant rootstock to France.

The Missouri solution worked and the French wine industry was saved. In commemoration of the event, two sculptures were erected in Montpellier, France. One
depicts a young woman cradling an old woman in her arms-the New World saving the Old World. The French government also honored Husmann for his work in
saving their wine industry. Afterwards Husmann moved from Hermann to California, where he became a founding father of the Napa Valley wine industry.

Prohibition
By the early 1900's over a hundred wineries and their supporting vineyards thrived throughout Missouri, producing an impressive yield that reached into the millions
of gallons. At the height of its prestige, Missouri wines were shipped throughout the US and Europe, winning gold medals in world competitions. These illustrious
accomplishments ended with the passage of the 1919 Volstead Act (18th amendment) - prohibition.

American viticulture came to a crashing halt. Missouri vineyards were uprooted and plowed under and grape presses were burned. Hermann local lore recounts
how the streets ran red as wine barrels were emptied and then destroyed.
Prohibition devastated American wine culture. The Missouri wine centers of Hermann and Augusta faced economic ruin. Agriculturally many of the state's signature
wine grapes were lost. For decades the only evidence of a once glorious winemaking past was found in churches, which were permitted to make sacramental wine.

Industry Rebirth

After the end of prohibition in 1933, Missouri's wine industry slowly began to reestablish itself, first with replanting of vineyards as late as the 1950's to the
reestablishment of its historic wineries in the 1960's. Hermann's Stone Hill Winery and Augusta's Mount Pleasant Winery lead the rebirth of the Missouri Wine
industry. Both have regained their historic reputations by once again winning national and international honors and medals.

In 1980, Augusta became the first viticulture area officially recognized in the United States. Since then the wine growing regions around Hermann, the Ozark
Mountains and Highlands, and the south central region around St. James have also been designated official viticultural areas. Missouri now counts over 57
wineries, a number that continues to grow. An industry built on its vintage past.

History Uncorked: Two Centuries of Missouri Wine

The Hermann Wine Region

Wine making has contributed to the economic, cultural and social fabric of German society for centuries. Hermann's German settlers brought their wine making
culture with them from Philadelphia upon arriving in the Hermann area in 1837 when they began cultivating the abundance of native grapes.

In addition to cultivating the area's native grapes, the Hermann Germans began actively planting vineyards and making wine. Hermann's grape and wine industry was
encouraged by its town fathers who sold grape lots - vacant city lots to anyone for $50, interest free, over a five-year period. The only condition was that the lot had to be
planted in grapes.

A total of 600 grape lots eventually were sold. Soon the entire town was growing grapes, building wine cellars and making wine. Along with the commercial wineries,
smaller operations and home wine cellars were common such as the winery housed in the Strehly House, located today as a part of the Deutschheim Historic Site.
Wine halls and wine gardens patterned after those in Germany followed, becoming favored locations for the community to socialize.

Hermann's wine industry grew rapidly. Within a decade steamboats brought St. Louis visitors to Hermann's first Weinfest. Then as today, visitors marveled at
Hermann's picturesque scenery. As one early visitor wrote of their Hermann wine trip, ". . .after disembarking from our steamboat, we enjoyed more than our share of
sweet Catawba wine and marveled at the grapevine-covered hills."

By the turn of the 20th century, Hermann's winemakers had gained national and international success. Stone Hill Winery, established in 1847, had become the
second largest winery in the country and was winning gold medals at World's Fair competitions around the globe. At the dawn of the 20th century, Hermann's overall
wine production reached an incredible three million gallons of wine a year.

Since prohibition Hermann has successfully reestablished itself as a leader in American wine production. Hermann's historic wineries of Stone Hill, Adam Puchta and
Hermannhof are thriving along with the area's newer wineries. Hermann once again is producing gold medal wines and leads Missouri in production.

Augusta Wine Region

Across and down river from Hermann is Augusta. Founded in 1836 by Leonard Harold, one of Daniel Boone's settlers, the village was originally named Mount
Pleasant.

Friedrich Muench, a German minister who came to the area with the German migration, influenced area grape growers and vintners with his published work,
Amerikanische Weinbauschule, which loosely translates to American wine school and grape culture. Muench's publication influenced many of Missouri's grape
growers and vintners including George Husmann, which earned him the affectionate nickname of Father Muench by area wine producers.

Friedrich Muench along with his brother George established Mount Pleasant Winery in 1859, naming it honor of Augusta's former name. The Muench's original
cellars were completed in 1881 and are still in use today. The Muench brothers worked to develop several hearty rootstocks, improve overall wine quality and
championed what would become Missouri's state grape, the Norton.

Before prohibition Augusta was also the site of many smaller wineries, the Nahm winery is one example. Nahm has the distinction of being the first winery to be
officially licensed in Augusta after prohibition. Unfortunately, Nahm was unable to maintain itself due in part to the economic setbacks Augusta suffered after both
prohibition and the depression.

Augusta had to wait until the 1960's before reestablishing itself as an American wine region, marked by the reopening of the historic Mount Pleasant Winery. Other
Augusta wine makers followed, creating the area's Weinstrasse (wine road), encouraging visitors to experience a day in wine country, firmly establishing Missouri
wineries as the foundation to the agritourism movement.

Augusta vintners also had the vision to apply for appellation status with the federal government. Through their pioneering efforts, Missouri's Augusta wine area has
the distinction of being named the first United States Wine Appellation (District) in 1980, placing the area above the Californian wine appellations of Napa and
Sonoma.

Ozark Highlands, Ozark Mountain, River Regions

By the 1870's vineyards were flourishing in the communities of Rolla and Dillon. At the turn
of the century, Italian immigrants who settled at nearby Rosati (once known as Knobview)
brought their wine making skills to Missouri. The Italians planted vineyards for wine and,
later planted juice grapes for Welch's. By prohibition over 2000 acres of wine grapes had
been planted in the area with almost 200 small family wineries in operation. Today the St.
James area is fondly known as the Little Italy of the Ozarks. Once again area vineyards and
wineries are growing, along with St. James Winery, the first winery to establish and position
itself in the region.

Southeast of the Ozark Highlands, hugging the corridor of the Mississippi River valley, is
historic Ste. Genevieve County. The fastest growing wine area in Missouri, the region's
winemakers have drawn on the area's colonial French heritage to create award-winning
wines.

Sainte Genevieve Winery located in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, the oldest French settlement
west of the Mississippi River, was the first successful winery to open in the region. Outside
the city limits are four of Missouri's newest wineries, Charleville, Cave, Chaumette and
Crown. These wineries make up the area's Route du Vin.

