#TBT: S.C.’s greatest grape 🍇

This is part of our #TBT collaboration with Historic Columbia.

We will admit to having Heirloom Fever. It started innocently enough with stalls selling a flushed rainbow of tomatoes at Soda City Market. And we were delighted by the stumpy yellow cucumbers that appeared all over menus in the Vista and on Main.

Then Nat Bradford came along with his family’s watermelon and we nearly lost our minds. We ate compressed watermelon salads. We pickled the sweet green rinds. We slurped Bradford-and-bourbon slushies at Tasty Tomato and wished the growing season would never end.

But what about the grapes we nearly lost to history?

Rival vines

In 1811, every grapevine that Nicholas Herbemont brought to Columbia withered and died. All 120 varieties of Vitis vinefera succumbed to the inescapable heat of a South Carolina summer.

Herbemont’s weren’t the only ones to perish. Since the 17th century, colonists watched their European grapevines wither and rot in American soil. For two hundred years the cabernets and Rieslings, Muscats and pinos succumbed to rot and disease.

Native grapes, however, grew so freely for so long that, when Leif Erikson landed in North America, the territory became known as Vinland. These native grapes were exceptionally hearty. They liked heat, they liked cold, they were resistant to disease and rot. But the wine made from these fruits wasn’t appealing to Europeans. (Call them snobs if you want to.)

Then finally—finally—in 1811 amongst the detritus of his vineyard, Herbemont hatched a plan. For the good of the grape, he would hybridize the European vines with their American cousin. What happened next put Columbia on the map.

Noble vintages

Herbemont was the first to embrace hybrid grapes in the production of fine wines in North America. A native of Champagne in France, he was determined to make S.C. the wine capital of the continent.

In 1819, Herbemont began a Great Grape Experiment in downtown Columbia. Just blocks from the State House, Nicholas Herbemont painstakingly grafted wine cuttings to native grape rootstocks.

The new grape was a marvel. Herbemont bred the Native borquiniana and European vinefera to create a fat, brown fruit. It retained the disease resistant qualities of the Native while also developing a sweet, succulent flavor from its European heritage.

Herbemont grapes | Image courtesy Historic Columbia

The American grape industry was founded on seven grapes — the Catawba, the Concord, the Norton, the Delaware, the Isabella, the Lenoir, and the Herbemont. None is strictly native, and none is strictly European.

Not Your Average Cash Crop

So why don’t we study South Carolina’s grape production in school? We hear all about the cash crops of the past—cotton, rice, indigo. Where’s the Herbemont?

In 1827, Nicholas Herbemont went before the state legislature and proposed the abandonment of the cotton industry (as well as the slave system) in favor of large scale, Swiss-backed grape cultivation.

His plan failed by a single vote in the senate.

After that, the vines went west. Missouri and Texas became the major hubs of Herbemont production in the United States until the 1860s.

In the early 1870s, nearly every Herbemont vine was dug up and shipped to Europe. The United States focused its efforts on rebuilding after the Civil War and turned away from wine production. Europeans, on the other hand, were desperate for a crop that was resistant to the phylloxera mite.

While its native home smoldered under the shadow of Reconstruction, the Herbemont grape saved the French noble vintages.

Back to our roots

In 2016, Historic Columbia embarked on a mission to once again cultivate South Carolina’s world-famous grape. Cuttings from the Texas A&M horticultural collection were propagated just blocks from Herbemont’s original vineyard. A vine was planted on the arbors at the Robert Mills House and Garden.

Image courtesy Historic Columbia

Image courtesy Historic Columbia

Image courtesy Historic Columbia

Last July, tiny bunches of green grapes gradually turned brown—just as Herbemont himself described in his studies.

In January, steps away from the arbor at Robert Mills where the grapes were grown, David Shields (champion of heirloom eats) opened a bottle of Herbemont vintage.

Shields and a handful of other tasted four wines from TerraVox, a Missouri winemaker familiar with the legacy and appeal of historic horticulture. The bottles included one Herbemont (which is produced in small batches of one to two cases per year, a 2015 and 2016 vintage of Lenoir, and a Norton.

According to Shields, “The Herbemont, like all orange wines, has a bright acid structure, from that brief exposure to the skins. It was not sweet like Rose, but bracing, dry, refined an austere.”

Intrigued? Us too. Here’s hoping a bottle or two finds its way over to Lula Drake.

In the meantime, we’re ready for watermelon season.

If you’re interested in learning more about our region’s horticultural heritage, check out Historic Columbia’s 2018 Gardening Symposium on Saturday. 🌷 And if you’re looking to learn more about everyone’s favorite watermelon, there’s a documentary about the Bradford on YouTube. 🍉 (If you haven’t had your fill of Herbemont grapes, there’s a documentary about those too. 🍇)

Cheers to 200 years,

–Lois from Historic Columbia + Beth