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Steven Grubbs
May 14, 2013

20 Interesting Things I Learned About Eastern American Wine (By Trying Only a Little)

  1. There is this woman named Lucie Morton.  She works as a viticulture consultant for a number of eastern growers, some of which stretch as far south as the upper lobe of my home state, Georgia.  I met her in Virginia, while driving around in the cool Blue Ridge Mountains, checking out wineries.  Virginia wines might surprise you these days.  They don’t fit the usual profile of eastern wine.  On the average, they are neither foxy, nor spastic.  Most are sturdy, and thoughtful.  Lucie Morton appears to be at-or-near the epicenter of these improvements.  Weeks later, I spoke with her over a series of emails.  I was seeking a little perspective on the whole thing.  She suggested I read a book she wrote almost three decades ago, Winegrowing in Eastern America: an Illustrated Guide to Viniculture East of the Rockies, and an apparently seminal work by a wine historian named Leon D. Adams called The Wines of America.

  2. The Wines of America is teeming with a more entire history than many of us venture to explore.  Adams gives the East equal billing with the rest of the American wine scene, emphasizing that although the history of Vinifera in this country begins in Baja, the commercial and cultural history of American wine began in the east.

  3. Adams begins his book by making a few conspicuously optimistic claims.  If you read The Wines of America, don’t let this part throw you.  They are statements that were probably bold in the 1970s, but which now feel like weird protuberances in the text.  Its first sentence informs us that: 

    "In the quantity of wine it produces, the United States ranks sixth among the winegrowing nations.  In the quality of its wines, it ranks first."

    Adams goes on to cite a “more hospitable climate” and “the scientific approach to quality” as advantages over the Old World, with all of its “traditions, cobwebbed cellars, and primitive methods”.   These claims mostly act as reminders of how young and spindly American fine wine culture really still is, since Adams’ book is an account of that culture up until the point where it was just coming into bloom, when everything seemed to be possible (Adams penned its first incarnation in 1973; my Fourth Edition dates to 1990).  That too-broad shirk of tradition may actually help to sharpen up a vista for those romantic sommeliers (myself included) who constantly champion the old ways over the new, since we have been mostly shielded from how the old methods did once go occasionally awry.  It is also interesting to note that Adams was also a powerful advocate for lighter-style table wines, conceiving of them as instruments of moderation, as Jefferson had before him.  Adams’ image of domestic wine was likely something notably different than the blockbuster style assumed here in the late ‘90s and early aughts, and the distinction he was drawing was likely opposite that of the fortified sweet wines that had become popular after Prohibition’s repeal, wines that provided the ‘winos’ with their sad, enduring moniker.

  4. Early colonists were amazed at the strange medley of wild vines they found when they ventured into the forests of the eastern seaboard.  They imagined a new wine economy would just crop up around them.  At some point between 1562 and 1564, French Protestant Calvinists called Huguenots made wine from Scuppernong grapes in the area that is now Jacksonville, Florida.  In 1609, the colonists at Jamestown tried their hand with native grapes, as did the Plymouth Pilgrims, in 1623.  The colonists were disappointed with the results.  The following generation brought Vitis Vinifera vines from Europe, hoping to make wines that more closely resembled what they drank back home.

  5. There is a pheromone called o-aminoacetophenone, which works to repel honeybees.  It is present in many native American grape varieties, and it creates a strange, woody musk in their wines.  It is this note that garnered the descriptor foxy, and it is one of the reasons why early colonists had trouble enjoying the wines they made from native grapes.  I talked to Jenni McCloud, of Chrysalis Vineyards, in Middleburg, Virginia, about the Norton grape.  She drew a distinction between what gets called foxy and what is simply grapey, like the fruit tone of Concord.  Norton, she says, is grapey but not foxy.  Grapey tones come from methyl anthranilate.  Apparently, many native (and hybrid) grapes have a lot of both methyl anthranilate and o-aminoacetophenone, which is why the two get conflated, but they are very different things. 

  6. Easterners tried and tried to grow vinifera, but without any significant success. The vines would just wither and die.  They guessed the issue was cold hardiness, but invisible pests (well, phylloxera, mostly) and rot were probably more to blame.   Native vines were immune to these troubles.  Today, eastern winemakers usually keep vinifera healthy by using grafted rootstock and by spraying.  Lucie Morton told me that if you plant smart, with the correct varieties in the right places, you don’t have to use any more chemicals than any other conventional farm would.  She shrugs off the humidity issue.  I asked if the problem of humidity had been overstated, and she said, “Well it is part of the story, but [it] has been overplayed in the bad old days before planting away from trees and strict canopy management came into play.  No worse than other places where it rains in the summer.”

