Jane Anson The Arrival of King Cabernet

Clockwise from left: Joseph Banks, Thomas Jefferson, Jean-Louis Vignes, Agoston Haraszthy and William Lee. ‘All larger-than-life explorers with an eye on what history would say about them. And all united by their impact on the growth of Cabernet Sauvignon in California.’

course, there was Sauvignon Blanc – which, a century earlier, had been one half of a spontaneous crossing with Cabernet Franc to produce Cabernet Sauvignon.

The recipient of the vines was Peter Legaux. Born in Metz, northeastern France, Legaux had emigrated to the United States in 1786 after what seems to have been a colourful and slightly shady life as a local politician in both France and the French West Indies. He seems to have annoyed several of his new neighbours in America too, but he is also the first of the men at our dining table to have genuinely focused his life on bringing viticulture to the United States.

On arrival in Philadelphia, he bought a 206-acre estate at Spring Mill, Montgomery County, where he began planting European vines and building vaults for storage of wine. In 1793 the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized the incorporation of a company to promote Legaux’s vineyard by subscription – making clear that he was looking for investors.

Legaux was nothing if not ambitious, writing to Jefferson in March 1801 to congratulate him on the presidency and offering to send him thousands of vines to plant in Virginia. When Jefferson politely declined, Legaux tried again, writing to him about the difficulties in establishing his vineyard and inviting the president to become an investor. He apparently was not able to coax any money from him (in fact, let’s assume Jefferson would not want to be seated next to Legaux at our dinner), but nonetheless, he did send vines to Jefferson’s Monticello estate in 1802.

A few years later, the Bordeaux vines arrive from Lee. Legaux’s diary entry for April 15th 1805, held by the American Philosophy Society, records: ‘This day at ½ past 10 o’clock at Night, I received a letter from Mr McMahon with 3 boxes of Grapevines, sended by Mr Lee Consul Americain from Bordeaux, all in very good order and good plantes of Châteaux Margeaux, Lafitte and Haut Brion. 4,500 plantes for 230# . . . and order to send in Town for more etc.’

We don’t know if any of these vines ended up in California in the following decades, but we do know that Legaux’s vineyard went a long way to establishing an industry that was slowly but inexorably heading west, and we know that early vines in California came from two sources: European imports and shipments from these earlier-established vineyards in New England, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Twenty years later, and we finally have near-certainty of Cabernet Sauvignon making its way west. It came care of Jean-Louis Vignes (or Don Luis Vignes as he was known locally in a region that was heavily Spanish-influenced at the time). Vignes (yes, it really does translate as ‘vines’) emigrated in 1826 from the Bordeaux region, arriving in El Dorado, California, in 1831. Vignes was born in Cadillac, a small wine producing town on Bordeaux’ Right Bank, that has had, incidentally, a disproportionately large influence on American culture: first with Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac – who founded Detroit in 1701 and was immortalized with the Cadillac car – and now Vignes, less well known but whose legacy can be felt every time you open a glass of Napa Cab.

Descendants of Vignes still live in California; they look after a family archive that was initially created by Pierre Vignes, brother of Jean-Louis and a man who emigrated to work on his brother’s successful vineyard in the 1840s.

Vignes apparently left France, with his wife and four children, in November 1826 intending to establish a sugar plantation in the Sandwich Islands, but instead he ended up near Honolulu, where he raised sugar cane, vines and cattle, before finding a job heading up a distillery. When the distillery closed, Vignes, who was already 51, uprooted his family again, boarding the trading vessel Louisa in May 1831 to set sail for Monterey. Two years later he made his way to the pueblo (or small town as it was then) of Los Angeles.

Vignes bought a tract of land adjacent to the Los Angeles River (I’m thinking this would have had a similar layout to the farm one he came from in Cadillac – a wine growing town set on the banks of Bordeaux’s Garonne River). Here he laid out El Aliso Vineyard and became the most important winemaker in California, producing as many as 182,000 litres (something like 243,000 bottles) a year. We know that he planted the local Mission grape which was popular at the time, but also that he sent to Bordeaux for cuttings of the varieties that he knew from back home, and that almost certainly included Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon

Blanc. The cuttings were brought in via Boston and Cape Horn and then grafted onto local American rootstock – several decades before other locals popularized European Vitis vinifera plants in California.

