No Wine in Mesoamerica/No Law of Moses

“America has been covered with grapevines even before varieties like Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon were transplanted from Europe. Several of these native species play an important role in the world of wine, but most have been cast aside and their stories are threatened to disappear into history… Nearly all the wines that we drink today are produced with one species of grape: Vitis vinifera. V. vinifera traces its roots back to grapes in ancient Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc). Vinifera grapes include all the most popular wines in the world: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, etc. and have been studied extensively. The idiosyncrasies of making wine with V. vinifera have been fine tuned for several thousand years.”

Indigenous American Grape Varieties, A Primer
by David Mark Brown June 23, 2010 FCG, Wine Spotlight

“Of the eight species of grapes in the Vitis genus, six are native to North America, while only vinifera is native to Europe and amurensis to Asia. The powerhouse species native to Europe gives us varieties (also called cultivars) such as merlot, cabernet sauvignon, riesling, chardonnay, and sauvignon blanc. Basically every wine grape most of us can think of.

Of the six native species that had been growing in North America long before European settlers arrived, some may sound more familiar than others: rotundifolia (muscadine), aestivalis (summer grape), riparia (frost grape), labrusca (fox grape), mustangensis (Mustang grape), and rupestris (sand grape).

Rotundifolia (muscadine) was the first species in North America to be heavily cultivated, and has a history of over 400 years. The living proof resides on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Known simply as the Mothervine (right), this ancient muscadine is the oldest known grape vine in North America. North Carolina is the largest producer of muscadine, but over three hundred improved muscadine cultivars are currently growing throughout the southeastern United States.

“Wine from the same vine that Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists likely plucked grapes from will soon be available to the public. MotherVine Premium Scuppernong Wine will be introduced on Tuesday on Mother Vineyard Road, the site of the more than 400-year-old Mother Vine, reputed to be the oldest cultivated grapevine in the world. “Nobody in Europe has come up with one as old as that – and we’ve challenged them,” said David Fussell Sr., the owner of Duplin Winery in Rose Hill.” The virginian Pilot Newpaper

A History of Wine in America 

The Beginnings, 1000-1700

The history of the vine in America begins, symbolically at least, in the fogs that shroud the medieval Norsemen’s explorations. Every American knows the story of Leif Ericsson, and how, in A.D. 1001, he sailed from Greenland to the unknown country to the west. The story, however, is not at all clear. Historians disagree as to what the records of this voyage actually tell us, since they are saga narratives; they come from a remote era, from a strange language, and are uncritical, indistinct, and contradictory. Most experts, however, will agree that Leif—or someone—reached the new land. There, at least according to one saga, while Leif and his men went exploring in one direction, another member of the company, a German named Tyrker, went off by himself and made the discovery of what he called wine-berries—vinber in the original Old Norse, translated into English as “grapes.”^[1] The Norsemen made Tyrker’s “grapes” a part of their cargo when they sailed away, and Leif, in honor of this notable part of the country’s produce, called the land “Wineland.”

As a German, Tyrker claimed to know what he was talking about: “I was born where there is no lack of either grapes or vines,” he told Leif. But the latest opinion inclines to the belief that the vines of Leif Ericsson’s “Wineland”—most probably the northern coast of Newfoundland^[2] —were in fact not grapes at all but the plants of the wild cranberry. ^[3] Another guess is that what the Vikings named the land for was meadow grass, called archaically vin or vinber , and misinterpreted by later tellers of the saga. ^[4] No wild grapes grow in so high a latitude. Though it is powerfully tempting to believe that the Vikings really did discover grapes in their Vinland, the evidence is all against them unless we suppose that the climate of the region was significantly warmer then than now. Their name of “Wineland,” however, was excellent prophecy. For the continent that they had discovered was in fact a great natural vineyard, where, farther to the south, and from coast to coast, the grape rioted in profusion and variety.

