American Wine Grapes
I will explain to you the terms by which we characterize the different qualities of wines . . .
—Thomas Jefferson, 1819
I still had more wine blinders to confront. I had ignored pretty much anything grape having to do with America. More specifically, I had ignored comments from my mother and late stepfather over the years, regarding their house in Vevay, Indiana. Both of them loved historical societies, architecture, American vernacular, that sort of thing. They’d mentioned, numerous times, that their 1814 home was once owned by a family that played a key role in American wine history. I always replied with feigned interest, and promptly forgot the matter.
I had time to read scientific papers about the DNA of wild yeasts that live symbiotically with wasps, or the particular markings and shape of ancient Egyptian and Roman amphora stoppers, or ancient Caucasus wine myths—all of those subjects, and dozens more. But no time to take note of the fact that Vevay was named after the Swiss town of the same name, and that it was founded by the man who many considered to be the father of winemaking in America, Jean-Jacques (or John James) Dufour. He was so under my radar that I stayed in the house for a week, helping my mother move after my stepfather’s death without ever bothering to investigate the Dufour story. Much later a little voice in my head said, Oh. Maybe you should look into that.
Dufour emigrated from Switzerland along with dozens of family members and associates, with the goal of creating the first commercially successful vineyards in America. In 1801 he successfully petitioned Congress for a special land grant on the banks of the Ohio River, predicting that the local vintages would soon rival those from the Rhine and Rhone regions. He sent wine to President Thomas Jefferson, and in 1826 wrote the first winemaking book published in this country, The American Vine-Dresser’s Guide. At first the Vevay wines were successful and popular, but the vineyards eventually died out, apparently from a combination of disease and neglect.
I started to take the idea of American wine grapes more seriously, even though some see nothing but three hundred years of duds (think Concord grape wine, then banish the thought quickly). But how could I place Saperavi, Himbertscha, Jandali, and all the rest of the rare Old World grapes on a pedestal above every grape in America? When I read about Dufour the implication was clear: my mind had discriminated against the very notion of American wine grapes just as other people turned up their noses at Cremisan or ancient wines in general. I’d cheered when Sean Myles, the grape scientist, spoke about “viticultural apartheid” and the folly of describing a few famous European grapes as “noble.” Yet I was just as biased, only in a different way.
But what counts as an heirloom grape if your region has no history of winemaking? Could a quality American wine grape exist? For more than a century the stock answer was no, but that is changing.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and many others experimented with vineyards, mostly with disappointing results. Long before that, Spanish priests brought vine clippings to the New World, hoping for bountiful harvests. So-called Mission grapes flourished in California during the 1800s, but over time were eclipsed by French varieties. Greek, Sicilian, and Swiss immigrants also came here with a love for wine, but weren’t impressed by our native grapes. That, at least, was the general story line, and the explanation for why California and the vast majority of American vineyards have planted well-known European grapes for the last seventy-five years.
It’s hard to say exactly why native American grapes are so different, but one clue comes from a hundred million years ago. North America was once smooshed together with Europe, South America, Africa, and much of Asia into a supercontinent called Pangaea, which slowly broke apart. After the Americas drifted away our grapes evolved separately, and while there is plenty of diversity here, the flavors they make aren’t the same as European or Middle Eastern grapes. Concord grapes make nice jelly, but as the Wine Grapes authors politely note, “Wine made from American species, particularly Vitis labrusca, can have a very distinctive flavour—definitely an acquired taste—combining animal fur and candied fruits.” Others mention aromas that call to mind the time my dog rolled in the mud, after being sprayed by a skunk. America supposedly struck out on native wine grapes.
Or did we? Recently scientists in Minnesota, California, and other states have taken a harder look at indigenous American grapes and found long-hidden qualities. In the early 1980s Minnesota appropriated funds for a grape-breeding program. The goal was to get a promising hybrid into the market. “It really took nearly twenty years to get Frontenac, our first variety, out [into vineyards]. It was actually crossed, I believe, in 1977,” said Matthew Clark, an assistant professor of grape breeding and enology at the University of Minnesota.
Botanists crossed indigenous cold-hardy grapes with the European Vitis, hoping to create a flavorful, disease tolerant, productive vine. That’s more of a challenge than it may seem. “Maybe one out of ten thousand of our seedlings makes it to the stage of becoming a cultivar. So it really is a numbers game,” Clark told me in a phone call.
The UM program is doing actual nursery crossbreeding—grape sex—not using laboratory-created genetically modified organisms, often referred to as GMO. I thought hard about the distinction. A decade ago I would have turned my nose up at these wines; not anymore. The new varieties mate indigenous grape DNA with that from European grapes, much like waves of human immigrants changed America. Perhaps you can criticize UM and others for speeding up the breeding process, but so what? At heart they’re unlocking flavor, disease-resistance, and growth genes that may be tens of millions of years old. To me these scientists are doing exactly what ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks did: refining wine grapes to produce tastes we enjoy.