The Missouri Germans

Cincinnati had sent out its influences in another direction too—down the Ohio to the
Mississippi, up that river to St. Louis, and thence upstream along the Missouri to the
German settlement of Hermann. Winegrowing of one kind or another was already a
venerable activity in the central Mississippi basin. We remember the Jesuits of
Kaskaskia, the reputation of whose vineyards Dufour had heard of in Philadelphia
before the end of the eighteenth century. The early dominance of the French in the
Mississippi Valley meant that many experiments by small communities and by
individuals of that vinophile race—clerical as well as lay—were certainly made with both
native and imported grapes. In the 1770s the French settlers at Vincennes on the
Wabash made red wine of native grapes for their own consumption that gained a good
report.] Dufour recorded that vines were growing well in the gardens of St. Genevieve,
Missouri, below St. Louis. Cahokia, another old French settlement, also made wine
before the coming of the British. But these were strictly domestic efforts. The statement
is repeatedly made that the French government in the eighteenth century forbade
viticulture in its American territories for fear of injury to the home industry.[69] I have not
found proof of this; if it is true, it expresses a fear for which, so far as the record shows,
there was very little ground in fact. In Missouri, as in Ohio, a winegrowing industry waited
upon the appearance of the Germans.

The flow of German emigration that reached Cincinnati in the 1820s moved through and
beyond it to St. Louis and the Missouri Valley in the next decade. A large part of it had
been attracted there by the idealized, romantic description of the region published in
1829 by Gottfried Duden, a wealthy German who was convinced of the evils of
overpopulation in the Old World and sought a new beginning in the American West. He
bought a farm along the Missouri River in Warren County in the new state of Missouri
and wrote of the rich pastoral beauties of the land in order to draw new settlers. They
came in large numbers, hastened along by the repressive politics of the reaction to the
revolutionary outbreaks on the Continent in 1830. When they arrived, they found a
wilderness not exactly like the smiling land of overflowing plenty that Duden had led
them to expect, but neither did they fare badly. St. Louis and the lands along the Missouri
for many miles to the west soon took on a distinctly German character.

It was this fact that caught the attention of the directors of the Philadelphia Settlement
Society (Deutsche Ansiedlungs-Gesellschaft zu Philadelphia ). This organization was
formed in 1836 to carry out an ideal of German cultural nationalism by founding a colony
in the remote West that should be German through and through in every particular. The
society sent an agent to the Missouri lands, and there, in the angle formed by the
junction of the Gasconade and Missouri rivers, he bought some 11,000 acres for the
society, which in turn sold the land to its stockholders. Settlement began in late 1837,
and within two years Hermann, as the new town was called (after the German national
hero Arminius who defeated the armies of Caesar Augustus), had a population of 450
souls: it was laid out with ambitious amplitude, its Market Street being deliberately made
wider than Philadelphia's splendid Market Street by its visionary designers. They also
included a "Weinstrasse" in the plan of the city's streets. The difficulties of administering
a frontier settlement from Philadelphia quickly led to a new arrangement, by which the
Philadelphia Society's assets were transferred to the corporation of Hermann and the
society dissolved. The aim of fostering a center of distinctively German culture was not
abandoned. Hermann was substantially all German throughout the nineteenth century
and was a center from which German settlement spread through east-central Missouri
in Augusta, Washington, Morrison, and other towns.

The character of the immigrants was far higher than ordinary: most were men of
education, and some were of high professional standing. Their distinction is crudely
recognized in their local nickname of Lateinische Bauern —"Latin Peasants"—that is,
farmers who could read the learned languages. Earlier, organized German settlements
associated with winegrowing in this country were typically religious, on the model of the
Pietists of Germantown in the time of William Penn, or of the Rappites in Indiana and
Pennsylvania. The Hermannites, however, were thoroughly secular, inclining even, here
and there, towards free thought. They cared more for literature, music, theater, and
public festivals than for church. In Hermann, stores remained open on the Sabbath, and
the early settlers did not trouble themselves to put up a church building, though they
were quick to establish a theatrical society and to build a music hall. It is perhaps no
cause for wonder that a community so disposed should take to winegrowing and
succeed at it as no one yet had succeeded.

The first settlers of Hermann had ventured west with the idea that they would become
farmers on the wide prairies, but they found that the land their agent had bought was in
broken, hilly, stony country, unfit for the agriculture they had in mind. Viticulture was an
experiment obviously worth trying, and though the long history of failure in this country
was cause for skepticism, they had the current example of Longworth and his early
successes as a hopeful sign to guide them.

Inevitably—almost as a ritual gesture it seems—some vinifera vines were tried before
the end of the 1830s. But the Hermannites were quick to accept the implication of
Longworth's work and turned to the native varieties, using cuttings obtained from
Cincinnati. The first cultivated grape to produce at Hermann was an Isabella vine
planted by Jacob Fugger that fruited in 1845. The first wine, from Isabella grapes, was
made in 1846 by Michael Poeschel;] there were already 150,000 vines set out in
Hermann then, and the economic promise was such that the town established a
nursery for vines and offered land for vineyards on extravagantly easy terms. The
responses were immediate and strong: six hundred "wine lots" were snapped up, and
by 1848 Hermann commenced its era of commercial winemaking with a modest but
symbolically important production of 1,000 gallons of wine. The occasion was marked in
good German style by a Weinfest that fall. The town cannon was fired in honor of
Bacchus, and a steamboat-load of ladies and gentlemen from St. Louis came to join the
festivities: the rumor of wine spread instantly through that region, proof of the eagerness
with which it was hoped for. One of the St. Louis gentlemen, a lawyer named Alexander
Kayser, was inspired to offer three premiums of $100 for the best specimens of
Missouri wine, the first of which was gained in 1850 by a catawba of vintage 1849 from
the vineyards of Hermann.

Though the Isabella was the first variety to be used, it satisfied no one. Other varieties
were soon tried: the first Catawba crop was produced in 1848; the Norton began to be
cultivated around 1850, the Concord in 1855. When mildew and rot began to devastate
the Catawba vineyards, as they quickly did, the Germans along the Missouri, unlike their
compatriots along the Ohio, had acceptable alternatives to turn to. The Concord, thanks
to its tough, productive nature, was not long in occupying the largest share of the
acreage in vines, but Hermann would never have established a reputation for wine if it
had had only the Concord. The variety for quality was the Norton, a seedling grown by Dr.
D. N. Norton, of Richmond, Virginia, before 1830. It had been tried without much
enthusiasm in various places, including the vineyards of Cincinnati, where Longworth
pronounced that it was good for nothing as a wine grape. The growers at Hermann,
however, could venture to disregard the great Longworth's judgment, for their need was
desperate. Thus when a Herr Wiedersprecher brought Norton cuttings from Cincinnati,
they gave them a trial. To Jacob Rommel belongs the honor of producing the first wine
from Norton at Hermann. Thus the Norton caught on in Missouri at a time when the
Catawba crop had already been repeatedly damaged by the diseases to which it is
vulnerable and the growers were casting about for something to take its place.