Grapes grow abundantly in many parts of the world: besides the grapes of the classic sites in the Near East and in Europe, there are Chinese grapes, Sudanese grapes, Caribbean grapes. But, though the grape vine is widely tolerant and readily adaptable, it will not grow everywhere, and in some places where it grows vigorously, it still does not grow well for the winemaker’s purposes. The main restrictions are the need for sufficient sun to bring the clusters of fruit to full ripeness, yet sufficient winter chill to allow the vine to go dormant. There is another consideration. The so-called “balance” of a wine requires that the sugar content of the grape—essentially the product of heat—not overwhelm the acid content. Too much heat leads to too much sugar and reduction of flavor. Too little, to too much acid. Either extreme destroys the balance of elements. Since the continental United States lies within the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere, it is, most of it, potential vineyard area—though not necessarily good vineyard area. In fact, more species of native vines are found in North America than anywhere else in the world. The number of its native species varies according to the system of classification followed, but it is on the order of thirty, or about half of the number found throughout the entire world. ^[5]

One must emphasize the word native . The vine of European winemaking, the vine that Noah planted after the Flood, is the species vinifera—”the wine bearer,” in Linnaeus’s Latin—of the genus Vitis , the vine. Vitis vinifera is the vine whose history is identical with the history of wine itself: the leaves of vinifera bind the brows of Dionysus in his triumph; the seeds of vinifera are found with the mummies of the pharaohs in the pyramids. It was the juice of vinifera, mysteriously alive with the powers of fermentation, that led the ancients to connect wine with the spiritual realm and to make it an intimate part of religious ceremony. In the thousands of years during which vinifera has been under cultivation, it has produced thousands of varieties—4,000 by one count, 5,000 by another, 8,000 by yet another, though there is no realistic way to arrive at a figure. ^[6] The grape is constantly in process of variation through the seedlings it produces, and the recognized varieties are only the tiny fraction selected by man for his purposes from among the uncounted millions that have grown wherever the seeds of the grape have been dropped…

All of the explorers and early settlers made note of the abundant and vigorous wild grape vines—they could hardly help doing so, since they were obviously and everywhere to be seen along the coast of eastern North America. Within two years of Columbus’s discovery, for example, the Spaniards reported vines growing in the Caribbean islands. ^[9] The Pilgrims in New England found the species now called Vitis labrusca growing profusely in the woods around their settlements. ^[10]The labrusca, or northern fox grape, is the best looking of the natives, with large berries that may come in black, white, or red. It is the only native grape that exhibits this range of colors. Labrusca is still the best known of the native species because the ubiquitous Concord, the grape that most Americans take to be the standard of “grapeyness” in juice and jellies, is a pure example of it…

Hundreds of miles to the south of the Pilgrim settlements, and even before the Pilgrims landed, the gentlemen of the Virginia Company at Jamestown encountered a number of native grape species, among them the very distinctive one called Vitis rotundifolia —round leaf grape—that grows on bottom lands, on river banks, and in swamps, often covering hundreds of square feet with a single vine…

Both Pilgrims in the north and Virginians in the south would have known the small-berried and harsh-tasting Vitis riparia —the riverbank grape—which is the most widely distributed of all native American grapes…

Another grape widespread throughout the eastern United States is Vitis aestivalis , the summer grape, the best adapted to the making of wine of all the North American natives, though not the most widely used. Unlike the rotundifolia and others, it has adequate sugar in its large clusters of small berries; and it is free of the powerful “foxy” odor of the labrusca…

Take, for example, the earliest reference on record to the grapes growing in what is now the United States. In 1524, only a generation after Columbus, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, coasting north along the Atlantic seaboard, encountered a region so lovely in his eyes that he called it Arcadia.^[15] Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, the latest student of the subject, is of the opinion that Verrazzano meant Kitty Hawk, of Wright brothers fame, off the North Carolina mainland—a region that no one would identify as Arcadian now.^[16]…

They might have suspected some difficulty from the fact that none of the Indians they saw had any knowledge of wine; in fact, no eastern Indians had any fermented drinks of any sort, though this fact tells us more about the accidents of culture than about natural possibilities.^[19]…

The first reference to the actual making of wine in what is now the United States is in the report of his voyage to Florida in 1565 by the rich and respectable pirate Captain John Hawkins, afterwards Sir John…

Wine and silk, those two luxurious commodities, were constantly linked in the English imagination as the most desirable products (other than gold) that America could yield; as one writer has said, the duet of the vine and silk formed from the beginning “one of the major themes in the vast symphony of colonial hopes that enchanted, for half a century, the England of Elizabeth and James the First.”^[26]…”

Complete Article Here: A History of Wine in America From the Beginnings To Prohibition Thomas Pinney