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<< previous...Earliest Efforts at Wine-Making in America—Failures to Acclimatise European Vines—Wines Made by the Swiss Settlers and the Mission Fathers—The Yield of the Mission Vineyards—The Monster Vine of the Montecito Valley—The Catawba Vine and its General Cultivation—Mr. Longworth one of the Founders of American Viticulture—Fresh Attempts to make Sparkling Wine at Cincinnati—Existing Sparkling Wine Manufactures there—Longfellow’s Song in Praise of Catawba—The Kelley Island Wine Company—Vintaging and Treatment of their Sparkling Wines—Decrease of Consumption—The Vineyards of Hammondsport—Varieties of Grapes used for Sparkling Wines—The Vintage—After-Treatment of the Wines—The Pleasant Valley and Urbana Wine Companies and their Various Brands—Californian Sparkling Wines—The Buena Vista Vinicultural Society of San Francisco—Its Early Failures and Eventual Success in Manufacturing Sparkling Wines—The Vintage in California—Chinese Vintagers—How the Wine is Made—American Spurious Sparkling Wines.

From the earliest period of the colonisation of America the vine appears to have attracted the attention of the settlers, and it is said that as early as 1564 wine was made from the native grape in Florida. The first attempts to establish a regular vineyard date, however, from 1620, and would seem to have been made in Virginia with European vines, the prospects having become sufficiently encouraging in 1630 for the colonists to send for French vine-dressers to tend their plants. The latter were subsequently accused of ruining the vines by their bad treatment, but most likely this was an error, it having since been made evident that European vines cannot be successfully cultivated east of the Rocky Mountains, where the phylloxera vastatrix prevails. It was in vain that William Penn made repeated attempts to acclimatise European vines in Pennsylvania, that the Swiss emigrants—vine-growers from the Lake of Geneva—made similar trials, they having expended ten thousand dollars to no purpose. In vain, in Jessamine county, Kentucky, Pierre Legaud laboured in the environs of Philadelphia, and Lakanal, the member of the French Convention, experimented in Tennessee, Ohio, and Alabama; all their efforts to introduce the Old World vines proved futile. The attempts that were made by Swiss settlers at Vevay, in Indiana, with the indigenous plants were more successful, and after a time they managed to produce some palatable wine from the Schuylkill muscatel.... next >>