The UM program is zeroing in on wild and table grapes with distinctive flavors, and working to breed those into wine grapes. “How much potential do wild American grape vines have, in terms of flavor?” I asked Clark.
“The diversity of flavors is astonishing,” he said. “We have grapes that taste like pineapple, strawberry, black pepper. I think the resources are only limited by the amount of time we spend exploring them. We’re really trying to develop wine products that are more in the European style, but utilize the resources of the North American germ plasm.”
What about the terrible reputation of wild American grapes’ flavor, so often described as a kind of damp, mangy foxiness? I realized that must come from a specific—and probably tiny—part of the DNA. Could the nasty aromas be bred out? “We’re doing work right now to identify some of the off aromas and flavors, and we’re making great strides. Ultimately our goal is to have a DNA test that we can use to screen a seedling years before it produces its first fruit as part of the breeding program, to determine if it has that negative trait or not.”
That could be huge, opening up an ancient repository of flavors and aromas that European winemakers never had access to. “The wines we produce, that niche itself, they offer some unique flavor profiles,” Clark said. “It’s an opportunity for someone who’s interested in locally produced products, as well as part of an American story.”
A New England winery is showing how much potential the new hybrids have, even if the little town of Woodstock, Vermont, doesn’t inspire thoughts of fine wine. There are pottery shops and creameries and white-clad colonial houses near the banks of the Ottauquechee River, and covered bridges and ski resorts in the nearby countryside. So when the New York Times listed a vintage from Deirdre Heekin’s La Garagista vineyard as one of the top ten wines of 2015, it was roughly akin to an Oklahoma restaurant winning praise for best sushi.
“A few years ago, I never imagined I would fall in love with a Vermont wine,” Times critic Eric Asimov wrote. “[But her] wines are so soulful that they demanded my attention. I was especially taken with the floral, spicy, lively 2013 Damejeanne.” Asimov is one of the most influential critics in the nation, and winemakers around the world dream of making his top ten list. The vineyard location wasn’t just the only surprise. The wines Asimov loved used hybrid Marquette red and La Crescent white grapes, both created at the University of Minnesota. Heekin didn’t foresee winemaking success either, joking in her book Libation: A Bitter Alchemy:
I wish I could trace my family history back to vocational winemakers from Italy, or France, or even California; a story replete with a derelict chateau, or a sprawling stone farmhouse famous in the village for its perfectly cool cellars, redolent of lime and metal. If only my grandparents or great-grandparents had come through the port of Naples, sleeping on lice-infested mats in the ship’s hold, holding tight to their wooden chest of seeds and vines, planting a vineyard in a New World row-house garden once they’d found work and lodging. Such stories, as beguiling as I might find them, are not my story.
I mulled over how a tiny Vermont vineyard that’s operated for only a few years had attracted such praise, and whether Heekin’s grape varieties foretold America’s future vineyards.
Heekin’s story does actually have a few European roots. The day after they were married in the early 1990s, Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, left to spend a year in Italy, captivated by the Slow Food movement, which started there. They returned home to run a bakery, a farm, a restaurant, and ultimately the winery. Heekin told me by phone that at first they didn’t plan a winemaking future. She described life before she started making wine: “I’m the wine director at our restaurant. My specialty is Italian indigenous varietals—rare varietals. I was always predisposed to really looking at what comes out of a region, as opposed to international varietals, like Chardonnay, Merlot, etc.” She discovered Coenobium, a white wine made by Italian nuns. The couple visited the nuns’ winery, and back in Vermont Heekin had a simple revelation: “The nuns make an elixir that is a manifestation of what nature has to offer them that year. It entices us, intrigues us, makes us thankful, makes us think, makes us remember. This is what the nuns have done.” Coenobium is a blend that includes some Malvasia, the same grapes in Leonardo’s vineyard.
As the couple learned more and more about their Vermont land, they began to look at American grapes as something more than table fare. “[W]e knew it would be an enormous undertaking,” Barber told the Times. “Yet it made so much sense. We try to source everything from nearby. If we could have wine from here . . .”
