Hugh Johnson The Madness of Agoston Haraszthy

foggy property and moved down the San Francisco peninsula about 40 kilometres (25 miles) to Crystal Springs, where by 1856 he had managed to acquire some 1,000 acres. Cattle, fruit trees, strawberries, grain, grapes; he raised them all. He also went into the gold-assaying business which was frantically overstretched by the flow of gold from the mines, and in no time was made the US government’s smelter and refiner: the head of the San Francisco mint. No novelist could have invented Haraszthy. There is a surprise around every corner of his life – and how many lives have had so many corners? After two years of supervising the blazing furnaces of the mint, which ran day and night, he was charged with embezzling $151,000 worth of gold. What had happened, as the jury discovered, was that the rooftops of San Francisco were liberally gilded with the specks of gold that had flown up the overheated chimney.

While the mint was too hot, Crystal Springs, Haraszthy found, was too cold. Even down the peninsula he had a fog problem: his grapes were failing to ripen. In his mind’s eye he had an earthly paradise north of the Bay, where he had called on General Vallejo. Sitting on the porch of Lachryma Montis, the legend runs, he had sipped his host’s wine and delivered the deathless line: ‘General, this stuff ain’t bad!’ In January 1857 he bought 560 acres almost next door to Vallejo and set his son Attila to planting cuttings from Crystal Springs, while he projected a sort of Pompeian villa to be called Buena Vista. This is where his contribution to California’s wine growing really began. In contrast to the General and everyone else, he planted dry slopes with no possibility of irrigation. Most of his vines were still the faithful old Mission, but there was no mistaking the difference in quality that dry-farming made. Furthermore he persuaded a dozen prominent San Franciscans to invest with him in the new experiment. Charles Krug, shortly to become the virtual founder of the Napa Valley wine industry and the deadly rival of Sonoma, was among them. For the moment the competition was between Haraszthy and Vallejo. A newspaper reported in 1860 that ‘there is still an active rivalry [between them] as to who shall have the neatest-looking vine-fields and make the best wine. Dr Faure, a French gentleman, has charge of the General’s wine department. His last year’s make of white wine is of excellent quality.’ Meanwhile Haraszthy, at the request of the Californian State Agricultural Society, wrote a Report on Grapes and Wines in California, a manual on planting and winemaking, urging experimentation of all kinds, particularly with different vines on different soils – but also a polemic urging the government to spend money on collecting cuttings in Europe using the consulate service, and distribute them in California. At Buena Vista he propagated vines by the hundred thousand. And he dug deep tunnels in the hillside to store their produce.

Haraszthy was still not ready to pause for breath. He urged that more research was needed. In 1861 the state governor commissioned him to visit Europe to learn all he could in the best wine areas and to bring back vines. His journey from San Francisco via New York to Southampton took six weeks. From late July to October he stormed round Europe, from Paris to the Rhine, to Switzerland, to Piedmont and Genoa, to the Languedoc, to Bordeaux, round Spain, to Montpellier and Burgundy, and back to Liverpool. Within six months he was back in Sonoma, finishing his book on the whole experience and awaiting the arrival of 100,000 vines of 300 different varieties, which the Wells Fargo Company delivered in January.

Most writers agree that this collection was the Hungarian’s most important contribution to California’s viticulture. It (theoretically) made possible all the experiments that were so necessary to match vines with soils and climates. That they were largely frustrated by the legislature, who declined to distribute the cuttings, or even to pay him for them, was partly perhaps due to the Civil War in the distant east (Haraszthy, as you might expect, supported the rebel South), but largely to the stinginess and apathy of civil servants. Nothing (or not greatly) daunted, Haraszthy did his best to distribute them himself.

Just how essential his imports were is shown in the plantings that, even two years later, he and Vallejo had in Sonoma, the most go-ahead district in the state. Both were still planting the Mission massively. Haraszthy had 120,000 Mission vines established, plus 140,000 newly planted, as against 6,000 ‘foreign’ vines established, and 40,000 new-set. Vallejo had 40,000 old Mission and 15,000 new, with 3,000 established foreign vines and 12,000 new.

It was only from the mid-1860s that superior vines were available in any numbers in California, with Sonoma enormously in the lead. The next few years saw the apotheosis of Buena Vista, and its collapse. The final act of Haraszthy’s frantic story should be told here, before we survey the rest of the awakening state. In 1868, disillusioned with California, he decided the future lay in Nicaragua, rum and sawmills. In 1869 he fell into a stream where there were alligators.