  7. One struggle the early colonists had with many native varieties is that they tended toward low must weights and high acidity.  The wines worked toward a natural balance that was unlike that of vinifera.  Matthieu Finot, winemaker at King Family Vineyards, in Crozet, VA, told me that although the vinifera vines take a lot of work in the vineyard to keep them healthy in the east, native vines require a lot of effort in the cellar to make wines that are palatable.  They just don’t seem to want to make wines that match our ideal of balance.  On the other hand, there are those who propose that our palates could simply adjust to what the native DNA wants their wine to be, and that one might perceive North American wine on its own terms.  Unfortunately, for the universe of taste, it isn’t easy to speculate on the realm of the possible.

  8. During the 1800s, a rivalry of sorts developed between the wine producers of the east and those of the west.  Adams describes how “eastern vintners accused the California shippers of selling their wines under French and German labels (which was often true) and of putting California labels on eastern wines.”  Wine sellers in the northeast responded by putting California labels on spoiled European wines, then affixing European labels on the best of what had come from the west coast.  

  9. Early on in Winegrowing in Eastern America, Lucie Morton provides an easy taxonomy of native grapevine species:  Vitis aestivalis likely possesses the best winemaking genes.  We now believe it is a parent of both Norton and Herbemont.  Vitis labrusca is the grapey, often foxy category that includes Concord and Niagara.  It created a spontaneous hybrid called Catawba, which most likely arose along the banks of the Carolina river that provided its name.  Morton points out that the fruit character of Labrusca has been “chemically synthesized for use in items ranging from bubble-gum to lip gloss”.  Vitis riparia is an “herbaceous, high-acid grape” blessed with “excellent rootstock”.  Its most famous progeny is Baco Noir, a cross with Folle Blanche.  And then, there is the rustic Vitis rotundifolia, the species of Muscadine.  Rutundofolia gives us Scuppernong and Magnolia (among others), and it grows well in the oppressive heat and humidity of the deep southeast.  Its berries are large, its skins are very thick, and it is foxy.  

  10. Some hybrid varieties exist because vinifera vines would live long enough to crossbreed spontaneously with wild varieties.  But others were cultivated, and much of this cultivation took place in (of all places) France.  Examples include: Seyval Blanc, Chambourcin, and the würz-y Traminette.

  11. Adams implies that the lack of a strong eastern wine culture led to a lack of sensible drinking, with the void being filled first with applejack, then whiskey, the eventual national beverage.  The blowback was Prohibition, and it nearly killed off America’s fledgling wine industry.  Wineries all over the nation buoyed themselves by either changing over to table grapes or by selling what were essentially home winemaking kits, packages that provided both directions on how to create wine and a cursory written warning that one should not attempt to do so.  

  12. According to Adams, even after repeal, Prohibition continued to stunt the American wine culture that was trying to rise up in its wake.  He names a few “appalling legacies” that led wine to make a poor impression on American drinking culture.  First, it caused a gap in understanding about wine quality.  Few palates could discern the difference between a spoiled bottle (of which there were many) and an intact one.  Next, a flood of dilettante-ish books and articles emerged issuing loads of social rules for wine, which did more to scare drinkers away than to educate them, so that “most native-born buyers of alcoholic beverages stuck to beer and hard liquor”.  Third, there was a lack of suitable grapes after repeal, since during prohibition many growers switched over to sturdy ‘juice grapes’ that would ship and preserve easily, such as Alicante Bouschet in California, and Concord in the east.  Finally, exorbitant taxes on liquor meant that fortified wines were the cheapest way to get drunk, thus birthing the image of the ‘wino’.  Adams says the American wine industry was “reborn in ruins.”  He goes on:

    "It was making the wrong kinds of wine from the wrong kinds of grapes for the wrong kind of consumers in a whiskey-drinking nation with guilt feelings about imbibing in general and a confused attitude toward wine in particular."  

  13. There are also a few encouraging success stories in the history of eastern wine, each with a compelling character:  Nicolas Longworth, Captain Paul Garrett, Philip Wagner, Charles Fournier.  One might now like to commence Googling.

  14. In 1957, a Ukrainian named Dr. Konstantin Frank planted Vitis vinifera varieties with grafted rootstock in the cold, erect hillsides along New York’s Finger Lakes.  He had been told many times that it couldn’t be done, and was largely treated as a joke.  His work provided new contexts and new thought about what was possible with vinifera.

