ISSUE 58, GRAPES, Part 6: Catawba & Wine
Catawba & Wine
Catawba Wines are sparkling or still vintages in which the Catawba grape predominates. The first widely popular American wine variety, it existed in two styles: effervescent double fermented Sparkling Catawba produced along the Ohio Riven Valley in the antebellum period, and a still form that was white or rose in style. The Staunton Nursery Catalog of 1858 described the grape succintly: "This is one of the hardiest, most productive and excellent of our native sorts; bunches of medium size, rather loose; berries round or slightly oval, pale red in the shade, but deep red in the sun, covered with a lilac bloom; flesh pale red in the shade, but deep red in the sun, covered with a lilac bloom; flesh slightly pulpy, juicy, sweet, aromatic, rich, slightly musky. Very productive" (38). There was some hyperbole here: it was not greatly productive. It had disease vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, it became the most valuable commercial grape in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Nicholas Longworth popularized the Sparkling Wine made from the grape in the 1830s—it was light colored, aromatic, and light. The still wines of the post bellum period and the present day lack any hint of the foxiness that characterizes most wines made with grapes of labrusca parentage.
Sparkling Catawba became widely popular in American hotels at exactly the same time (1830s-1850s) that Champagne began supplanting Madeira as the wine of choice among genteel consumers. Like Champagne, it was fizzy, fragrant, and brisk on the tongue—it was dulcet, yet not so sweet as to obscure the well structured acidity of the wine. It was substantially cheaper than imported Champagne. It was not fortified by Brandy or supercharged with sugar as many of the wines of the early 19th century were. An 1856 newspaper piece, “The Wine Vaults of Mr. Longworth” observed, “Sparkling Catawba, having brilliant merits has easily made its way to the customers in all parts of the country, and by its immediately attractive sweetness and flavor, by its noise and froth manifestations, has greatly helped to introduce its more sterling and staple, though at first tasteless lovely brother, the Still Catawba” Pittsfield Sun (July 24, 1856), 2. Corneau & Son, vignerons of Cincinnati, specialized in perfecting the still Catawba in the 1850s. “This is a delicately flavored Hock, and might be easily mistaken for the true Rhine wine.” “The Catawba Wines,” Alexandria Gazette (June 25, 1852), 2. In 1858 poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow distilled the regard with which Americans held Catawba Wine in a poem of that name.
CATAWBA WINE (1858, Birds of Passage)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This song of mine
Is a Song of the Vine,
To be sung by the glowing embers
Of wayside inns,
When the rain begins
To darken the drear Novembers.
It is not a song
Of the Scuppernong,
From warm Carolinian valleys,
Nor the Isabel
And the Muscadel
That bask in our garden alleys.
Nor the red Mustang,
Whose clusters hang
O'er the waves of the Colorado,
And the fiery flood
Of whose purple blood
Has a dash of Spanish bravado.
For richest and best
Is the wine of the West,
That grows by the Beautiful River;
Whose sweet perfume
Fills all the room
With a benison on the giver.
And as hollow trees
Are the haunts of bees,
Forever going and coming;
So this crystal hive
Is all alive
With a swarming and buzzing and humming.
Very good in its way
Is the Verzenay,
Or the Sillery soft and creamy;
But Catawba wine
Has a taste more divine,
More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy.
There grows no vine
By the haunted Rhine,
By Danube or Guadalquivir,
Nor on island or cape,
That bears such a grape
As grows by the Beautiful River.
Drugged is their juice
For foreign use,
When shipped o'er the reeling Atlantic,
To rack our brains
With the fever pains,
That have driven the Old World frantic.
To the sewers and sinks
With all such drinks,
And after them tumble the mixer;
For a poison malign
Is such Borgia wine,
Or at best but a Devil's Elixir.
While pure as a spring
Is the wine I sing,
And to praise it, one needs but name it;
For Catawba wine
Has need of no sign,
No tavern-bush to proclaim it.
And this Song of the Vine,
This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver
To the Queen of the West,
In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River.
The Catawba derived from a cross of a Native Vitis labrusca and a Vitis vinefera the white Semillon grape. It first came to public notice in the late 1820s, popularized by the early American vigneron, Col. John Adlum of Georgetown, Maryland. Adlum claimed to have secured the grape from the Schell family of Clarksburg, Maryland. Whence and where the Schells secured the grape remains a mystery. The name suggests some connection with that area of North Carolina/ South Carolina inhabited by the Catawba people. There is no written or printed substantiation for the stories that say the initial cuttings were conveyed from Carolina to Washington, D. C. in 1801 or 1802. But origin is not so important as trajectory. Despite a tendency to split when ripe, its vulnerability to mildew and root rot, and its modest productivity, its versatility as a table grape and wine grape inspired many Ohio cultivators to plant it, among them Nicholas Longworth. .
Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati was America's first wine millionaire, amassing his fortune by shipping cases of sparkling Catawba wine to the hotels of America in the 1840s. His product appeared just at the moment when champagne was beginning to muscle out Madeira as the favorite event wine. Longworth covered miles of the Ohio Valley with the Catawba and made it a brand that did not die until Prohibition killed off every wine in the United States.
During prohibition the Meier Wine Company of Cincinnati--a company founded in 1890 in the image of Longworth's earlier business--switched its sparkling Catawba wine production to the creation of Sparkling White Catawba grape juice, a staple for non-alcoholic party punches ever since.
Recently a revival of interest in Catawba Wine has burgeoned along the Ohio River. At least five producers offer white and rose versions. I am still awaiting a truly winning sparkling version in the image of Longworth’s original hit.