Manual of American Grape-Growing

CHAPTER I. The Domestication of the Grape

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE GRAPE

The domestication of an animal or a plant is a milestone in the advance of agriculture and so becomes of interest to every human being. But, more particularly, the materials, the events and the men who direct the work of domestication are of interest to those who breed and care for animals and plants; the grape-grower should find much profit in the story of the domestication of the grape. What was the raw material of a fruit known since the beginning of agriculture and wherever temperate fruits are grown? How has this material been fashioned into use? Who were the originative and who the directive agents? These are fundamental questions in the improvement of the grape, answers to which will also throw much light on the culture of it.

Botanists number from forty to sixty species of grapes in the world. These are widely distributed in the northern hemisphere, all but a few being found in temperate countries. Thus, more than half of the named species come from the United States and Canada, while nearly all of the others are from China and Japan, with but one species certainly growing wild in southwestern Asia and bordering parts of Europe. All true grapes have more or less edible fruits, and of the twenty or more species grown in the New World more than half have been or are being domesticated. Of the Old World grapes, only one species is cultivated for fruit, but this, of all grapes, is of greatest economic importance and, therefore, deserves first consideration.

THE EUROPEAN GRAPE

The European grape, Vitis vinifera (Fig. 1), is the grape of ancient and modern agriculture. It is the vine which Noah planted after the Deluge; the vine of Israel and of the Promised Land; the vine of the parables in the New Testament. It is the grape and the vine of the myths, fables, poetry and prose of all peoples. It is the grape from which the wines of the world are made. From it come the raisins of the world. It is the chief agricultural crop of southern Europe and northern Africa and of vast regions in other parts of the world, having followed civilized man from place to place in all temperate climates. The European grape has so impressed itself on the human mind that when one thinks or speaks of the grape, or of the vine, it is this Old World species, the vine of antiquity, that presents itself.

The written records of the cultivation of the European grape go back five or six thousand years. The ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans grew the vine and made wine from its fruit. Grape seeds have been found in the remains of European peoples of prehistoric times, showing that primitive men enlivened their scanty fare with wild grapes. Cultivation of the grape in the Old World probably began in the region about the Caspian Sea where the vine has always run wild. We have proof of the great antiquity of the grape in Egypt, for its seeds are found entombed with the oldest mummies. Probably the Phoenicians, the earliest navigators on the Mediterranean, carried the grape from Egypt and Syria to Greece, Rome and other countries bordering on this sea. The domestication of the grape was far advanced in Christ's time, for Pliny, writing then, describes ninety-one kinds of grapes and fifty kinds of wine.

It can never be known exactly when the European grape came under cultivation. There is no word as to what were the methods and processes of domestication, and whose the minds and hands that remodeled the wild grape of Europe into the grape of the vineyards. The Old World grape was domesticated long before the faint traditions which have been transmitted to our day could possibly have arisen. For knowledge of how wild species of this fruit have been and may be brought under cultivation, we must turn to New World records.

AMERICAN GRAPES

Few other plants in the New World grow wild under such varied conditions and over such extended areas as the grape. Wild grapes are found in the warmer parts of New Brunswick; on the shores of the Great Lakes; everywhere in the woodlands of the North and Middle Atlantic states; on the limestone soils of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Virginias; and they thrive in the sandy woods, sea plains and reef-keys of the South Atlantic and Gulf states. While not so common west of the Mississippi, yet some kind of wild grape is found from North Dakota to Texas; grapes grow on the mountains and in the cañons of all the Rocky Mountain states; and several species thrive on the Mexican borders and in the far Southwest.

