Tangled Vines by Frances Dinkelspiel

Author:Frances Dinkelspiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250033215
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

PART FOUR

EXPANSION

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION

On a warm day in June of 1862 a group of men gathered in a building on lower Broadway in New York City. They were members of the American Institute of the City of New York, a civic organization formed by inventors in 1838 to promote agriculture and the mechanical arts. The men had come together south of Canal Street to sample California wine—considered an oddity at the time.

H. A. Graff of Brooklyn, who was “well acquainted with foreign wines,”89 had brought six bottles to the meeting. The men, agriculture and horticulture enthusiasts, were part of the Farmers’ Club, one of the institute’s many committees. Each week, the members examined a different aspect of farming. Their topics were varied; they had recently discussed the cultivation of strawberries, the Hessian fly, and a new law about cattle on the highway.

Even though the Civil War was raging and recent battles in Virginia had claimed the lives of 12,000 men, the men’s focus on agriculture was keen. None of them had ever tried California wine. It was a novelty product, difficult to find on the East Coast. California wine was just starting to be noticed in San Francisco—Virginia peach brandy, magnolia whiskey, Catawba wine from Ohio, and French Champagne were all more popular than California wine, so it is no surprise that hardly anyone in New York had sampled it.

California was so distant from New York that bringing wine there was a challenge. The transcontinental railroad hadn’t been completed yet (that would happen in 1869) so the most common way to transport wine to New York or Boston was to ship it around Cape Horn. This voyage of 14,700 miles took six to seven months and added considerably to the price. But it had the advantage of allowing the wine stored in pipes, a kind of narrow barrel, to age, a practice few California winemakers bothered with in those early years.

The first shipment of California wine to the East Coast occurred in October 1860, and was sufficiently significant that newspapers took note. “This commencement of the exportation of Californian wine will prove of much advantage to the State,” commented an article. “Our natural market … will be in the Eastern States, where the climate is not favorable to the grape.”90

The first exporters were Kohler & Frohling, a company formed by two German musicians in San Francisco who had given up their instruments to plant vineyards in southern California. The firm opened a New York store in 1860. A year later, Jean Louis and Pierre Sainsevain, the nephews of Los Angeles wine pioneer Jean-Louis Vignes, set up a shop on Broadway.

The members of the Farmers’ Club were the type of people who sought out the new and unusual. So they must have been salivating as they picked up glasses of wine from the vintages of 1858 and 1860. There was white wine and Champagne from the El Aliso vineyard in Los Angeles, now owned by the Sainsevain brothers (which the note taker mistakenly called Alizo) and Port and Angelica from Kohler and Frohling.

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