Heekin’s visit to another Vermont winery challenged the old narrative that America has only “bad” wine grapes. Lincoln Peak Vineyard was growing some of the new hybrids, and she fell for the wines. Heekin and Barber bought seedlings to plant on their farm, and she sought guidance from other cold winemaking regions. “Because we don’t have a history here of what the style of wine is, and what traditional growing is,” she told me, “I made a study for myself of every alpine region wine I could get my hands on. Not so much trying to duplicate those wines, but what can I learn from them that gives me inspiration in ways in which we can work with the wine in the field, or styles that we can employ in the cellar in terms of our fermentation.” Heekin didn’t want to copy wines from, say, Germany—she wanted to learn techniques from winemakers in similar climates.
Heekin said the wines made from the hybrid grapes are exhibiting terroir that is different from the other vineyards they farm. “What we’re starting to see, which is super exciting, is that the varietal is there, but its presence is starting to fade, and the site, the presence of the personality of the vineyard, is starting to take over in terms of the impressions you get from the wine,” she said. Their wines are a raging success. The couple has now closed the little restaurant, and opened a small wine bar and tavernetta at the vineyard.
Still, much of America is warm, not cold. That’s where a quirky, legendary winemaker and the University of California, Davis, come in.
Coyotes, deer, doves, songbirds, and turkey eat Canyon grapes (Vitis arizonica); Pueblo and Apache tribes, Spanish missionaries, and early European settlers did, too. The grapes have a natural immunity to many diseases, so they flourish from Texas to Arizona and down into Mexico, in pine forests, riverbanks, and floodplains. Now a romantic, radical, and somewhat perplexing vineyard experiment in California may help winegrowers discover new flavors, and avoid a ruinous and persistent disease without using chemicals, partly by using a portion of Vitis arizonica DNA.
“I’m not sure if it is a lightbulb or a colossal delusion,” California winemaker Randall Grahm told me, adding that it may take a generation to find out. In an industry in which creating a new logo can qualify as innovation, Grahm is more like Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—poetry, distortion, and perhaps just a little madness, but art, whether you like it or not. His new California vineyard, Popelouchum, an offshoot of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is a traditional, organic, scientific, pagan, open-source approach to winemaking that just might change the winemaking world. Or not. The 280 acres are about thirty miles southeast of Santa Cruz, set amidst rolling, windy hills.
After decades of fame, fortune, and apparent success as a California winemaker, Grahm decided to try the most taboo yet obvious vineyard experiment of all: let vineyard grapes have sex out in the real world so they create ten thousand new varieties. Philosophically, it boils down to this: he hopes that by marrying the vines to the California soil and climate from birth, nature will release more flavors, or variations of flavors, than controlled breeding ever did. If that seems like an odd plan, it’s only because we rarely think about the Faustian bargain at the heart of the wine industry: stopping grapes from reproducing. For decades I never did.
Practically, Grahm is trying to mix the most primal form of wine cultivation—putting seeds in the ground—with modern nursery breeding. Vouillamoz and Myles taught me about the secret at the heart of modern winemaking—lock in the tastes but shut down any evolution, thus creating an opportunity for pandemic diseases to take hold.
I asked Grahm what inspired Popelouchum, and he told me it wasn’t so much a specific moment as a realization that came to him around 2012. “It just struck me that if you’re going to try and produce a wine of terroir, you’re going to have to use a very different approach.”
For years Grahm seemed to have mastered the standard playbook. In the 1990s he built a national reputation with labels such as Big House Red and Cardinal Zin. He’s won three James Beard Awards, sold the popular brands to a wine conglomerate in 2006, and was inducted into the Culinary Institute of America’s Vintners Hall of Fame in 2010. Yet Grahm talks openly about his failures. “My wines were OK, but was I really doing anything distinctive or special? The world doesn’t need these wines—I was writing and talking about terroir but I wasn’t doing what I was saying,” he told the New York Times in 2009. Not only that, Grahm confessed to using the hidden tools that many successful, modestly priced wines rely on, asserting that he no longer wanted to use winemaking tricks such as aroma-enhancing yeasts, enzymes, and spinning cones that artificially lower alcohol content.
Grahm continued the lament with me, and it was like hearing Eli Zabar admit that his bagels weren’t so special after all. Grahm did more than dis Chardonnay and Merlot. He’s famous for worshipping Pinot Noir, an elegant grape used in Burgundy, but now feels he spent decades laboring under a fundamental delusion. “It’s very funny,” he said. “I just made this self-discovery the other day, and that is: All I ever dream about is Pinot Noir—or I should say Burgundy. All I want to do is produce Burgundy [wines]. The problem of course is I can’t produce Burgundy in California. For a long time, I think I thought ‘Oh, if I could just grow Pinot Noir that was really great, and emulate Burgundy, my problems would be solved.’ ”
The problems never got solved. Now Grahm feels he made the same mistake winemakers all over the world have made: expecting French grapes to produce brilliant wines in climates they weren’t bred for. In early 2016 Grahm summed it all up by telling a wine critic that California winemakers succeed at control, and that consumers appreciate consistency. “But at the same time, it removes much of the possibility of greatness, or surprise, or originality. And that is the tragic failing of many of the wines of the New World, and not just California.”