A black grape, the Norton yields a dark and astringent wine without foxiness, capable of
developing into a sound and well-balanced table wine. Yet the early practice at Hermann
was apparently to ferment on the skins for only one or two days and thus to produce
wine more pink than red. This was reportedly done to avoid excess astringency. By 1867
the Missourians had learned enough about handling the Norton to please at least one
discriminating critic. The philanthropist and writer Charles Loring Brace, reporting on his
disappointment with the wines of California that he had sampled on a tour of that state,
concluded that "no red wine has ever been produced in America equal to that made by
the Germans of Missouri from [the Norton]."

The prominence of the Norton at Hermann links the region with Virginia and the South
rather than with Ohio and the northern tradition of white winemaking in the eastern
United States. For white wine, the winemakers of Hermann also used a southern grape,
the Lenoir. The Catawba persisted, too, but subject to the same wild ups and downs in
annual yield, the effect of disease, that plagued the variety at Cincinnati.

By 1855 Hermann was surrounded by 500 acres of vineyards and was
producing enough beyond local demand to be able to send wine up the Ohio
River to the wine houses of Cincinnati, where Missouri catawba was added to
the wine of Cincinnati.[89] By 1861 the volume was great enough to justify the
establishment of a large-scale winery at Hermann, built by Michael Poeschel,
Hermann's first wine-maker, and his partner, John Scherer.[90] This firm,
which grew to be the largest winery outside of California, operated until
Prohibition, and has, since 1965, been put back into the production of native
wines.

The Civil War slowed agricultural development at Hermann, as it did along
the Ohio. Nevertheless, the winegrowing industry continued a modest
expansion. The Hermann vineyardists exhibited thirty-five varieties of grapes
at the Gasconade County Fair in 1862—the only fair held in Missouri that year.
The war did brush the town, for the wine in George Husmann's cellar was all
drunk by General Sterling Price's Confederates when they raided the town in
October 1864. At the end of the war, Hermann had about a thousand acres of
vines, more than half of which were not yet in bearing. The preceding season
had yielded 42,000 gallons of wine. And the demand for cuttings from the
nurseries of Hermann exceeded their capacity: some two million went out that
year. Winegrowing was now spread far beyond Hermann, touching almost
every corner of the state, and moving into Illinois and Kansas, the states
flanking Missouri on east and west. Augusta in nearby St. Charles County,
another center of German settlement, was producing a significant quantity of
wine in the 1860s (after many years of dormancy, wine production has been
resumed at Augusta). After the war, then, winemaking around Hermann was
ready to enter on a steady prosperity that lasted down to Prohibition.

One may ask why Hermann, on river lands not much different from those
around Cincinnati, should have succeeded in setting up an industry that long
outlasted the one created by Longworth at about the same time? The most
obvious, and perhaps most important, reason is that the Germans did not
invest everything in the Catawba and so could survive its failure. They had
tried other varieties with success that came before they could grow
disheartened, as the Germans of Cincinnati had been disheartened. Another
reason, less apparent, and much more difficult to demonstrate, lies in the
character of the Missouri Germans. They were not tenant farmers but
independent proprietors, prepared to take an experimental and scientific
interest in viticulture. Perhaps it is significant that many of the pioneers were
not Rhinelanders or South Germans like Rapp's Württembergers, but
Hessians and Prussians, without experience of winegrowing in Europe.
Hermann's first winemaker, Michael Poeschel, for example, was a north
German who had no knowledge of grape culture; on the other hand, those
who briefly and futilely tried vinifera at Hermann were Rhinelanders, another
instance of Old World experience as a handicap in the new.

As for the Missouri Germans' scientific disposition, that is shown in the work
of developing new varieties and in the quantity of technical writing devoted to
viticulture for which Missouri was remarkable in the nineteenth century. The
philanthropic and literary farmer Friedrich Muench, of Washington, Warren
County, a man trained to the Lutheran ministry in the University of Giessen
and one of the original emigrants attracted by the blandishment of Gottfried
Duden's description of the Missouri country, published the earliest treatise
that I have found issuing from the Missouri German community.[94] His
"Anleitung zum Weinbau in Nordamerika" ("Directions for Winegrowing in
North America") appeared in the Mississippi Handelszeitung in 1859; a later
version in book form appeared at St. Louis in 1864 as Amerikanische
Weinbauschule ; this went through three editions, and was translated in 1865
as School jar American Grape Culture: Brief but Thorough and Practical
Guide to the Laying Out of Vineyards, the Treatment of Vines, and the
Production of Wine in North America . Muench, or "old Father Muench" as he
grew to be called, had been growing grapes since 1846 and continued to do
so until 1881, "when he was found dead among his beloved vines, one fine
winter's morning of that year, with the pruning shears still in his hand, in his
84th year."[95] Something of Muench's high-minded style may be had from
this passage in his School for American Grape Culture:

If it prove but moderately remunerative, the vine-dresser, free, lord of his own
possessions, in daily intercourse with peaceful nature, is a happier and more
contented man than thousands of those who, in our large cities, driven about
by the thronging crowd, rarely attain true peace and serenity of mind. With the
growth of the grape every nation elevates itself to a higher grade of
civilization—brutality must vanish, and human nature progresses. (P. 11)

Before Muench's book appeared, another essay on viticulture was published
at Hermann by a second and more important writer, George Husmann,
whose An Essay on the Culture of the Grape in the Great West came out in
1863.[96] Husmann, whose father had been a shareholder in the society that
founded Hermann, was a north German like Poeschel and Muench, not a
Rhinelander. He thus inherited no tradition of Old World winemaking, but had
to learn his craft under native frontier conditions. His next publication was The
Cultivation of the Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines ,
published in New York in 1866. This book, written as the Civil War was
ending, is filled with a kind of visionary excitement over the prospects of a new
viticulture in a newly united country, which may in part help to account for its
success. In successive editions and under various new titles, it became one
of the standard works on the subject, remaining in print well into this century.

