The Wild Vine by Todd Kliman

Author:Todd Kliman [Kliman, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59130-2
Published: 2010-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

15

IN HERMANN, popular lore has it that Prohibition killed the wine industry. “Then came Prohibition,” is the oft-repeated phrase, a grim punch line offered up by the town’s many amateur historians, the deus ex machina of a colorful immigrant story of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and success. “All those awards and all those medals, the industry was going strong, and things couldn’t have been better. And then came Prohibition,” Hermannites say with a shrug and a sigh. They might as well be saying, “And then along came the angel of death …”

But the truth is more complicated than that. Grand, overarching theories, much like simple, good vs. evil narratives, make for a good story, easily digestible, but seldom one that captures reality in all its messy strangeness. And it was messy strangeness I was after, because it was what I had come to expect and to trust in. Messy strangeness was not a residue of the story of the Norton; more and more, it seemed, messy strangeness was the story.

The truth was, the Norton’s downfall was being plotted even as the medals were piling up and its long-term future seemed assured, not unlike the tragic and untimely end that awaits a great thoroughbred who is pushed to exceed his levels of endurance and talent, and whose destruction is sowed by his success—ruin being the reward of the gods for ignoring history, tradition, and fate.

Husmann had sensed as much, even as he was celebrating the French embrace of his favorite grape. In “The Future of Grape-Growing in the West,” included in the Tenth Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Missouri for 1874, the same report in which he reported the response to Hermann’s wines in Montpellier, he wrote, “Grape growing in the West, and especially in our State, promising and lucrative as it was in its infancy, is at present under a cloud. The markets are flooded and glutted with cheap wines and low priced grapes, so low, indeed, that they will hardly pay the grower, and it has become a question of vital importance, which every grape-grower anxiously asks, ‘Will grape-growing and winemaking pay in the future?’”

He attributed the “depression” in the market to a number of factors, including a lack of professionalism on the part of some of the state’s winemakers, some of whom, he argued, had believed they could tend to grapes as they could corn. Having devoted himself to the study and introduction of new techniques and processes, he had grown increasingly tired of the amateurism he saw. Worst was the cultivation of too narrow a variety of grapes. Concord and Norton had so dominated production that they discouraged the cultivation of other grapes. Valuable though they were, they were not suited to every taste.

“The Concord as a market grape does not carry well,” Husmann concluded. “It has too tender a skin, and although of fair quality, clogs the palate too soon, while the Norton is no market grape at all.”

The doting father

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