The question is, can Popelouchum succeed? I called Andy Walker, the wine grape genetics expert at UC Davis, aka the wine academia center of the universe. The school sometimes gets blamed for helping winemakers create generic wines, but Walker’s big-picture view echoed Grahm’s hopes and concerns. “I do think Randall’s experiment is worth doing. Diversity is good. Whether he selects optimal individuals and uses them, or accepts all variation as good and blends the whole mixture is an interesting question and I hope he tests both approaches,” Walker said.
Could Popelouchum really produce grapes that express terroir and new flavors, I asked? “Yeah, maybe,” Walker said. “He’ll be letting the environment sort of sort out those siblings. And some will do better and some will do worse. And it’s going to happen over decades—it won’t be a quick process.” Walker added that it’s hard to predict the outcome because there aren’t many examples of this kind of breeding, where different seeds from grape clusters are planted. The European and Middle Eastern vineyard industry spread via cuttings, not seeds. The biological details of Popelouchum brought to mind something Vouillamoz had told me: sowing all the seeds from a single bunch of grapes doesn’t produce identical vines—each seed will produce a plant with its own flavors, just as a mother’s children can vary in hair color, size, eye color, etc. “[He] should get a large range of variation. And that’s what he’s looking for,” Walker confirmed. Grahm might be getting more than he bargained for, but creating just a few new wine grapes would be a tremendous success.
Scientists are getting much closer to understanding exactly why certain grapes or yeasts express particular flavors. Walker said that there’s a huge revolution going on right now based on new technology that can sense and detect flavors. “The nose was the ultimate arbiter until very recently. Now we have electronic noses.” According to Walker, that creates the possibility of precisely identifying chemical compounds in wine and in grapes. It’s not clear where all the powerful new tools will lead, though. “No one has really asked the next question, which is: What do we do with this stuff now?” What he means is whether the industry, and thus wine lovers by extension, will embrace the new wines or stick with traditional options.
There is another selling point to the new hybrid grapes, however. Unlocking the natural disease-resistant genes in indigenous vines could make the new grapes hard to pass up. Pierce’s Disease (PD) causes entire vineyards to wither and die. It’s transmitted by winged insects called sharpshooters, which are typically a little less than half an inch long. You’ve probably seen one if you look closely at plants—they’re like mini cicada-grasshoppers. A UC Davis study of PD economic costs and impacts found that between 1999 and 2010 the industry, plus federal, state, and local governments have spent nearly $544 million on fighting PD and the sharpshooter pests. Despite those efforts, California vineyards lose about $56 million each year from vines dying from PD. And it’s not just California; this is a worldwide problem.
The money is only part of the story. Walker said vineyards apply huge amounts of fungicide to control other grapevine diseases such as downy mildew. The general practice is to spray before the disease even appears, as a safeguard. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m not going to allow any leafhoppers, so I’m going to kill every one in the whole area before they can possibly get my vineyard.’ ” Walker understands the pressures vineyards face from potentially devastating loses, but he said the public isn’t likely to keep accepting such chemical and pesticide use forever. It’s a modern version of what the French went through after phylloxera. They tried soaking vineyards with every chemical imaginable, but the ultimate solution was grafting the European vines on American rootstocks, which had natural disease resistance.
“You can envision a time [when] we have to do something about it. And we can,” Walker informed me, by selectively breeding wild grapevine resistance into wine grapes. Walker has created grapes that contain just three percent Vitis arizonica DNA, yet they retain the natural PD resistance. Walker thinks we’re approaching an era when resistance to diseases, mold, and even drought can be bred into wine grapes. If he’s right, we could vastly reduce the amounts of pesticides and chemicals that get dumped on vineyards each year, all of which ultimately end up in the soil or nearby waterways.
It could be a historic development, but science isn’t the only limitation. A leading California newspaper used the term “Frankengrapes” to describe Walker’s research, even though he does natural, old-fashioned plant breeding. I sighed as Walker told me the story. Our DNA has traces from many other species, too. The “Franken” suggestion probably generated clicks, because activists use the word to describe the type of GMO crops Monsanto sells. The paper eventually changed the headline, and Walker said the reporter didn’t aim to denigrate his work. The fact remains, though: a wine grape with three percent wild DNA raised red flags for one writer. Yet consider the supposedly lowly parents of some of the famous French grapes. Nothing is “pure.” That’s just a wine industry illusion. Would any foodie balk at a splendidly flavorful tomato, just because three percent of its DNA came from natural cross-breeding with some other tomato variety? No. People freaked out at early GMO experiments because scientists mixed genes from different species—for example, flounder DNA went into one tomato variety to help it resist freezing. Many scientists point out that DNA is, well, just DNA—a set of genetic instructions. The flounder-tomato mix helped spawn the Frankenfood term. It’s true that American grapes have a reputation of producing iffy or worse wine, but using portions of their genome is a different matter. I asked Walker if that aversion is a purely psychological barrier.
