Inventing Wine by Paul Lukacs

Author:Paul Lukacs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

At the start of the twentieth century, wine was nowhere more suspect than in the United States. Far from enjoying special aesthetic status, it was widely considered a drink for degenerate drunks, poor men (and they were almost always male) called “winos.” That revealing colloquialism, which entered the national vernacular before the First World War, neatly reflects wine’s fall into American disrepute. A variety of forces, including the legacy of fundamental Protestantism, a belief in the country’s moral destiny, and a powerful populist-progressive political movement, led many Americans to treat it as an especially insidious form of alcohol. In their view, any guise of respectability and refinement that it might display was a sham. By wine’s very nature, it was demon drink, and so no different from the cheap whiskey being tossed back in the era’s roadhouses and saloons.

These suspicions would not play an important part in wine’s global history were it not for America’s growing influence within that history. At the start of the twentieth century, having just won a war with Spain, the United States was poised to become a world power, with its customs and mores exerting as much international sway as its military might. As the century unfolded, American movies, books, fashions, and other cultural habits would be both critiqued and imitated widely abroad. Clearly, those habits included attitudes and cultural practices involving wine. A great many American wines produced in the early decades of the century came heavily fortified with coarse spirits, which led much of the population to consider them fraudulent as well as dangerous. Often referred to as “stimulating” wines, these were not refined, age-worthy elixirs like Madeira, Port, and Sherry, but rather cheap, fiery intoxicants whose appeal came solely from their high levels of alcohol. They too were poured in bars and saloons. And because they cost so little, they often ended up being the one type of alcoholic drink that the poor and destitute could afford. Of course, some American vintners also made dry dinner wines, some of which apparently were quite good. Yet these never were accepted widely in American society, or at least not in respectable middle-class society. To many Americans, particularly those living in the country’s vast heartland, drinking wine seemed foreign and dangerous. It was a cultural practice that belonged to the two segments of urban society they distrusted most: wealthy aristocrats and poor immigrants. Thus they considered it a threat to the moral good.

Things had not always been so. In the early days of the republic, powerful voices had urged that wine be woven into the fabric of American life. Thomas Jefferson, who both traveled through Europe’s vineyards and planted one of his own in Virginia, was wine’s most vocal advocate among the founding fathers, but he was far from alone. George Washington tried to grow grapes and make wine, as did fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe. Though John Adams did not plant a vineyard, Massachusetts being too cold, he drank wine regularly. So

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