The special emphasis of Husmann was on the power of the winemaker to
control his work precisely. He explains the use of both the saccharometer and
the acidimeter, by which the winemaker can know exactly how much sugar
and how much acid, the two key ingredients in the raw material of wine, he
has to work with. Husmann is also frankly on the side of the winemakers who
make no bones about adding sugar to a deficient juice and water to an over-
acid juice. The object is to reach an ideal balance of sugar and acid; with the
help of analytic instruments, Husmann argued, no winemaker need ever be
at the mercy of a bad season. His instructions lean heavily on the work of the
German chemist Dr. Ludwig Gall, whose "Practical Guide" had been
translated in 1860 for publication in the U.S. Patent Office Report, the
forerunner of the reports of the Department of Agriculture. There is no doubt
that Husmann exaggerates the quality of the wine produced by his methods;
he was writing more as a chemist than as a traditional winemaker, and he
did not go uncriticized. But, as he very sensibly maintained, since the eastern
grower more often than not was compelled to work with fruit low in sugar and
high in acid, the choice was simply between making a "natural" wine unfit to
drink and an "artificial" wine that was quite palatable—and profitable.

In 1869 Husmann founded a monthly journal called The Grape Culturist at St.
Louis, the first to be devoted to the subject in this country. Though it expired in
1871, that it could have been born at all and then have survived for three years
is some measure of the status of winegrowing in the Mississippi Valley. It
was also evidence of the literary and technical culture of the Germans. The
publisher of the magazine was Conrad Witter, a St. Louis German who
advertised that he kept a "large assortment of books treating of the culture of
grapes and manufacture of wines." It is hard to imagine any other region in
the United States at this date in which such a stock of books might have been
offered in the hope of sale.

The Missouri Germans were soon at work developing new grapes for
western conditions; indeed, they were among the very first in America to carry
on sustained trials in grape breeding. Jacob Rommel, who was taken by his
parents to Hermann in the year of its founding, began work with native
seedlings around 1860 and produced a number of varieties that had some
recognition in their day. He was looking for vines that had hardiness against
the continental winters of the Midwest, resistance to the endemic fungus
diseases, and productiveness enough to be profitable, and he sought these
qualities in a series of seedlings derived from a riparia-labrusca ancestor.
One at least of Rommel's seedlings, the Elvira, a white grape yielding a
neutral white wine favored for blending, is still grown commercially in eastern
vineyards, mostly in New York and Missouri. In Canada it had a great
success, and it was still the most widely grown variety in the vineyards of
Ontario as late as 1979. It is, or was, occasionally met with as a varietal, but
more often anonymously as part of a sparkling wine blend. Nicholas Grein,
called Papa Grein by the younger generation of Hermannites, also introduced
a number of riparia-labrusca seedlings, the best known of which is the
Missouri Riesling, still cultivated to some extent in the state of its origin (and
often confused with Elvira). It has a strong resistance to black rot for an
American variety.

By far the most distinguished scientific contribution to viticultural knowledge
made by the Missouri German community came from Dr. George Engelmann
(1809-84), an M.D. from the University of Würzburg whose passion was
botany.[103] He came to the United States in 1832 as agent for his uncles,
who wanted to find investments in the Mississippi Valley. Settling in St. Louis,
he became the most sought-after physician in the city, yet still found time to
keep up his original work in botany, to carry out observations in biology,
meteorology, and geology, and to found the St. Louis Academy of Science.
Only a fraction of his work was devoted to grapes, but that is nevertheless an
important fraction. He published a number of brief articles on the
classification of native varieties, beginning with "Notes on the Grape Vines of
Missouri" in 1860 and ending with an essay on "The True Grape Vines of the
United States" in 1875. This appeared as part of the encyclopaedic and
learned catalogue of Bush and Son and Meissner, a leading Missouri nursery
founded in 1865 by Isidor Bush (not a Missouri German but a Prague-born
Austrian). The catalogue passed through numerous editions and was used
rather as a text book than as a commercial list; it was even translated into
French and Italian. Engelmann's description and classification of the native
vines was the scientific standard for his time: on his death it could be said
that "nearly all that we know scientifically of our species and forms of Vitis is
directly due to Dr. Engelmann's investigations."

When Engelmann first came to the United States, he made his way to a
settlement of Germans on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, about twenty
miles east of St. Louis. Here he had some connections, and here he made
his base of operations while he explored and botanized before settling down
to his medical practice. This was the region of the old French settlements,
where grape growing had long been familiar, so familiar that even the
American settlers readily took it up. Gustave Koerner, another German
immigrant, a friend of Engelmann's, and later a distinguished lawyer, and a
friend and political supporter of Lincoln's, recalled what he, Engelmann, and
their friends found as they travelled for the first time to Belleville in 1833.
Stopping at a farm, they were pleased to find Isabella grapes growing on the
trellised house; even better, the farmer offered them a drink of his wild grape
wine. "It was really very good," Koerner remembered, though sweetened a bit
by added sugar, "the American having no liking for wine unless it is sweet."
[106] The Germans themselves, when a group of them settled around
Belleville, began at once to grow vines, and long continued to do so. Years
later Koerner remembered giving a visiting German poet, who had said
disparaging things about American wines, some "old, well-seasoned Norton
Virginia Seedling" from the vineyard of a neighbor:

He drank it with great gusto, remarking that it was a very fine wine; he
supposed, he said, it was Burgundy. When I laughingly told him it was St.
Clair County wine, he would hardly believe me. . . . I must do him the justice,
however, of saying that good Norton has really the body of Burgundy, and can
never be taken for Bordeaux.

One of the most prominent men among the Belleville Germans was
Theodore Hilgard, who had been a lawyer, judge, and man of letters in
Zweibrucken and who, after emigrating to Illinois, produced a wine there that
he fondly called "Hilgardsberger." More important for this history, Hilgard's
son, Eugene, became professor of agriculture at the University of California,
director of the Experiment Stations, and dean of the College of Agriculture,
positions in which he made contributions of the first importance to the
winegrowing of California. He is thus another claim to the historical
importance of the Latin Peasants settled in the region of which St. Louis is
the center.

St. Louis itself—including St. Louis County—with its layers of French and
German history, has been a scene of winemaking since very early times, as
these things are measured in American history. The first St. Louis wine on
record was made for church use by the Jesuits of St. Stanislaus Seminary at
Florissant, north of the city, in 1823; they later developed commercial
production as well, and continued the business down to 1960.[110] The
earliest purely commercial winery in St. Louis was the firm called the Missouri
Wine Company, founded in 1853. It constructed underground cellars for
storage (they still survive in downtown St. Louis) and went into business not
only in Missouri wines but in wines from Ohio. The well-known Cincinnati
vineyardist Robert Buchanan, for example, sold his vintages of 1855 and
1856 in bulk to the Missouri Wine Company. So the traffic in wine between
Missouri and Ohio was a two-way street; we have seen that Hermann sent
some of its wine up the Ohio to Longworth in Cincinnati, while Buchanan was
shipping downstream to St. Louis. The Missouri Wine Company was
advertising its sparkling catawba in the St. Louis papers in 1857, and the
probability is that this was Ohio wine. Another interesting, but indistinct, St.
Louis enterprise was carried out by Isidor Bush's partner, Gustave Edward
Meissner, who planted 600 acres of vines on Meissner's Island, below the
city. These may have been intended as a nursery planting; in any case, no
wine production is recorded from Meissner's Island.