  15. Not all of the eastern states have made the recent strides that Virginia has.  I can’t say very much for what I encountered as I drove up the eastward curve of the Blue Ridge slope toward Virginia.  Most Georgia and North Carolina wines had been pretty misguided, aesthetically speaking.  The problems ranged from difficult label design (cow-print patterns, excessive fonts), to enigmatic faults (a ubiquitous note of melted plastic) and surreal winemaking strategies (re-fired barrel parts dropped into tanks, wine containing other things than grapes).  It was a strange land to trip in.

  16. If humidity has served as a kind of scapegoat for eastern quality woes, then there must be a better explanation for why the east lags so far behind the west.  From what Lucie Morton told me directly, and from I gleaned in her book, I think the account would be twofold.  First, they are still striving to match the right grape variety, clones, and vineyard practices to the right growing locations.  Second, the extremity of the eastern climate, with all of its unpredictable vacillations, its uneven spurts of damp summer heat blazes and bitter winter cold shots, its pests, its strains of Black Rot, Pierce’s Disease, and Leaf Roll, all serve to make the process of matching site and viticulture even more of an extraordinary, daunting challenge than it would otherwise be.  European wine took thousands of years to get where it is today.  Perhaps the east needs more than just a few decades to sort out its hand.

  17. In the high hills that surround the town of Elkin, overlooking the deep center of North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, there is a producer named Carolina Heritage Vineyards.  Founded in 2005, the winery is the retirement project of Clyde and Pat Colwell, former school principal and IBM exec, respectively.  Their goal was to work without chemical pesticides or herbicides, and they chose to use native DNA to accomplish this, so they grow only hybrid and native varieties.  They are the southeast’s lone USDA-certified organic winery.  The wines feel unseasoned and raw, but they spark hope in the mind for some future thing, some new American incarnation.


    The Pinot Noir plot at Ankida Ridge, near Amherst, Virginia.  Below the vineyard is a chicken house whose tenants are allowed to run free in the vineyard, along with dogs, cats and sheep.


  18. Speaking of proof of life, there is a very young small producer in the high old mountain stretch northwest of Amherst, VA, above Lynchburg, called Ankida Ridge.  Lucie Morton serves as a consultant for proprietor Christine Vrooman and her winemaker son, Nathan.  Lucie selected this site, with its southeast exposure and virgin soil, rich in decomposing granite, and she felt very confident that they could grow Pinot Noir here, even hoping they could do it organically.  The latter turned out not to be the case, but the former proved radiantly true, and when I tasted it for the first time, from the warm, steadily-ripened inaugural 2010 vintage, produced with three year old vines, it completely reversed all of my assumptions about the potential of eastern wine.

  19. Christine Vrooman later invited me to attend a meeting with Dr. Cliff Ambers, a Virginia geologist who, in his spare time, tinkers with wild grape varieties, both their taxonomy and the wines they can make.  He started a label called Chateau Z.  The wines taste strange, but intact and challenging, and they are replete with sensations of the wild Virginia high country, with its gnarled trunks, unnamed streams, and populations of black bear and mountain cats.  The meeting would be a kind of summit about his attempt to breed a version of Sauvignon Blanc, one shored up with native DNA.  I wish I could have made it.


    A few head of Ankida Ridge sheep.  Their presence helps reduce the need for chemical herbicides.

  20. It is very hard to comment on what exactly is possible.  One doesn’t want to be foolish in optimism about places with as many natural challenges as those in the eastern US.  But we have been proven wrong before.  We have experienced new forms, new standards (Oregon Pinot Noir comes to mind).  I won’t try and describe what all is possible, moving ahead.  But if the direction of Virginia’s wine scene is any indication, I am increasingly leaning toward all things.
Anonymous
  • over 9 years ago

    I think this is an excellent offering for an important discussion of East Coast Wine. I currently reside in Baltimore, MD, and we are eagerly searching for a way to represent the region in our wine selections for a boutique hotel and restaurant. Does anyone else have any experience with MD wine?

    I lived in Charlottesville, VA for 15 years, and in the heart of the Monticello AVA. There are some stunners. For years, VA wine could not be sold out of state, and I think that may have precipitated an ignorance of the development of that industry. During those years, within the state, there was a very active and engaged community. Wine Passports, events at most wineries during the growing season, event facilities, polo matches, opera events...

    I'm very excited to see VA getting some attention, but there is a lot there beyond Chrysallis and Barboursville. Get a room in Charlottesville, get in the car, pick a direction, and you will probably be able to visit as many wineries and vineyards as your designated driver can tolerate.

  • over 11 years ago

    Great essay, Steven.