“Yeah,” he said. “And in fact we’ll have to get over it,” given the social pressures to reduce chemical use and the way climate change is already impacting some wine regions. Luckily, Walker said, there’s no need for GMO vines, because of all the genetic diversity in wild grapes, plus all the lesser-known native grapes being rediscovered. “There’s no reason to use genetic modification unless you don’t have the genes at hand. And within Vitis we have everything we need.”
Walker’s work with wild American grapes may deliver many more genetic surprises. Over the last thirty years, he’s collected about twelve hundred different samples from across the southwest. DNA analysis by other scientists has also unraveled the true story of California’s Mission grape, reputedly brought here by Spanish missionaries in the 1600s. The grape variety turns out to be Listán Prieto, from the Spanish countryside around Madrid. Immortalized in Don Quixote, it has some links to Muscat of Alexandria, Egypt. The Mission grapes have brothers and sisters in Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina—all brought to those countries by missionaries between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
For now Grahm has planted some Grenache grapes at Popelouchum, with the goal of breeding disease resistance into existing grapes that already have great flavor. After the first harvests, he’ll look for new flavors and try planting other grapes. Popelouchum’s Indiegogo campaign raised almost $175,000 and Grahm has secured official nonprofit status for the project. He said they would share the breeding information with other winemakers, and that the first trial wines could be bottled around 2020. A final verdict on whether the idea works won’t come for decades, and he thinks even getting to that point will cost “a lot” more money. I suggested that if he created ten distinctive new wine grapes, or even only a few, that would be an achievement.
“It would,” he replied. “But it’s not necessarily about finding the superior grape for the site.” Success could also come from a blend made from many of the new grapes. By early 2018 Graham was trying or considering a wide range of grapes at Popelouchum, including Furmint, Ruche, Rossese, Timorasso, and Ciliegiolo—and still planning the massive grape breeding project.
Grahm’s project made me think that saving rare and native grapes won’t do enough to change preconceptions about wine. Perhaps it is just part of the effort to encourage new tastes, diversity, and enlightened land use. Grahm summed it up at a Brooklyn food conference, telling the audience, “Why do wines of place matter? For the same reason that distinct species of butterflies, birds, or salamanders or the discovery of new stars and galaxies matter. They add richness and complexity to our lives.”
During our conversation I asked Grahm why he thought wines have stayed so homogeneous in America, given the surging interest in craft beers and whiskies, distinctive chocolates, and foods from all over the world. Did he think vineyards will really change here? Grahm told me he’s tremendously encouraged by the younger generation of European wine lovers, who really embrace local wines. He’s withholding judgment on our country.
To get a longer perspective I spoke to Kermit Lynch, the legendary wine importer and author of Adventures on the Wine Route, who opened his first store in 1972 in Berkeley. Lynch said the irrational craze for wines made from just a few French grapes took off in the early 1980s, when Robert Parker emerged as the most influential wine critic in the country. “My customers would walk in carrying their Parker review,” he told me. They wanted whatever the Wine Advocate recommended.
Echoing what I’d heard over and over again on my own wine route adventures, Lynch confirmed the same story to be true in California. “Winemakers were pulling out local varieties to plant what they thought were the noble varieties. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The wrong soil and Cabernet Sauvignon is no longer a noble variety.” Wine journalists helped by hyping some French harvest years as the best or worst ever, fueling marketplace swings which promoted the notion that critics could truly discern such trends. Publications started scoring wine on a 100-point scale, and Lynch said that made no sense. “Judging wines like that—that’s totally new in the history of wine. I see so many wine experts who know everything about everything.” He gently suggested that is unrealistic.
Waves of baby boomers grew up drinking certain wines, and the industry developed tools that place a premium on consistency, not distinctive tastes. Many US wineries sought to copy popular, easy-drinking flavor profiles, with only slight tweaks, like fast food french fries. If a vineyard produced wine with too much or too little sweetness, tannins, or alcohol, there were ways to fix it all.