The main claim of St. Louis to a place in the history of wine in America rests
with the American Wine Company, which took over the Missouri Wine
Company in 1859 and, through many changes of fortune, persisted up to the
early years of World War II. The president was a Chicago hotelkeeper and
politician named Isaac Cook, who, despite the struggles of political faction in
Illinois, still managed to take an interest in wine as both a connoisseur and a
producer. In 1861 he left Chicago for St. Louis, and built up the American
Wine Company to a leading place in the American trade. The main stock in
trade was called Cook's Imperial Champagne, a label still in use, though it
has passed through various hands and been applied to wines of various
origins in its more than a hundred years of currency. Under Cook, the
American Wine Company bought vineyards in the Sandusky region of Ohio,
and though the finishing of the wine was carried out in St. Louis (in the cellars
originally built for the Missouri Wine Company), the history of the business
belongs perhaps more to Ohio than to Missouri. The American Wine
Company also dealt in such wines as Missouri catawba and Norton.

Missouri is the farthest western reach of winegrowing at this stage of
American history (excluding for the moment California and the regions of
Spanish-American cultivation in the Southwest). After recounting all the early
trials and modest successes in Missouri we may glance briefly, by way of
reminder, at the obstacles that the pioneers had to face, and that their
successors still face. They cultivated a region at the heart of a continent,
untempered by any great body of water. The winter cold there sweeps down
from the arctic regions of Canada, or off the high mountains and high plains
that form the western, windward, edge of the Missouri basin. Even the
hardiest grapes may expect to be killed to the ground from time to time in the
freezes that flow from these sources. Phylloxera is at home here. Not too far
to the south and east is the home of Pierce's Disease. Mildews, both powdery
and downy, are alternately favored by heat and by damp; black rot is always
present. If the early growers had known all this, would they have ventured at
all? In any case, they did not know, and they did venture. The reviving efforts to
establish a significant viticulture in Missouri today have an honorable pioneer
tradition behind them of successful struggle against very tough odds.

Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to
Prohibition. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. http://ark.
cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft967nb63q/

The Poeschel Winery building, erected about 1850, near Hermann, Missouri, by the first
winemaker in the region. Even in the beginning the Germans built solidly. (From Charles
Van Ravenswaay, The Arts and Architecture of Germans in Missouri [1977])

Friedrich Muench (1798?—1881),
trained as a Lutheran minister in
Germany, typified the enthusiastic
style of the German winegrowers of
Missouri. "With the growth of the
grape," he wrote, "every nation
elevates itself to a higher degree of
civilization." The winery he founded
in Augusta, Missouri, is in operation
today. (State Historical Society of
Missouri)

Missouri, Kansas, and the Midwest

In Missouri, the center of winemaking in the Midwest, there was an expansive mood
immediately following the Civil War. We have already noted the excited enthusiasm of
George Husmann about the future of winemaking in Missouri, and he evidently
managed to communicate that enthusiasm to others in the state. The Cliff Cave Wine
Company was organized in 1866 to develop 240 acres of vineyard site on the
Mississippi River, thirteen miles south of St. Louis. It had cellars in a natural cave—
like the one where Tom Sawyer spied on Injun Joe not far away in Mark Twain's
Hannibal—and a storage capacity of 100,000 gallons by 1870. The director was Dr. C.
W. Spalding, M.D., of St. Louis, the co-editor, with Husmann, of the short-lived Grape
Culturist .[64] Another postwar enterprise near St. Louis was the vineyard operated by
an Irishman named J.J. Kelley at Webster Groves; there he produced wine from such
native varieties as the Delaware and Norton that the French scientist Planchon, visiting
in 1873, found excellent.[65]

In the same year that the Cliff Cave Company was set up, another, larger enterprise
was founded on the Missouri River, not many miles to the east of Hermann, at Bluffton.
This was the Bluffton Wine Company, which secured over 1,500 acres in Montgomery
and Callaway counties, laid out the town of Bluffton, and then leased the land to
tenants who were to grow the grapes for the winery.[66] This sort of scheme was
called a "colony," and in one form or another it occurred frequently in the history of
American settlement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Two of the leading
names in Missouri viticulture were among the incorporators of the Bluffton Company,
Husmann of Hermann, and Isidor Bush of St. Louis. Samuel Miller, of Pennsylvania, a
well-known horticulturist who had introduced the Martha and other varieties of native
hybrid grapes, was in charge of the viticultural work. Husmann himself took the
presidency of the firm and migrated from Hermann to Bluffton in 1869 when the cellars
of the firm were complete and ready to begin production. The party inaugurating the
cellars in February 1869 attracted a large group of St. Louis notables, mostly drawn
from the German community, and the hopeful officers of the firm announced that they
had received an order for forty cases of their Missouri Cynthiana and other wines from
President U.S. Grant himself.[67]

In 1867, shortly after the founding of the Cliff Cave and Bluffton wineries, Dr. Spalding
and Husmann founded the Mississippi Valley Grape Growers' Association to organize
growers on both sides of the river, north and south of St. Louis.[68] All this must have
seemed good evidence of the secure beginnings and bright future of winegrowing in
Missouri. But the young hopes of the growers were soon knocked on the head; the
crash of prices in 1871 forced the Bluffton Wine Company into bankruptcy;[69] at the
same time diseases, especially the black rot, began to ravage the vineyards beyond
all precedent, and the horizon for wine-growers seemed dark indeed. When, in 1880,
the irrepressible Husmann published his American Grape Growing and Wine Making ,
he was forced to admit that the preceding decade had almost entirely falsified the
hopes with which it had begun, not just in Missouri but in other states: "Prices in
consequence of over production of inferior grapes and wines, came down to their
lowest ebb, diseases and other disasters have occurred, and for a time it seemed
almost as if grape growing had become a failure."[70] All was not lost, however. There
was reason to be hopeful as growers learned their business better, and as the control
of winemaking methods became more secure.

One new development of crucial assistance was not far away. This was the discovery,
by one of those happy accidents that help to make revolutions, of the fungicide called
bordeaux mixture, a compound of copper sulphate and lime. The mixture was applied
by a harassed French grower to his vines bordering a roadside to make them look
unappetizing and so to discourage casual thefts. Its fungicidal properties were
somehow noticed, and it was then tested and brought to the attention of the public by
the French scientist Alexis Millardet of Bordeaux in 1885.[71] It was soon thereafter
introduced into the United States through the Department of Agriculture. Trials were
made in afflicted vineyards in South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Missouri, with
spectacularly good results.[72] This work was, incidentally, one of the first significant
contributions of the newly established state agricultural experiment stations. Called
"the first broad spectrum fungicide,"[73] bordeaux mixture for the first time gave the
embattled eastern grape grower an effective weapon against black rot and downy
mildew.