    Barboursville wines are excellent, as Max commented, as are many Virginia Viogniers and red Bordeaux blends.  The hybrid Norton is routinely excellent and the Italian winemaker at Barboursville is excelling with Nebbiolo, et. al.

    --------------------------------------------------------

    I like your point #16.  

    If the Finger Lakes Viticultural Area is so old, why are 95% of their 120 wineries under-performing?  

    The NY Farm Winery act was passed in 1976 as an emergency measure to allow growers to make wine in limited amounts.  The big companies, Taylor, Canandaigua, etc weren’t buying grapes and the Mom & Pop farmers were going bust.  They had to go into the winery business.  As a hedge against a hard winter (where their entire annual income would be lost) these wineries always retained a high proportion of Labrusca and Hybrids.   Locals, tourists, and unsophisticated Americans liked the grapey, and necessarily semi-sweet wines.  And to this day they still do - to a point where most wineries can only sell 50% of their wine as dry Vinifera wines.

    Meanwhile, 10 years later, wineries in Canada’s Niagara Peninsula started popping up with huge capital investments (as California wineries do) and they planted the right cool-climate Vinifera varieties well suited to the Northeast.  The wines are stunning and very French/Northern Italian/ Germanic.

    Further North, in Ontario’s Prince Edward County, growers have to bury every cane each winter to keep Vinifera plants alive, but the wines are stunning as they usually are at the climatic limits of viticulture.

    Back on Seneca Lake, the new Redtail Ridge Winery grows stunning Vinifera (including Teraldogo) and the owner/winemaker is the ex-Research Winemaker from Gallo in Modesto.  

    Where I live in the Hudson Valley, Millbrook planted 50 Vinifera varieties in the 1980’s and now is down to 4 or 5 survivors including what they still call Tocai Friulano - it is different every year but always world class.

    More on American Wine History Here:

    alumni.virginia.edu/.../friday-forum-richard-leahy

    This is an online recorded webinar that can be downloaded as an mp4 for mobile devices.  

    The presenter is Richard Leahy.  He is an amateur winemaker, wine professional, author, and expert on Virginia wines.   Richard G. Leahy has written on Virginia wine since 1986.  He is a regional editor for the Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America.  Leahy’s 2012 book is entitled Beyond Jefferson’s Vines.   Beyond Jefferson’s Vines, covers the state’s history and features interviews with the Virginia’s top wine industry members and members of state government.  Included are updates on the latest industry developments.

    The Webinar is based mostly on Beyond Jefferson’s Vines, Kevin Zraly’s American Wine Guide, Leon Adams’ The Wines of America.  The Webinar shows the rise, fall and rise again of the American wine industry from the ashes of Prohibition, including the rise of the non-West Coast wine industry.

    Leahy recently brought a bunch of Virginia examples to the London trade to rave reviews.  

    http://www.richardleahy.com/

    VA Wines Beat France in “Judgment of Virginia” Blind Tasting At RR Smith Museum on 10/14.

    saartcenter.org/.../richard-leahys-wine-report-va-wines-beat-france-in-judgment-of-virginia-blind-tasting-at-rr-smith-museum-on-1014

    Also visit www.virginiawine.org/.../marketing-office

    Rick Schofield

    Port Ewen, NY

  • over 11 years ago

    I would say that the Virginia wine scene is one of the most exciting in the United States right now, visited RDV last month and Barboursville a few years back, and their wines are amazing.  On the list we have a vertical from 2004 to 2008 of Barboursville Octagon, each vintage shows depth of character, and structure that proves that it will age for the long run.  As for RDV I think that they are one of the most exciting wineries focused on Bordeaux varieties in the USA at the moment, with out a doubt.  Also not to forget would be Linden Vineyards, making amazing wine from Sauvignon Blanc to late harvest Vidal Blanc.  Some other great Virginia wineries would be Valhalla, making ageworthy Bordeaux variety wines, also Norton, Petite Sirah, Chardonnay, and Malbec outside of Roanoke Virginia; and one of my favorites Breaux Vineyards who make one of the best Nebbiolo's outside of the Piemonte, and I say this being one of the biggest fans of Barolo and Barbaresco that you will find anywhere.  As for NC, the quality is few and far between, but the very best is the McRitchie winery outside of Elkin, who make great wines, an unoaked Chardonnay, a easy to drink Viognier, and some serious Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.  Also Raffaldini that make really delicious Vermentino and Montepulciano.  The winemaking world in the Southeast gets better the more winemakers we get moving here from around the world.  Great Blog, thank you for bringin attention to our little part of the world.

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