CHAPTER XV
GRAPE-BREEDING
Chance, pure and simple, has been the greatest factor in the production of varieties of American grapes. From the millions of wild plants, an occasional grape of pre-eminent merit has caught the eye of the cultivator and has been brought into the vineyard to be the progenitor of a new variety. Or in the vineyards, more often in near-by waste lands, from the prodigious number of seedlings that spring up, pure or cross-bred, a plant of merit becomes the foundation of a new variety. An interesting fact in the domestication of the four chief species of American grapes is that none came under cultivation until forms of them, striking in value, had been found. Catawba, representing the Labrusca grapes; the Scuppernong, the Rotundifolias; Norton, from Vitis æstivalis; Delaware and Herbemont from the Bourquiniana grapes; and Clinton from Vitis vulpina, are, after a century, scarcely excelled, although in each species there are now many new varieties.
That our best grapes have come from chance is not because of a lack of human effort to produce superior varieties. Of all fruits, the grape has received most attention in America from the generation of plant-breeders just passing. Grape-breeders have produced 2000 or more varieties, a medley of the heterogeneous characters of a dozen species. That so many of this vast number are worthless is due more to a lack of knowledge of plant-breeding than to a lack of effort, for the order and system in plant-breeding that now prevail, disclosed by recent brilliant discoveries, were unknown to grape-breeders of the last century.
Grape Hybrids
As early as 1822, Nuttall, a noted botanist, then at Harvard, recommended "hybrids betwixt the European vine and those of the United States which would better answer the variable climates of North America." In 1830, William Robert Prince, [Fig. 48], fourth proprietor of the then famous Linnean Botanic Nursery at Flushing, Long Island, grew 10,000 seedling grapes "from admixture under every variety of circumstance." This was probably the first attempt on a large scale to improve the native grapes by hybridizing, although little seems to have come of it. Later, a Dr. Valk, also of Flushing, grew hybrids from which he obtained Ada, the first named hybrid, the introduction of which started hybridizers to work in all parts of the country where grapes were grown.