So much of tracing Cabernet Sauvignon’s early journey is guesswork because it would take another century, and Frank Schoonmaker’s championing of varietal labelling, to make the concept of recording individual grape varieties a reality. But we have another Frenchman to thank for the first time that we can unequivocally see Cabernet’s footprint. Enter our last-but-one dining companion, Antoine Delmas, who arrived in San Francisco aged 31 in 1849. He had been a nurseryman back in France and established a similar nursery in San José in 1851, importing 10,000 cuttings in 1854 alone. It was here that he planted – and kindly wrote down that he did so – both ‘Cabrunet’ and ‘Merleau’ (he also imported, apparently, the French snail, with the intention of indulging his culinary passion for them, something that has gone down less well with local gardeners over the years).

By this point, Delmas was far from alone. During the decade from 1852 to 1862, California nurserymen and ambitious winemakers brought in endless vinifera cuttings and rooted vines to plant in California to satisfy a growing thirst. Local records show that in the single year 1855, total sales of still wine came to almost 14,000 barrels and 120,000 cases.

All of which brings us neatly to our final dinner guest, Agoston Haraszthy. This Hungarian nobleman, traveller, writer, distiller, plantation owner and general all-round adventurer gets perhaps the most credit from history for introducing European grape varieties to California. Unquestionably he deserves much credit for importing 100,000 vine cuttings of 300 varieties following his trip around the wine regions of Europe in 1861 (see page 19). He was appointed to do this by the Governor of California, John G Downey, and his book Grape Culture, Wine and Wine-Making, published in 1862, had a huge impact on local production. He had founded Buena Vista winery in Sonoma back in 1857 and – right up until his death in the jaws of an alligator in Nicaragua in 1869 – was a tireless promoter of quality wine from Vitis vinifera grapes. But he was not the first.

Cabernet’s fame was cemented over the following decades, when men such as Gustave Neibaum planted the variety at Inglenook in 1883, along with John Drummond in Sonoma and Morris Estee in Napa. In 1885 the most expensive wine in Napa was recorded as a Cabernet Sauvignon from Spring Mountain, called Miravalle, owned by San Francisco financier Tiburcio Parrott, another early proponent of a variety that today dominates the psychological landscape of much of California. But all owe a debt of gratitude to our earlier explorers. Let’s raise a glass to them here.

THE NEW NAPA

Harry Waugh was famously the first British wine merchant to champion Napa Valley wines. Here, in his letter from 1971, he finds a region amid great change and discovery, with the ‘electric feeling now vibrant in this California air’ calling to mind the excitement of the Gold Rush. It is remarkable how quickly some of his predictions for the valley came true.

HARRY WAUGH (1972)

The Napa Valley, which of all the wine districts of California the writer is beginning to know just a little, must surely be the most fascinating, the most exhilarating grape-growing district of the world; remarkable not only for its beauty but for the vitality, the enthusiasm, the expertise and the thirst for knowledge of the winemakers whose willingness to experiment and try out new ideas increases from year to year. This search for perfection, always present in the past, is growing to a crescendo, and is indeed truly exciting.

The concentration on the use of the varietal grape has really only been in being during the past 10 years, but already it has made a vast difference to the quality of the wine and now, although this was certainly not the case in the 1950s, the different vintages are recognized for what they are, and one seldom hears any more that the vintages in California are all the same, for clearly they are not!

The growers, some of the most talented and skilful winemakers of the world, admit freely that all is still new and that there is much to learn. They are not yet certain, for instance, which pieces of ground in the Valley are most suitable, say, for Cabernet Sauvignon, for Chardonnay, or Pinot Noir; this can only be found out by trial and error, that is, by actual experience.

Some growers will tell you it will take 30 years before the real potential of this area can be properly assessed, others say 50 – who knows? But what is certain is that these skilled and dedicated winemakers of the present generation are taking gigantic strides towards perfection.

For proof of this, one merely has to study the Chardonnay to see how this has improved even over the past five years. Many of the wines from this grape seem largely to have lost much of that California taste, though how to describe this taste in words is almost impossible! They seem to resemble more the white