Throughout the ups and downs in the rest of the state, the industry at Hermann had
been continuous and expanding. The biggest of the town's wineries, the firm of
Poeschel & Scherer, put up its main building in 1869, added a cellar in 1874, and was
producing on the order of 200,000 gallons in the 1880s. In the next decade it was
taken over by new owners as the Stone Hill Wine Company and the production
capacity expanded to over a million gallons. When the battleship Missouri was
launched in 1901, it was wine from Stone Hill that christened her.[74] Other successful
growers at Hermann, though not on the same scale as Stone Hill, were Henry Henze,
August Langendoerfer, Frederick Loehnig, H. Schus, and Julius Hundhausen.[75]
Winegrowing also continued in and around Augusta, near where Friedrich Muench
had pioneered years before. Some vineyards and winemaking also developed in the
southwestern corner of the state, in the Ozarks, and around Kansas City on the
Missouri River: a hundred acres of wine grapes were reported in that region as early
as 1870.[76]

By far the most significant and interesting work in Missouri in the nineteenth century—
a work of vital importance to winegrowing around the world—came about through the
phylloxera crisis that began its career of devastation in France in 1867, about the time
that winegrowing in Missouri was being energetically expanded. It happened that
Charles V. Riley (1843-95), the first state entomologist for Missouri, was a leading
expert on the phylloxera; he was able, in 1870-71, to establish the identity of the
American insect with the unknown creature at large in the vineyards of France, a first
step of essential importance in combating the pest.[77] As a resident of Missouri
(though English-born), Riley knew something about native American vines; he was
one of the first to suggest the idea of grafting vinifera to native American rootstocks,
and his authority gave special weight to the suggestion. His work on phylloxera had
made him well known in France; he had also visited that country, and he had assisted
the experts sent over to this country by the French government to learn about phylloxera.
[78] Riley was thus in a position of special importance for the French in their search for
a means of fighting against phylloxera. After hundreds of futile and often pathetic
"cures" for the phylloxera infestation had been vainly tried in France, and when it
gradually became clear that grafting vinifera vines onto resistant American roots was
the only reliable and practical way to save the French wine industry, Riley was again
appealed to, this time for his advice on the selection of appropriate American varieties
for the purpose. He in turn referred the French experts who were carrying out the
necessary trials to the veteran growers and nurserymen of Missouri.[79]

In this way it came about that Missouri took the lead in furnishing the root-stocks that
saved the vineyards of France. Three nurserymen in particular, all of them winemakers
themselves, were in the forefront of this work. They were George Husmann, who, after
the failure of the Bluffton Wine Company, had established himself as a nurseryman in
Sedalia, Missouri; Isidor Bush, the learned Austrian whose Bushberg nursery and
Bush Wine Company were in St. Louis; and Hermann Jaeger, a trained viticulturist
from Switzerland who had come to Missouri in 1867 and planted a vineyard at New
Switzerland, in the southwest Ozark region of Newton County. The combination of
Riley, Husmann, Bush, and Jaeger probably could not have been matched outside of
Missouri in the 1870s, both for relevant scientific knowledge and for practical
experience in viticulture. It was highly fitting, then, that Missouri supplied the vines that,
after extended trial in France, yielded the sorts that enabled the French to reconstitute
their afflicted vineyards. Writing in 1880, Husmann reported that "millions upon
millions of American cuttings and vines have already been shipped to France."[80]
George Ordish has calculated that the potential market for American rootstocks
sufficient to replant the vast vineyards of France was on the order of eleven billion
plants[81] —a figure that might well make the Missouri nurserymen imagine wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice. But of course the French soon began propagating from
their own nurseries of imported American vines. The significant contribution of
Missouri was to provide the original vines from which a stock could be propagated and
disseminated in France by the French themselves. The years from 1873 to 1876 were
the period of greatest activity in this movement of cuttings from Missouri to France.[82]

Missouri was also ideally situated to provide a variety of native vines, a point of great
importance since it was quickly discovered that American vines were by no means
uniform in their power to resist phylloxera. Labrusca varieties, for example, were
almost as tender and vulnerable to the louse as was vinifera itself. It was also found
that the American species differed widely in their ability to serve as rootstock for
vinifera: some took well to grafting, some less well. Another variable was the
Americans' tolerance of French soils. Many French vineyards are on chalky soils—
those of Champagne, to take a famous example—and some American varieties have
an intense, even fatal, dislike of chalk. It was thus necessary to proceed slowly and to
try as wide a range of experiment as the material available allowed. Here Missouri
could be most useful, for it is a state where southwestern, midwestern, and
southeastern climates meet. Labrusca, aestivalis, riparia, rupestris, cordifolia, and
other species all grow in Missouri, so that if one sort failed another could be provided.
As it happened, the first varieties sent for experiment to France were labrusca and
labrusca-riparia hybrids; they did not do well. Then varieties of aestivalis were
shipped. In the end, it was found that riparia and rupestris varieties did best, and they
provided the basis on which rebuilding could proceed. Jaeger, Husmann, and Bush
shipped great quantities of them.[83]

