Good Grape Wine Company

April 2 2008

A Word on the Birthplace of Wine

Lest anybody forget, I like to remind folks where the birthplace of wine is.  Yes, it is Indiana, baby!

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that in the early days of this site I posted excerpts from the first published American viticultural book by John James Dufour, a Swiss settler who came to the U.S. with the intention of cultivating grapes and producing wine.  The book, The American Vine-Dresser’s Guide, is interesting if a touch impenetrable based on Dufour’s English skills circa 1826.  It chronicles his journey to the first successful grape-growing and winemaking enterprise in the U.S.

I stopped posting the excerpts from the public domain book because I knew nobody was reading the posts, much less skimming.  Perhaps, there were not enough pictures.

I was reminded of my old posting quirks when I was flipping through the current issue of Food & Wine magazine.

Perhaps it only occurred regionally, some magazines give advertisers the capability to spot-run their advertisements based on geography, but regardless I was more than surprised to see a full-page ad in the current issue of Food & Wine celebrating Kentucky wine.

Kentucky wine? 

The place of horses, whiskey and, and, wine?

There was a profile on Jess Jackson’s Kentucky horse farm in the same issue. Doubtlessly an enterprising sales rep. from the magazine called the state wine commission up to see if they wanted to piggy-back on the editorial content.  However, more interesting is the copy on the ad that reads:

You know our bourbon.  Now get to know our wine.  There are nearly three dozen wineries located through Kentucky that you can tour and then enjoy a sample of their finest work.  You’ll soon discover it’s no mistake that America’s first commercial vineyard was founded in Kentucky in 1798.

Kentucky may have had the first commercial vineyard in 1798, but here is the kicker and what the ad does not say:  It failed!  And, John James Dufour headed north to Indiana, on the banks of the Ohio River, at a place that would later be called Vevay, so named from Dufour’s native Switerland, and that is where, ultimately, the first SUCCESSFUL viticultural and winemaking enterprise was started! This was around 1807.

Indiana:  home to basketball, tenderloin sandwiches, and corn … ah, and the birthplace of wine culture in America. 

Dufour later went on to write about his experiences 20 years later in the aforementioned Vine-Dresser’s Guide.

So, lest we forget our history, I’ll continue to remind …

Speaking of being reminded of our wine history, there are dozens and dozens of out-of-print wine books available; some are more famous than others and many were published in the 1800’s and early turn of the century 1900’s.  Many are a fascinating glimpse into U.S. wine history. Titles like Notes on a Cellar-Book by George Saintsbury, for example.

There was a recent article in Newsweek about the old Classics Illustrated – the comic book adaptations of classic books that were printed and read in plentitude in the 1950’s and beyond.  Well, they are making a comeback.

If somebody wants to make at least one wine lover happy, I think it’s a fantastic idea to adapt some of these classic wine books into accessibly written and, yes, comic book-like illustrated pager turners.

Author James Gabler wrote a compendium on virtually every wine book ever printed in the U.S. in a book that can be found at this link.  That is a good place to start.  In addition, for publishers, the books are, again, in the public domain. 

With Millenials coming to wine like ducks to water, and seemingly averse to anything that requires more than five minutes worth of attention span, now is a good time for us to get re-acquainted with our wine past, and all the better if it is in a form that is consumable by the largest amount of people possible.

Personally speaking, I want everybody to know that wine started in Indiana, and, well, frankly, if getting the word out and making The American Wine-Dresser’s Guide available in illustrated form is what it takes for people to read the wine classics, ala a Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” then I’m all for it.

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