“There’s so many things you can add and take out of wines now,” Lynch said. “Somebody sent me a catalog that’s sent to winemakers, with all the things they can buy to change the taste of their wine. They can even lower the acidity by adding powder to it. It’s just amazing. And of course there must be flavors. I’m sure you can buy flavors.” Lynch is right, of course. Do you like that hint of oakiness in certain bargain brands of Chardonnay? Don’t assume the wine ever touched a barrel. Some wineries just throw oak chips into stainless steel tanks, and it’s perfectly legal to do so.
I learned that the writers Wendell Berry and John McPhee were huge fans of Lynch’s classic book, too. Berry, the Kentucky poet and proponent of local, sustainable agriculture, wrote an article for one of Lynch’s monthly brochures. “I saw much clearer than I had before how my interest in wine could be accommodated to my interest in good agriculture,” Berry wrote about Adventures on the Wine Route, calling it “among other things, a fine book on agriculture. One of the best, really, for its interest in the way the quality of place and soil and work are communicated to the quality of the final product. [. . .] Drinking wine from a good little vineyard . . . is like eating vegetables from a fertile, familiar garden, or lamb from the flock of an excellent shepherd whom you know. The immediate pleasure of taste is enlarged and enhanced by the pleasure that one takes in the life of the world and the husbandry of the soil.”
My biggest American winemaking surprise came from Oregon, more than eight thousand miles from Tbilisi, Georgia. I never expected to hear about a link to ancient winemaking in the rainy, forested mountains near Portland. Until a few years ago, Andrew and Annedria Beckham didn’t either. The couple met in Utah in 1998, while Andrew was studying there, and later moved to Oregon. He got a job teaching ceramics at a school district just outside Portland, and they bought eight acres of land to build a studio and raise a family.
Their neighbors, in their eighties, grew wine grapes, and Andrew thought it would be fun to plant a few rows. Annedria humored him. His teaching job and the pottery studio took up a lot of time, and the couple started a family, so in retrospect a winery was the furthest thing from their minds. But today they make a perfect winemaking team. He has grand dreams; she is a realist. Annedria learned the business side, and became the executive director of the local wine growers association. In the winery Andrew’s workday begins at 4:00 a.m. during harvest season. After a full day of teaching he’s back at the winery, sometimes until after midnight.
In the early years most of their eight-acre hillside was planted with mostly Pinot Noir–style grapes, plus some Swiss Wädenswil and German Riesling. Their first vintage was 2009. Not so revolutionary—there are plenty of young Oregon winemakers. Around 2013 Annedria showed her husband an article on Elisabetta Foradori, the amphora winemaker I had tried to visit in Italy.
“I was really enamored with the fact she was using these big clay pots to make her wine. I looked at the photos and said I think I could make something similar. I set out to figure out how to do it,” Andrew told me when we spoke on the phone. “It’s certainly been a challenge, because there aren’t people to ask questions of in the United States. So I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff through trial and error. I’ve gone through extensive trials with different firing temperatures and different clay formulations, to come up with a body that’s fired at the right temperature, is porous enough for the gas exchange I’m looking for, but is not so porous that we have problems with sanitation, and volume loss, and [wine] leaking through the vessel.” A large amphora can take more than two days to fire, and three months to fully dry. They must have integrity and strength after firing, yet in ancient times they were built in enormous numbers, which amazes Andrew.
At first the winery focused on establishing the vines. Traditional fermentation was done in stainless steel and oak barrels. But by 2013 Andrew was ready to experiment. Today some vintages are fermented in stainless steel and aged in amphoras, some use traditional barrel aging, some use amphoras for every step, and others remain in the stainless steel for the whole process. “In the cellar at this point we’re able taste how those four styles of winemaking are affecting the same lot of fruit. And it’s incredible how different those four wines are,” he told me.
The Beckhams farm organically, using indigenous yeasts and bottling most of their wines without filtration or other manipulation, just as everyone did for thousands of years. Andrew is collecting precise analytical data about how the wines made in each type of fermentation vessel age. “The wines that we’re aging in clay seem to be evolving at a much faster speed than wines that are aging in wood, so the wines coming from clay are higher toned. There’s more energy to them. They all have a very dusty, earth-like texture and intense clarity.” I’d noticed that in Georgian wines, too. The clay gives an earthy, iron undertone to the wines, but somehow makes fruits, spices, and other aromas pop out, like clear notes on an acoustic guitar, not a fruit bomb. Andrew thinks that’s because the amphoras act as clarifying and refining chambers.
The Beckhams only produced about three thousand bottles of amphora wine in 2014, but they saw a pattern. Critics loved the amphora angle. Forbes published an article online, and Food & Wine and Wine Enthusiast magazines did stories, too. An Oregon wine critic wrote that America finally had truly traditional winemaking—the “Slow Wine” version of Slow Food. At one point Andrew loaned an amphora to a fellow winemaker, and soon people were calling him not just about buying wine—but also about buying amphoras.
