Circle of Vines by Richard Figiel

Author:Richard Figiel [Figiel, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Cooking, Beverages, Alcoholic, General
ISBN: 9781438453828
Google: PY2XBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2014-09-22T02:47:51+00:00

FIGURE 6.2. Hammondsport’s town square was covered with debris and barrels flushed out of the Roualet winery by the 1935 flood—one more blow to an industry on its knees after Prohibition. Hundreds of barrels littered the streets of the village. Roualet never reopened, though its massive edifice, once the largest freestanding stone buildings in the state after the capitol, stood empty at the edge of town into the 21st century. (Courtesy of the Steuben County Historical Society)

The 32-year-old Fournier was just emerging from a failed marriage and feeling unmoored. He had been groomed to take over as wine master at Veuve Clicquot by his uncle who, with the rest of the Champenois community, surely found it incroyable when the young man agreed to take the Urbana job himself, for one year. Underhill had no doubt ticked off the names of his past winemakers—Charles LeBreton from Roederer, Jules Crance from Moet et Chandon—but he apparently neglected to mention details about Finger Lakes winegrowing. “I had no idea,” Fournier later recalled, “of the climate and the grapes I would have to work with. It was a sultry 100 degrees in the shade when I arrived in New York City. Then I tasted Concord, Catawba, Elvira and Isabella wines which, to say the least, gave me a shock. In addition, the winemaking science there was very limited. The winter that followed was the third shock! But as I had come under a one year contract, I stuck it out.”

With the 1934 vintage he immediately set about lightening up Urbana’s wine style, drawing down the use of brandy and sugar and experimenting with ways to refine native grape flavors. He had brought with him from Veuve Clicquot his own Champagne yeast culture. When his one-year contract ended, the work had barely begun. He chose to stay on.

Fournier heard from all directions that growing the grape varieties familiar to him in Champagne was commercially impossible on Keuka Lake. The Geneva Experiment Station still viewed European vinifera grapes as exotics for backyard wine enthusiasts motivated to bury their vines each winter. Fournier was also familiar, however, with hybrids of French and American grape varieties that had been developed by French plant breeders responding to the European phylloxera vineyard epidemic of the late 1800s. The raison d’etre of the hybrids was the combination, in stricken French vineyards, of North American hardiness with European finesse. Why not apply the same logic to the slopes of Keuka Lake? In the spring of 1936 Urbana put a test planting behind the winery of the hybrids Seibel 1000 and Ravat 6, named after their breeders.

Those vines may have come directly from France or from the Geneva Experiment Station, where French hybrids had been growing in research and breeding blocks since shortly after the turn of the century. The station’s Professor Richard Wellington took a particular interest in the hybrids coming out of France. In the early 1920s he supplied vines to Charles Champlin, Jr. for an experimental planting on the slope

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