While it is possible that all American grapes have descended from an original species, the types are now as diverse as the regions they inhabit. The wild grapes of the forests have long slender trunks and branches, whereby their leaves are better exposed to the sunlight. Two shrubby species do not attain a greater height than four or five feet; these grow in sandy soils, or among rocks exposed to sun and air. Another runs on the ground and bears foliage almost evergreen. The stem of one species attains a diameter of a foot, bearing its foliage in a great canopy. From this giant form the species vary to slender, graceful, climbing vines. Wild grapes are as varied in climatic adaptations as in structure of vine and grow luxuriantly in every condition of heat or cold, wetness or dryness, capable of supporting fruit-culture in America. So many of the kinds have horticultural possibilities that it seems certain that some grape can be domesticated in all of the agricultural regions of the country, their natural plasticity indicating, even if it were not known from experience, that all can be domesticated.

Leif the Lucky, the first European to visit America, if the Icelandic records are true, christened the new land Wineland. It has been supposed that this designation was given for the grapes, but recent investigations show that the fruits were probably mountain cranberries. Captain John Hawkins, who visited the Spanish settlements in Florida in 1565, mentions wild grapes among the resources of the New World. Amadas and Barlowe, sent out by Raleigh in 1584, describe the coasts of the Carolinas as, "so full of grapes that in all the world like abundance cannot be found." Captain John Smith, writing in 1606, describes the grapes of Virginia and recommends the culture of the vine as an industry for the newly founded colony. Few, indeed, are the explorers of the Atlantic seaboard who do not mention grapes among the plants of the country. Yet none saw intrinsic value in these wild vines. To the Europeans, the grapes of the Old World alone were worth cultivating, and the vines growing everywhere in America only suggested that the grape they had known across the sea might be grown in the new home.

That American viticulture must depend on the native species for its varieties began to be recognized at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when several large companies engaged in growing foreign grapes failed, and a meritorious native grape made its appearance. The vine of promise was a variety known as the Alexander. Thomas Jefferson, ever alert for the agricultural welfare of the nation, writing in 1809 to John Adlum, one of the first experimenters with an American species, voiced the sentiment of grape experimenters in speaking of the Alexander: "I think it will be well to push the culture of this grape without losing time and efforts in the search of foreign vines, which it will take centuries to adapt to our soil and climate."

Alexander is an offshoot of the common fox-grape, Vitis Labrusca (Fig. 2), found in the woods on the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia and occasionally in the Mississippi Valley. The history of the variety dates back to before the Revolutionary War, when, according to William Bartram, the Quaker botanist, it was found growing in the vicinity of Philadelphia, by John Alexander, gardener to Governor Penn of Pennsylvania. Curiously enough, it came into general cultivation through the deception of a nurseryman. Peter Legaux, a French-American grape-grower, in 1801 sold the Kentucky Vineyard Society fifteen hundred grape cuttings which he said had been taken from an European grape introduced from the Cape of Good Hope, therefore called the "Cape" grape. Legaux's grape turned out to be the Alexander. In the new home the spurious Cape grew wonderfully well and as the knowledge of its fruitfulness in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana spread, demand for it increased, and with remarkable rapidity, considering the time, it came into general cultivation in the parts of the United States then settled.

The Labrusca or fox-grapes.

Of the several species of American grapes now under cultivation, the Labrusca, first represented by the Alexander, has furnished more cultivated varieties than all the other American species together, no less than five hundred of its varieties having been grown in the vineyards of the country. There are several reasons why it is the most generally cultivated species. It is native to the parts of the United States in which agriculture soonest advanced to a state where fruits were desired. In the wild, the Labruscas are the most attractive, being largest and handsomest in color; among all grapes it alone shows black-, white- and red-fruited forms on wild vines. There is a northern and a southern form of the species, and its varieties are, therefore, widely adapted to climates and to soils. The flavor of the fruits of this species, all things considered, is rather better than that of any other of our wild grapes, though the skins in most of its varieties have a peculiar aroma, somewhat pronounced in the well-known Concord, Niagara and Worden, which is disagreeable to tastes accustomed to the pure flavors of the European grapes. All Labruscas submit well to vineyard operations and are vigorous, hardy and productive, though they are more subject to the dreaded phylloxera than are most of the other cultivated native species. Of the many grapes of this type, at least two deserve brief historical mention.

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