Nicholas Longworth,[34] of Cincinnati, Ohio, experimented with the European grapes for thirty years. His experience is best told in his own words written in 1846: “I have tried the foreign grapes extensively for wine at great expense for many years, and have abandoned them as unfit for our climate. In the acclimation of plants I do not believe. The white, Sweetwater grape is not more hardy with me than it was thirty years since, and does not bear as well. I have tried them in all soils and with all exposures.
“I obtained 5,000 plants from Madeira, 10,000 from France; and one-half of them, consisting of twenty varieties of the most celebrated wine grapes from the mountains of Jura, in the extreme northern[35] part of France, where the vine region ends; I also obtained them from the vicinity of Paris, Bordeaux, and from Germany. I went to the expense of trenching one hundred feet square on a side hill, placing a layer of stone and gravel at the bottom, with a drain to carry off the water, and to put in a compost of rich soil and sand three feet deep, and planted on it a great variety of foreign wine grapes. All failed; and not a single plant is left in my vineyards. I would advise the cultivation of native grapes alone, and the raising of new varieties from their seed.”[36]
The French Revolution drove a wealthy and educated Frenchman, M. Parmentier, to New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He planted about his place in Brooklyn a large garden in which there were many grapes. This garden afterward became a commercial nursery from which was distributed a considerable number of European grapes. Mr. Robert Underhill at Croton Point on the Hudson was induced to plant a vineyard of these but they soon went the way of all their kind, leaving Mr. Underhill only a consuming desire to plant grapes. This desire bore fruit, as we shall see. When the reign of terror had ceased, Parmentier returned to France from whence he sent many grapes to friends in America. He left a lasting impress on the horticulture and viticulture of America, through his experimental efforts with plants and his contribution to American horticultural literature. The Underhills (the father had been joined by his sons R. T. and W. A. Underhill) planted a vineyard of Catawbas and Isabellas in 1827. These vineyards grew until they covered seventy-five acres, the product of which was marketed in the metropolis and nearby cities. The grapes from this vineyard often sold for twenty-five cents a pound and supplied the whole market of the region. The grape industry of the Hudson River Valley began with Parmentier and the Underhills.
Another Frenchman, Alphonse Loubat, planted a vineyard of forty acres at Utrecht, Long Island, containing about 150,000 plants of foreign varieties. Here, we are told, “he strove against mildew and sun-scald for several years, but had to yield at last, as the elements were too much for human exertions to overcome.”[37] Loubat attempted to protect his grapes from mildew by covering them with paper bags and was probably the originator of the practice of bagging grapes.
Not infrequently one may still find some varieties of the Old World grape grown out of doors with a fair degree of success in favored locations but always by the amateur and never in a commercial vineyard. These few pages rehearsing repeated failures without a single success, serve to show the uselessness of attempting to grow foreign grapes in eastern America. Their culture has been tried by thousands on a small scale and by many individuals with experience, knowledge and capital on a large scale. With all, the results have been the same; a year or two of promise, then disease, dead vines and an abandoned vineyard.
The causes for these failures have been indicated. As Dufour says, “a sickness takes hold of the vines.” Phylloxera, mildew, rot—native parasites to which native grapes are comparatively immune—“take hold” of the foreign sorts and they die.
It is probable, too, that our climate, at the North at least, is not well suited to the production of the Old World grape. As a species, the Vinifera grapes thrive best in climates equable in both temperature and humidity. The climate of eastern America is not equable; it alternates between hot and cold, wet and dry. The range in both temperature and humidity is far greater than in the grape-growing regions of Europe, California, South Africa or Australia. The fleshy roots of Vitis vinifera are more tender to cold than are those of the species of northern United States and this would prevent its culture becoming very general in many regions where native grapes can be grown.
It is only in the regions west of the Rocky Mountains, and more particularly in California, that the varieties of Vinifera are successfully grown in America. The great viticultural interests of the far West are founded upon the success of this one species. The native grapes can be grown but they cannot compete in California with Vitis vinifera for any purpose. Nevertheless American species are indispensable in this western region for stocks upon which to graft the Vinifera varieties, and it is probable that the time is not far distant when all California vines will be upon American roots. Within the boundaries of latitude in which Vinifera varieties are grown west of the Rocky Mountains the grape shows wonderful adaptability; it is found at all elevations permitting fruit culture; it grows on practically all soils; it thrives under irrigation or under dry farming; it is given various kinds of treatment, including total neglect, and still thrives; the number of varieties grown for wine, raisin and table grapes runs into hundreds. The truly wonderful success met with in the cultivation of this species west of the great continental divide makes all the more remarkable the fact that in no place east of the divide will varieties of it thrive.
We now pass to a consideration of the American grapes, their characters, the early notices of them, their rise, their success, and their future—a more pleasing task than to record disaster after disaster in growing the grape of the Old World.