Good Grape Wine Company

June 19 2006

The American Vine-Dresser’s Guide Pg. 18 -19

In this continuation of The American Vine-Dressers Guide by John James Dufour, he continues his narrative in Chapters 1 & 2 on his initial travels  throughout the United States in the late 1700s/early 1800s searching for appropriate land for the cultivation of the Good Grape.

I resolvedtherefore on a visit to see if any remains of the Jesuits vines werestill in being, and what sort ofgrapes they were; supposing very naturally,that if they had succeeded as well as tradition reported, some of them might possiblybe found in some of the gardens there. But I found only the spotwhere that vineyard had beenplanted, in a wellselected place, on the side of a hill to the north east of thetown, under a cliff. No goodgrapes, however were found either there, or in any of the gardens of thecountry. A thick forest was covering that spot, with luxuriant undergrowth, and of as­paragus in the place where the Jesuitshad planted a bed of that vegetable.

This lastcir­cumstance made me think that the vineyard had not been sosuccessful as represented to me; but had been subject to thesame sickness which afflict now all importedgrapes, of which I shall speak more at large hereafter; the exis­tence of whichI have seen on the vines now growing in the gardens of St. Louis & Kaskas­kia,where I have been lately. The grapes are such a good fruit that the inhabitantswould have kept some in their gardens, in spite of all the governmental restrictions, as has been done in Brazil;and even, if there would have been grape vines of a hardy nature, as many sorts are inEurope, some vestiges of them would have remained, and climbed up some of the for­esttrees and become wild, as the asparagus haddone. Traditions among illiterate men are not to be depended upon.

In myjourneying down the Ohio, I found at Marietta a Frenchman, who wasmaking several barrels of wine every year, out of grapes that were growing wild, and abundantly, on the heads of the Islands of the Ohioriver, known by the name of Sand grapes,because they grow best on the gravels; a few plants of which are nowgrowing in one. of our vineyards, given bythe Harmonites under the name of red juice of the Islands, I drank some of the wine, when about 4 months old, and found it like the wine produced inthe vicinity of Pa­ris, in France, if notbetter. All the French then livingon the borders of the Ohio, were fully of the opinion, that those vineswere of French ori­gin; that they had beenplanted first at Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, and when the Eng­lish took thatfort, the French rooted them out, andthrew the vines into the river, which car­ried and lodged them at the heads ofthe Isl­ands, where they havemultiplied and produce (an) abundance of grapes,because they are most reg­ularly pruned by the floating iceof the river which acts on them, as the pruning knife of a vine-dresser. The tradition was handed down with so many peculiar circumstances,and the grapes, which are thebest, that I know among the wild,resembling partly the species known in

France by the name of de la Madelaine, that I believedit, until I found the same kind of grapes, up the Kentucky, and Mississippirivers, where it was impossible they could have been brought, from theOhio by floating on the water; and, by the inspection of their blossom I foundthem to possess the genericcharacters of the indi­genous American wild grapes; of which I shall speak more hereafter.

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