This excerpt is from The Story of Wine – From Noah to Now by Hugh Johnson, Chapter 35 ‘East Coast, West Coast’, Académie du Vin Library (London) 2020. Reproduced here with kind permission of the author.

THE ARRIVAL OF KING CABERNET

How did Cabernet Sauvignon make it to California in the first place? Following the footsteps of seven celebrated wine pioneers, Jane Anson traces the likely routes of California’s greatest grape from Europe.

JANE ANSON (2021)

Let’s imagine a dinner party where around the table you have seated Sir Joseph Banks, Thomas Jefferson, Jean-Louis Vignes, Antoine Delmas, William Lee, Peter Legaux and Agoston Haraszthy. They were all – give or take a few decades – contemporaries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with nationalities ranging from British (Banks), French (Legaux, Vignes, Delmas), Hungarian (Haraszthy) and American (Jefferson, 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.

They shared a love of science, exploration and travel, so we could expect the conversation to be lively. And the food copious, as they all seem to have had serious appetites; so let’s serve them up beef tenderloin, braised lamb, veal tongue, turtle soup, venison chops and soufflés, all typical foods for the wealthy at this time.

Conversation might start out with Sir Joseph Banks being peppered with questions. I certainly have a few. This is a man who had a front seat in Captain Cook’s 1768 expedition on the Endeavour to South America, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia. He might not have directly set foot in California (he died 30 years before the state joined the Union), but he is in many ways the grandfather of the modern wine industry right across the so-called New World.

Banks spent his career importing and exporting botanical samples, including countless vine cuttings, building up 11,000 cultivated species in London’s Kew Gardens and sending a further 20,000 samples around the world. We have records of numerous letters being exchanged via various mutual friends discussing the work of both Banks and Jefferson, almost always filled with botanical queries over anything from dry rice seeds to geranium bulbs, but they don’t seem to have met directly. As a diplomat, then president, Jefferson only visited Kew once, in 1786, and there is no record of Banks being there to receive him, so our dinner party

would serve as an excellent opportunity for these two men to exchange ideas directly. What is certain is that both were polymaths – their interests mirroring each other on far sides of the world – both wine lovers and gourmets, and both provided inspiration for the world of botany and viticulture for centuries to come.

Jefferson had more direct contact with two other men around our dining table: Peter Legaux and William Lee. Each one played a key role in getting us closer to landing Cabernet Sauvignon in California. Lee, who was born in Boston, began his career aged 18 as a commission merchant – a trader who bought and sold a variety of goods on behalf of others, taking a fee each time. He travelled to Europe, moving through Great Britain and Holland before ending up in Bordeaux in 1796, where he settled and was appointed American Consul in 1801 by the newly-sworn-in President Jefferson. This was a time when Bordeaux was the most important port for transatlantic trade, with 173 American ships registered in the local docks in 1801 alone.

A consul’s job was essentially to be a shipping agent, overseeing transatlantic trade, assisting captains and their crew, and sending intelligence to Washington about the local political situation – with war between France and England ever threatening, this task would dominate Lee’s time as consul from 1801 until 1816. Lee was, by all accounts, the most successful of the consuls who worked in France during those years, described as orderly and efficient, writing regular updates and above all extremely loyal to Jefferson (a book of his letters is entitled A Yankee Jeffersonian, a phrase he used to describe himself on many occasions).

You can picture him at the dining table dressed, as all consuls were, in the uniform of the American navy: a deep blue coat with red facings, linings and cuffs, blue breeches with yellow buttons, black cockades and a small ceremonial sword. I’m hoping someone is pouring him a large glass of wine in recognition of the role he played, in 1805, in spreading the fame of Cabernet Sauvignon in the young nation of the United States of America. He did this by sending 4,500 vine cuttings from Châteaux Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion to the Pennsylvania Vine Company in an attempt to ensure its new planting project was a success.

This was half a century before the 1855 Classification anointed these châteaux as the First Growths of Bordeaux, but they were already the most prestigious properties in the region, and choosing them as donors of vines was a clear vote of confidence in the project. We don’t, as is often the case, have a record of exactly which varieties he sent, but plantings in those châteaux in the early 19th century would have been dominated by Malbec along with Cabernet Sauvignon (also known as Petite Verdure or sometimes Petit Cabernet), Cabernet Franc, traces of Merlot and a host of now rare names such as Castets and Sainte-Macaire. There were white varieties too; lots of them. Most importantly for this story, of