By RICK BORCHELT
Courtesy of (from left) James H. Miller and Ted Bodner; Rick Borchelt; Jim Brighton
Next time you sit out on your deck here in the suburbs sipping that French Bordeaux or Alsatian Riesling or Spanish Rioja, raise a toast to the wild grape vine climbing the oak tree in your backyard. But for native American grapes, the European wine industry would have collapsed entirely at the end of the 19th century.
Grapes are one of the oldest fruits in cultivation. Wine residue in pots from archeological digs in the Caucasus dates to more than 8,000 years ago, and there is evidence that Neolithic peoples in that region and western Asia had already begun to cultivate and select large-fruited grapes as long as 10,000 years ago.
By around 600 B.C., grapes and winemaking had made their way to Europe proper by way of Marseille — and the French never looked back. Today, there are more than 5,000 varieties of those original grapes and their various crosses, cultivars and selections. Importantly, all of these varieties derive from just one species of grape, Vitis vinifera (Vitis simply meaning grapevine in Latin).
Meanwhile, Native Americans had been busy cultivating grapes found in North America, but mostly for eating out of
hand or drying for later consumption. Grapes were so prolific in the New World that when Leif Erikson visited eastern Canada a thousand years ago, he named the land where he came ashore Vinland. North America had many more kinds of grapes to choose from, as many as 30 species by some counts. Maryland alone has seven native grape species — none of them Vitis vinifera or its cultivated European varieties. Early colonists sent back cuttings and rootstocks of American grapes to the Continent, but they were not much of a hit. Europeans were (and still are) used to a very specific, crisp taste to their wines; American grapes yielded wines that were charitably described as pungent or musky. Vitis vinifera vines that Europeans sent to the Americas performed poorly, usually dying within a few years.
These trans-Atlantic experiments, in the days before regulations prohibiting import of plants or animals that might be carrying disease, proved almost fatal to the French wine industry. Around 1860, French vineyards began to experience a mysterious ailment affecting their grapes, a disease that rapidly spread to other European wine-making regions. Within a few decades, more than half of France’s famed vineyards were dead, winemaking plummeted, and French authorities pessimistically predicted the end of French viniculture.
Sacre bleu! What was France to do?
Their first act was to blame America, and more specifically American grapes. And they were right. Along with the American vines had come a root parasite, a sap-sucking aphid called phylloxera. American grapes had co-evolved with phylloxera for hundreds of thousands of years and were resistant to the pest; Vitis vinifera was not. Botanist Jules Émile Planchon first figured out the role of phylloxera and traced its spread from American to French grapes.
Courtesy of Joachim Schmid
American grapes had two strikes against them with European winemakers even before phylloxera. In addition to having a murky flavor profile, they didn’t do too well on chalky French soil. But botanists guessed they might provide a root onto which Vitis vinifera varieties could be grafted. Texas grape grower T. V. Munson was enlisted to identify wild American grapes that might be most suitable for grafting, and another American viticulturist, Missourian Hermann Jaeger, contributed some 17 boxcars full of candidate rootstocks to the French.
The grafting experiment proved a huge success and saved the French (and European) wine industry. Both Jaeger and Munson received the French Legion of Honor for their efforts. Chapeau, gentlemen!
You can see many of the grape species that were part of these 19th century experiments in and around the Maryland suburbs today.
Summer grape (Vitis aestivalis) is a small-berried vine and is the most widely distributed native grape in Maryland. The underside of the leaves, which may be rounded or lobed, is covered with dense hairs that give it a white appearance.
Fox grape (Vitis labrusca) is another common Maryland grape; it has large fruit and rounded or broadly palmate leaves
that are light, fuzzy brown underneath. Fox grape is the parent for commercial Concord grapes of the namesake juices, jams and jellies. It’s also the primary source for such wines as Manischewitz and Mogen David.
Courtesy of Bill Hubick
Muscadine or scuppernong (Vitis rotundifolia) has, as the scientific name suggests, round, small, shiny green leaves,
Courtesy of Bill Hubick
but it carries the largest fruit of all our native species. It’s mostly used in jams, jellies, sauces and preserves but is also marketed as a sweet wine similar to that produced by Concord grapes.
Frost grape (Vitis vulpina) is the last of our native grapes to ripen in the fall — in fact, it takes a good frost to render the berries palatable. It’s another small-berried species but is also the grape species whose 6-inch-thick trunks are most likely the ones seen in local woodlands clambering 50 feet or more into the tree canopy.
In addition to saving France’s vinicultural bacon, our native grapes provide food for a myriad of wildlife — most prominently birds — but also raccoons, opossums and even foxes. Indeed, gray foxes will even climb into trees to get at ripe grapes.
So as you watch those reruns of this summer’s Paris Olympics and see the beaming athletes celebrating their gold with champagne in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, you can smugly remember that without native American grapes, there would be no champagne with which to celebrate. A votre santé, you native grapes, you saviors of the vineyard!
Have questions for Rick about the world of nature in and around the Maryland suburbs or suggestions for future columns? Drop him a note at rborchelt@gmail.com.