One may mention here that the French did not confine their use of American vines to
the roots alone. They also planted the vines for their fruit, and though officially
disapproved, there are still many vineyards of old-fashioned American hybrids, known
as producteurs directs , to be found in France: Noah, Clinton, Othello, and Lenoir
among others. At the same time, experiments were made in hybridizing the American
and French vines, just as American hybridizers had been doing on this side of the
Atlantic since the middle of the century. The French have produced many valuable
varieties through hybridizing, a work still actively carried on, and though the use of such
hybrids is now officially discouraged in Europe, they are widely and increasingly
planted in the eastern United States. The so-called French hybrids are an unlooked
for, but welcome, consequence of the phylloxera disaster.
Hermann Jaeger deserves a word more. He was an indefatigable worker in
developing and testing better varieties of grapes for American conditions. With this
object he explored the Ozark region and originated hybrids and seedlings from his
finds, many of them from the Post Oak grape (V. lincecumii ).[84] Jaeger was also
partial to rupestris varieties. When the French scientist Pierre Viala, searching for
American vines adapted to chalky French soils, called on Jaeger in Missouri he was
offered rupestris wine made by his host; it had, Viala said, "a very good color and a
taste good enough."[85] It is interesting to know that one of Jaeger's hybrids found its
way from Missouri to the Ardèche region of France, where it became the ancestor of
the famous series of hybrids developed by Georges Couderc and Louis Seibel, now
widely planted in this country as well as in Europe.[86]
George Husmann also deserves another and final word. In many ways his career was
symbolic of the fortunes of winegrowing in the United States itself, for it touched many
points of development and mirrored many representative changes. A brief outline will
make the truth of this proposition clear. We have already looked at his origins in the
winegrowing community of Hermann, at his embodiment of the scientific German style
of experiment, and at his eager proselytizing for winegrowing through his publications.
Then came his failure, in common with that of many others, in the incautious days after
the war. Undaunted, he turned to the propagation of vines in a nursery business, and
had a large part in supplying the French with native vines to combat the phylloxera. The
rest of his story begins in 1878, when he was appointed the first professor of
horticulture at the University of Missouri in Columbia. There he at once laid out a
vineyard on university ground and had over 130 varieties growing by 1880.[87] In 1881,
as though to symbolize the transference of power from the East to the West, Husmann
accepted a position as manager of the Talcoa Vineyards in the Napa Valley, California,
belonging to the James W. Simonton estate. The vineyards were being destroyed by
phylloxera, and Husmann was a recognized expert who might save them. He had sent
native root-stocks to California as well as to France in the years when he was a
nurseryman.[88]

Husmann's migration to California in 1881 came at just the moment when phylloxera
was at last recognized as a menace to the state, and at the same moment that saw
the formation of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners and the founding of the
university's viticultural program. Husmann set to work with his invariable energy and
enthusiasm, and soon had three hundred acres planted in native American vines for
experiment to determine their resistance and their suitability for grafting to vinifera.[89]
He also continued his interest in the whole subject of winegrowing, making inquiries
into the various developments in California and taking part in the professional
meetings of the state's winegrowers. The result was that within the decade of his
arrival in California he had written a book, called Grape Culture and Wine-Making in
California: A Practical Manual for the Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker (1888).

This was the third phase of Husmann's oracular performances before the American
public: in the first, going back to his early days as a grower and wine-maker at
Hermann, Missouri, he proclaimed the future of Missouri and the "great west" as the
home of a marvelous winegrowing economy; in the second, as a somewhat sobered
but still convinced prophet, he sold American vines to the French and wrote a book to
encourage eastern American growers generally after a decade of sore disappointment
and distress. In his final phase, he joined the growing company of visionaries who
had found the future revealed to them in California. In all of this, there was nothing
meretricious, nothing affected. Husmann was, clearly, a true believer, wherever he
found himself, and a shrewd judge too of what was going on and what might be made
of it. That California claimed him at last is no discredit to the rest of the country. I note it
here only as completing his role as symbolic instance of the progress of American
winegrowing in the century, a progress in which California was surely the culminating
stage. Long before his death in 1902, Husmann had left the Talcoa Vineyard for his
own property of Oak Glen, in the Chiles Valley of Napa County. The winery that he built
there has now disappeared, but the professor's work and his example are still vivid.

As we saw in an earlier chapter, winegrowing in other midwestern states responded
very quickly to the early successes in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. There were
vineyards and wineries in Illinois and Wisconsin before the Civil War, and in Iowa,
Nebraska, and Kansas not long after it. In Iowa, for instance, the State Horticultural
Society reported in 1868 on the results of grape growing and winemaking in sixteen
different counties with all the established varieties of native hybrids. The testimony
was all optimistic, and one witness declared that "one man can tend three acres of
grapes as easily as twenty acres of corn."[90] The fact that corn has long since
triumphed over its rivals in Iowa does not necessarily mean that the grape could not
still have a significant place there. In the same year as the Iowa report, 1868, Illinois
produced 225,000 gallons of wine, more than Missouri and only barely less than New
York.[91] The very heart of the Midwest was evidently a place where people thought
well of the chances of grape growing and winemaking.

In a large and general view, the two most favored regions for winegrowing in the
Midwest were along the two great river valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri:
along the first of these from southern Wisconsin to a point well below St. Louis; and
along the second from Omaha to St. Louis. On the Mississippi there was significant
viticulture at Dubuque, Nauvoo, Keokuk, and St. Louis; on the Missouri, at Council
Bluffs, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Kansas City, and, of course, at the old German
settlements from Boonville to St. Louis. Grapes were not confined to the riverine
slopes, however; they were raised on the prairies of the Illinois interior, on the Ozark
hills of southwestern Missouri, on the rich black lands of central Iowa, on the arid
bluffs of western Kansas, and any other sort of middle western site that might
challenge the ambitions of a horticultural pioneer.

It should certainly be known that these middle western states were winemaking
states, since the fact is largely forgotten today. Winemaking at Nauvoo, Illinois, is a
notable exception in having persisted down to the present day. More typical is the
history illustrated on the other side of the river from Nauvoo by the White Elk Vineyards
of Keokuk, Iowa. Established in 1869 by Hiram Barney of New York, the one hundred
acres of White Elk vines produced, by 1880, up to 30,000 gallons of Concord, Ives,
Norton, and Clinton wines a year.[92] But they could not survive the unequal struggle
against the growing power of prohibition on one side and the unremitting attack of
endemic diseases on the other. There were a number of beginnings comparable to
the White Elk Vineyards scattered over the wide distances of the flat Midwest, but to try
to give a connected account of them would present a distorted idea of their importance
in the general agricultural scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Winegrowing was always an exotic activity in most of this territory, at the mercy of
unfriendly nature and regarded with suspicious hostility by large parts of the
population. Still, though winegrowing was scattered and small-scale in these states,
its history recapitulates the most familiar themes of pioneer American experience in
this effort. In the first place, it was largely the work of continental immigrants, who were
almost certain to be German, Swiss, or French. In the second place, it was sometimes
an aspect of communitarian life, either religious or utopian. And it had to face the
inevitable obstacles: powerful endemic diseases, and intolerant prohibitionist hostility.
These themes may be briefly illustrated.