He became the first person in America to manufacture huge Caucasus-style clay amphoras. He scaled up to make some that can hold three hundred gallons (each one can require up to 1,500 pounds of clay) and zeroed in on a specific clay from the Sacramento Delta. “Everything has to be just so for the body to work,” he explained, from the firing temperature to lining the inside of some amphoras with beeswax. His pottery knowledge—and his kiln—led to the discovery that the amphoras can be re-sterilized after each vintage with a quick burst of heat.
I told Andrew about the scientists who traced many ancient amphoras to a region near Gaza. “That’s not surprising in the least,” he said. “And you add the craftsmen to that—people having the technical know-how and the ability to fire. Having a single source for those early vessels would make sense to me.”
The story of a young couple growing their own grapes and making their own amphoras drew a lot of attention. Andrew was pleased about how the wine community responded but he also admitted to some frustration at not having enough product to spread their vision: amphora wines that appeal to a broader public. “Some of the wines that are made in clay are very austere. And they’re really hard to get your head around. If you’re a winemaker, they’re kind of fun to geek out on. Our goal is to make really interesting, compelling, well-made wines that people can enjoy and not just want to have a sip of and talk about. The last thing I’m doing is just sealing them up and opening them a year later and calling them good.” He hoped more winemakers using his amphoras would feel the same.
The Beckhams had all sorts of responses to the amphora wines. “Reactions from, ‘There’s no way that’s Pinot Gris,’ to ‘that is the most compelling and interesting Pinot Gris I’ve ever tasted,’ Andrew told me. They’ve also noticed something Randall Grahm talked about in California. “You have to search hard to find a wine made in Oregon that’s done poorly,” he said. “But the problem is, they’re all so similar. In my opinion what we make here in the [valley] with our Gris is so boring. It’s great to drink on a warm day, but has nothing special to say.” That goes for many red wines, too. “They’re beautiful—but there are so many of them that are the same.”
Andrew said he was still exploring why different countries made the containers in various shapes. He sounded enthusiastic but slightly unsure of where the project was headed. Would he focus on the amphoras, on traditional varieties and aging, or try a whole new variety of wine, like Savagnin? Would he continue to sell amphoras to other wineries? I made a note to check back in, though I didn’t expect any dramatic developments. I was mistaken.
I called Andrew about a year later. The amphora business was booming. “We built a huge new production facility and I was fortunate to acquire some equipment that will allow me to take things to the next scale and size. I’ve got people chomping at the bit for them this year.”
An Oregon potter starting an amphora factory? Sure, I could see special orders here and there, but a real business? There was so much interest from other winemakers that the Beckhams saw great potential in being the first commercial amphora maker in America. They bought a kiln so big a car can fit inside, and a crane to handle larger sizes. He’s making 500- and 1,000-liter sizes now; a 2,000-liter model is coming soon. Their winery is shifting more towards amphora-style wines, too, and the Beckhams are grateful for the positive response.
Andrew said one of their new amphora wines sold more than half the available vintage in the first six weeks on the market, despite a forty-five-dollar retail price.
A long way from Cremisan, Jerusalem, and the Caucasus Mountains, ancient-style winemaking was growing in America, so I asked Beckham a question. “This might be crazy,” I said, “but would you be interested in trying to re-create an ancient-style wine?” I told Beckham about my travels and mentioned Patrick McGovern’s work on ancient ales with Dogfish Head Brewery. He knew, of course, that, amphoras would be crucial to making a wine that is something like what the ancients drank. I didn’t really expect Beckham to agree—he’s got the full-time teaching job, a wife and three young children, vineyards, a winery, and a new qvevri factory. I finished talking and there was a brief pause on the end of the line.
“I’d be really interested in that,” Beckham told me, and I jumped up out of my chair. We discussed some grape possibilities, and agreed to keep in touch.
Oregon may be the epicenter of wine innovation in America, even if there’s more money in California or New York. Chad Stock of Minimus Wines in Portland pushes winemaking traditions by experimenting in every vintage with different grape varieties, yeasts, fermentation, or aging. Here’s how he described their 2015 SM3 vintage: “SM3 is always pure Syrah from the Stella Maris Vineyard (SM). Fermentation is 100 percent wholecluster with maceration lasting one month. Daily foot treading is used to manage the cap for gentle extraction. Aging is done in 33 percent new, and 67 percent used French oak for ten months before being bottled unfined and unfiltered without any added sulfites ever.”
The translation of all that is Minimus mostly lets wines take their own course. Fining is a common industry process that can use a long list of compounds (fish bladder extract, seaweed, egg whites, clay, and more) to remove tiny suspended particles from wine before bottling, making it clearer. Filtering does the same thing.
