ISSUE 58, GRAPES, Part 5: Concord
Concord
The most popular American bred grape of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Concord premiered at the 1853 exhibition of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, an introduction by Ephraim Wales Bull. Bull was a gold beater by trade, an artisan who created gold foil for bookbinders and decorators by pounding it flat and thin. After years of work in Boston, he removed to Concord where he could pursue is avocation—horticulture—as well as his trade. He was the next door neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a close friend. The challenge Bull had undertaken was to devise a grape that would fully mature and produce large flavorful fruit in the New England climate. He grew three recognized varieties: the Catawba, the Isabella, and the Sweetwater. There were native grapes that grew in the vicinity. Bull believed that a seedling he found on his farm was a cross between the Native Vitis labrusca and a Catawba grape. After its initial exhibition at the 1853 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, it was adopted by Hovey in 1854, the great plant and seed broker, who touted the variety as the answer to New England’s long and fraught history of viticulture. By 1855 cuttings were being dispensed throughout the region.
Its popularity arose from its adaptability to a multitude of growing conditions in different geographic areas. It grew vigorously, produced abundantly, tolerated heat and cold equally, and enticed buyers with its appearance on produce stands readily. This despite the fact that it was rather sweet, prone to cracking, and had a penchant for rotting after picking. By the 1880s more Concord grapes were grown and sold than any other grape in the United States--so many bunches that a generation who grew up consuming Concord grape jelly and drinking Concord grape juice came to think of it as THE taste of grapes.
The commercial production of juice began in New Jersey circa 1870; large scale jelly production commenced with the turn of the twentieth century. In some parts of the South, east Tennessee and parts of Piedmont Virginia, conditions made the Concord super sweet, indeed so sweet that persons familiar with the New England Concord tasting these southern grapes could scarcely recognize them as belonging to the same family.
The concord grape became the go-to for cheap red wine in the 20th century with Manischewtiz and Mogen David labels embracing it as mass market production. The very fruity flavor and acid bit became, alas, the hallmark of “ignoble” vintage for tasters after the 1950s. Interestingly cooks found that wine sauce made from concord wine and sugar, cooked down, had fascinating flavor potentials.
In an 1854 letter, Bull described the grape thusly: "The grape is large, frequently an inch in diameter, and the bunches handsome, shouldered, and sometimes weigh a pound. In color it is a ruddy black, covered with a dense blue bloom, the skin very thin, the juice abundant, with a sweet aromatic flavor, and it has very little pulp" ["The Concord Grape," New England Farmer (April 1854), 162.]