The Germans of Belleville, Illinois, have already been mentioned, and the Germans, it
seems, almost always gave the lead elsewhere in the state, as they had at Belleville.
John Bauer, the son of a German winegrower in Rhenish Bavaria, and John Tanner, a
Swiss, introduced winegrowing to Nauvoo, Illinois, in the early 1850s, and one of the
earliest wineries there belonged to a man from Liechtenstein named Rheinberger.[93]
Louis Koch, a Saxon, operated a winery for many years before and after the Civil War,
at Golconda, on the Ohio River.[94] As viticulture spread up and down Illinois along the
length of its Mississippi River border, and into the prairies to the east, one continues to
encounter German names: Theodore Engelmann operated his Looking-Glass
Vineyard at Mascoutah; Dr. H. Schroeder his Marble Front Wine House in Peoria;
Friedrich Hecker at Belleville, Fred Schneiter at St. Elmo, and Theophile Huber at
Illinois City are other instances.[95] Hecker was a man of considerable eminence, a
lawyer and politician from Baden who had been forced into exile for his revolutionary
activities. He settled among the learned German farmers in the region of Belleville,
fought with distinction in the Civil War, and afterwards cultivated his farm with success.
He made viticulture a special interest and corresponded on American grape varieties
with experts in Germany at the time of the phylloxera crisis.[96] Theophile Huber,
whose vineyard went back to 1867, was an active experimenter in breeding new
varieties of native grapes; so were Ludwig Hencke of Collinsville, and J. Balziger of
Highland, G. A. Ensenburger of Bloomington, and Otto Wasserzieher of Nauvoo.[97]
The German propensity to experiment was not restricted to such eminent names as
Engelmann, Husmann, and Rommel, but was diffused widely and shared by many
obscure, but useful, workers.

Perhaps no state has been thought of as more thoroughly and permanently "Dry" than
Kansas: it was the first state to adopt constitutional prohibition; its politicians were
usually notable among the public spokesmen for the Dry cause; it was the home of the
absurd Carrie A. Nation, the ax-wielding destroyer of saloons. As the president of the
State Temperance Union vaunted in 1890, "Kansas is the mausoleum of the saloon,
the sepulchre of its vices, the tomb of its iniquities."[98] Besides, its rolling prairies
seem utterly unfitted to grape growing: Bacchus loves the hillsides, and there are none
in Kansas. In the popular imagery of the United States, Kansas is a place to grow
wheat, and that, in fact, is what most of the state's acreage is devoted to. Yet there was
a time when the future of winegrowing looked quite promising in Kansas, and perhaps
such a time will come again.

Wild vines flourish in Kansas just as they do in every other part of the Midwest. Captain
Etienne Venyard de Bourgmont, on an expedition to what is now the northeastern
corner of the state in 1724, was supplied with grapes there by the local Indians; what
is more, he and his men made wine from the wild summer grapes that they found
growing in abundance along the Missouri River bluffs.[99] Eighty years later, when
Lewis and Clark passed the site where Bourgmont had found his grapes, they saw
the same abundance: "On the shores were great quantities of summer and fall
grapes."[100] It would be another half century before much settlement had been made
in Kansas, but when it came, the grapes were still there to meet the pioneer. One
settler heading west from Kansas City just after the Civil War recalls the air of June on
the Kansas prairie as "fragrant with wild grape blossoms."[101] Another early settler,
describing how they used to go "graping" along the Kaw River bottoms, remembered
that "one could drive the wagon under the vines as they hung from low tree tops and
pick the fruit directly into the buckets and tubs provided."[102] I myself remember in the
1930s swinging across a Kansas creek on a great festoon of wild grape vine hanging
from the trees along the bank.

Such an obvious invitation to try grape growing was responded to quickly. We have
already noted the work of John Burr and Dr. Stayman around Leavenworth in the
1860s. Another pioneer in grape growing, a bold one, was a nurseryman named A. M.
Burns, who set up a nursery on the arid plains of Riley County in 1857 and specialized
in vines. In his catalogue for 1866 he wrote as one who had proved beyond doubt the
harmony between Kansas and the grape: "I now think I can with safety predict a
glorious future for the grape in Kansas. It is only a matter of time, and some who,
when I commenced to test the vine, sneered at the idea, may yet live to see the day
when our bluffs will be teeming with millions of dollars of wealth, while they ought to
hang their heads with shame at their own ignorance."[103] To anyone who has had
the patience to read to this point in my narrative, Burns's words will have a distinct
pathos: they echo so closely what other intrepid pioneers had to say about their work
and their vision in the two centuries before Burns wrote that one can hardly avoid the
ironic connection between his boast and their failure. Yet we cannot say that Burns
was wrong: only that the trial has not yet been sufficiently made. Burns offered a list of
more than 150 varieties for sale, all of them native American vines, including such
aboriginal hybrids as the Alexander and the Bland as well as the latest popular hybrids
such as the Concord, the Iona, and Rogers' hybrids. He was also producing his own
new varieties for trial in central Kansas.[104]
Burns was not just a voice crying alone in the wilderness, for there were many to share
his faith. Who was the first to make wine in Kansas does not appear, but the Brenner
family must have been among the earliest to do so, and they return us to the theme of
the European element in the Midwest. The two brothers Brenner, Adam and Jacob,
were born in the celebrated wine town of Deidesheim, Rheinpfalz, and migrated to
Kansas in the 1860s. There they settled in Doniphan County, in the far northeastern
corner of the state where the Missouri River forms the boundary and where the early
explorers had noted the abundance of native grapes. Jacob Brenner planted his
Central Vineyards in 1864 and developed sacramental wines as a specialty; Adam
Brenner planted his Doniphan Vineyards in 1865; George Brenner, Jacob's son,
planted his Bellevue Vineyards in 1869. The family's vineyards lay adjacent, and
included such varieties as Elvira from Missouri, Goethe from Massachusetts, and
Norton from Virginia. By 1883 they had, together, over a hundred acres of vines and a
winery capacity of over 60,000 gallons.[105] There was at least a touch of French
influence in Kansas as well. In Douglas County, just west of Kansas City, Isador
Labarriere was growing grapes and making wine in the 1870s, and in the same
county August Jacot built a wine cellar and planted a vineyard in the 1880s; there is
still a hamlet called Vinland in the area, no doubt evoking thoughts of Vikings rather
than of wine in the minds of its Kansas neighbors, who have long been out of the habit
of familiarity with wine.[106] In Miami County, not far from Vinland, R. W. Massey had
been growing grapes since just after the Civil War around Paola, on the Marais des
Cygnes River, where, only a few years earlier, the fanatical John Brown had been
preaching against the wickedness of slavery and slaying such proslavery men as he
could find. Massey hoped to form a "grape colony" in the area, but there is no evidence
that he did so.[107]

Preferred Citation: Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America: From the
Beginnings to Prohibition. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. http:
//ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft967nb63q/

American Wine Company

The ruins of high hopes in Missouri: the Boonville Wine Company's building,
shown in a nineteenth-century view, a victim of the bad times for midwestern
winemakers after the Civil War. (From Charles Van Ravenswaay, The Arts
and Architecture of Germans in Missouri [1977])

The Stone Hill Vineyards and Winery, Hermann, Missouri, in 1888. Descended
from the earliest winery at Hermann, it grew to be the largest. (From History of
Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Crawford and Gasconade Countise [1888])