Another Oregon producer helped me understand a piece of historical writing that had baffled me. Pliny the Elder compiled a bizarre list of so-called wines two thousand years ago, and I couldn’t imagine what any of them tasted like:
A wine is made [from] the pods of the Syrian carob, of pears, and of all kinds of apples. That known as “rhoites” is made from pomegranates, and other varieties are prepared from cornels, medlars, sorb apples, dried mulberries, and pine-nuts; these last are left to steep in must, and are then pressed; the others produce a sweet liquor of themselves. [. . .] Among the garden plants we find wines made of the following kinds: the radish, asparagus, cunila, origanum, parsley-seed, abrotonum, wild mint, rue, catmint, wild thyme, and horehound. A couple of handfuls of these ingredients are put into a cadus of must, as also one sextarius of sapa, and half a sextarius of sea-water. [. . .] Among flowers, that of the rose furnishes a wine.
That’s just a partial list of strange “wines” that Pliny mentions, and it all suggests an attitude of “if it can be fermented, we’ll drink it.” But how would any of them taste? I never expected to find out, until I learned of Carla David’s Wild Wines in Jacksonville, Oregon, just north of the border with California. In 2007 she started making wildflower and fruit wines out of her garage. Now, after receiving a US Department of Agriculture grant, she is producing more than three thousand bottles per year. Among them are dandelion, peach, ginger, linden flower, elderflower, raspberry, blackberry, elderberry, and rosehip wines. I ordered a few bottles, half expecting sickly sweet concoctions.
The Elderflower conjured up images of a pollen-covered bee. It was crisp, dry, and more floral than anything I’ve ever drunk. Is it wine? Technically, perhaps not. She starts with water and adds yeast, flowers or berries, and some sugar. Here’s the weird thing: in a blind test I bet some of her wines could fool people into thinking they were made with grapes. That challenged my preconceptions again.
Tastings
I’ve mentioned some special wineries in America, but many others are experimenting with lesser-known wine grapes and American–French hybrids. To get a sense of the winemaking diversity in Oregon, check out Voodoo Vintners by Katherine Cole.
Beckham Estate Vineyard, Sherwood, OR
beckhamestatevineyard.com
Beckham combines fermentation in amphoras with aging in amphoras and oak barrels, and has a large pottery studio, too. In addition to the wines listed below, they made a very nice amphora Malbec in the past; keep an eye out in case they make another in the future.
A.D. Beckham Amphora Pinot Noir “Lignum”
A.D. Beckham Grenache (red)
A.D. Beckham Pinot Gris
Vermentino (white)
Minimus Wines, Carlton, OR
www.minimuswines.com
Rockwell (a blend of red and white wines)
SM2 (a blend of Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc grapes)
Wild Wines, Applegate Valley, OR
www.enjoywildwines.com
Wines to try from Carla David’s venture include Aronia Berry, Lindenflower, Elderflower, Rosehip, and Dandelion.
Lincoln Peak Vineyard, New Haven, VT
lincolnpeakvineyard.com/wines
This is the winery that inspired Deidre Heekin to try the new American–European grape varieties. It’s hard to keep up with all their innovations: Lincoln now has a new variety, Petite Pearl, and also uses local Marquette, Louise Swenson, La Crescent, Prairie Star, and Adalmiina grapes.
La Garagista, Barnard, VT
www.lagaragista.com
Many of their wines sell out quickly, but here is a tasty solution: Deidre Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, opened a rustic wine bar and tavernetta at the vineyard in early 2017. Visit and try vintages such as Damejeanne, Harlots and Ruffians, Loups Garoux, Grace and Favour, and who knows what else, along with prosciutto, fruits, and vegetables from farms in the region.
Popelouchum, San Juan Bautista, CA
www.facebook.com/Popelouchum
Randall Grahm may have some small batches of wine from his experimental vineyards in 2018 or 2019, check the vineyard’s Facebook site periodically for updates.
Channing Daughters, Bridgehampton, NY
www.channingdaughters.com
This Long Island winery make a variety of “orange” wines in the Georgian style, including one that uses the ancient Ribolla Gialla grape.
Dr. Konstantin Frank Wine Cellars, Hammondsport, Finger Lakes, NY
www.drfrankwines.com
Ukrainian immigrant Konstantin Frank (1899–1985) pioneered the introduction of Georgian Rkatsiteli grapes to America more than fifty years ago, and the winery’s version is an easy, under-twenty-dollar way to experience that wine. A family enterprise, his descendants run the winery now. They also make some Saperavi reds.
Rkatsiteli (white)