Americans learned how to make wine successfully about two hundred years ago, after failing for more than two hundred years. Thomas Pinney takes an engaging approach to the history of American wine by telling its story through the lives of 13 people who played significant roles in building an industry that now extends to every state. While some names—such as Mondavi and Gallo—will be familiar, others are less well known. These include the wealthy Nicholas Longworth, who produced the first popular American wine; the German immigrant George Husmann, who championed the native Norton grape in Missouri and supplied rootstock to save French vineyards from phylloxera; Frank Schoonmaker, who championed the varietal concept over wines with misleading names; and Maynard Amerine, who helped make UC Davis a world-class winemaking school.
The author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California’s wine trade in the once isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim’s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles’s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.
The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.
Pinney covers new ground and new research, and treats the entire period in a new way. [History of Wine in America] will be welcomed by scholars and by wine enthusiasts."—Dr. James Lapsley, University of California, Davis "A worthy successor to Pinney's landmark History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition, and like that volume evidencing a wealth of knowledge, presented with grace and style. In addition to telling fascinating stories, both of these books are invaluable references. Anyone interested in the history of American wine should read them."—Paul Lukacs, author of American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine "I am confident the term definitive will apply to this work for innumerable vintages to come. Wine lovers from New England to California now have one place to turn for the history of their favorite beverage, wherever in America its grapes are grown."—Charles L. Sullivan, author of A Companion to California Wine and Zinfandel "An essential reference book for anyone wishing to sound authoritative at the dinner table."—Bruce Cass, editor of The Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America
A History of Wine in America is the definitive account of winemaking in the United States, first as it was carried out under Prohibition, and then as it developed and spread to all fifty states after the repeal of Prohibition. Engagingly written, exhaustively researched, and rich in detail, this book describes how Prohibition devastated the wine industry, the conditions of renewal after Repeal, the various New Deal measures that affected wine, and the early markets and methods. Thomas Pinney goes on to examine the effects of World War II and how the troubled postwar years led to the great wine boom of the late 1960s, the spread of winegrowing to almost every state, and its continued expansion to the present day. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of America and of American enterprise in microcosm. Pinney's sweeping narrative comprises a lively cast of characters that includes politicians, bootleggers, entrepreneurs, growers, scientists, and visionaries. Pinney relates the development of winemaking in states such as New York and Ohio; its extension to Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and other states; and its notable successes in California, Washington, and Oregon. He is the first to tell the complete and connected story of the rebirth of the wine industry in California, now one of the most successful winemaking regions in the world.
Some of Macaulay's letters were printed in nineteenth-century memoirs, but a 'Complete Letters' of this eminent Victorian has long been needed. Professor Pinney is editing the whole body of surviving letters by Macaulay, giving accurate texts and textual and explanatory notes. The letters are in chronological order, grouped by historical theme and phases of Macaulay's life. The first two volumes deal with his childhood, career at Cambridge, early legal career and early political career, and end with him about to leave for India. The letters are lively because Macaulay (as lawyer, essayist, historian, politician, administrator, poet) was a man of enormous energy and very wide interests. They will add greatly to our sense of early Victorian political and cultural life as well as to our understanding of Macaulay himself.
Some of Macaulay's letters were printed in nineteenth-century memoirs, but a 'Complete Letters' of this eminent Victorian has long been needed. Professor Pinney is editing the whole body of surviving letters by Macaulay, giving accurate texts and textual and explanatory notes. The letters are in chronological order, grouped by historical theme and phases of Macaulay's life. The first two volumes deal with his childhood, career at Cambridge, early legal career and early political career, and end with him about to leave for India. The letters are lively because Macaulay (as lawyer, essayist, historian, politician, administrator, poet) was a man of enormous energy and very wide interests. They will add greatly to our sense of early Victorian political and cultural life as well as to our understanding of Macaulay himself.
Some of Macaulay's letters were printed in nineteenth-century memoirs, but a 'Complete Letters' of this eminent Victorian has long been needed. Professor Pinney is editing the whole body of surviving letters by Macaulay, giving accurate texts and textual and explanatory notes. The letters are in chronological order, grouped by historical theme and phases of Macaulay's life. The first two volumes deal with his childhood, career at Cambridge, early legal career and early political career, and end with him about to leave for India. The letters are lively because Macaulay (as lawyer, essayist, historian, politician, administrator, poet) was a man of enormous energy and very wide interests. They will add greatly to our sense of early Victorian political and cultural life as well as to our understanding of Macaulay himself.
The fourth volume of Thomas Pinney's acclaimed edition of Macaulay's letters covers the period between September 1841 and December 1848, in which Macaulay is shown keeping up an active political life as MP for Edinburgh and member of Lord John Russell's Whig Cabinet. At the same time his literary reputation is extended by The Lays of Ancient Rome, the collected Essays, and, at the end of the period spanned by this volume, the triumphant publication of the first two volumes of the History of England. In the same years Macaulay was enjoying perhaps the most satisfactory period of his private life: we see him comfortably established in the Albany, enjoying the society of his sister and her family, taking part as a leading figure in Whig political and literary circles, and confidently at work on the book which was to crown his fame.
The years covered in this fifth volume of Macaulay's letters were a striking mixture of triumph and loss. The publication of the first part of The History of England at the end of 1848 set Macaulay at the top of his fame, not merely in England, but on the Continent and in America. Honours came pouring in, and the sales of his books began to make him a rich man. The publication of the second part of the History in 1855 was a publishing event of unparalleled magnitude: 25,000 copies were subscribed at once in England, and four times that number were quickly sold in the United States. To add to his triumph, the people of Edinburgh, who had so rudely and unexpectedly rejected him in 1847 as their representative in parliament, now recanted; though Macaulay refused even to appear before them, they insisted upon returning him to parliament, and did so in 1852.
The fourth volume of Thomas Pinney's acclaimed edition of Macaulay's letters covers the period between September 1841 and December 1848, in which Macaulay is shown keeping up an active political life as MP for Edinburgh and member of Lord John Russell's Whig Cabinet. At the same time his literary reputation is extended by The Lays of Ancient Rome, the collected Essays, and, at the end of the period spanned by this volume, the triumphant publication of the first two volumes of the History of England. In the same years Macaulay was enjoying perhaps the most satisfactory period of his private life: we see him comfortably established in the Albany, enjoying the society of his sister and her family, taking part as a leading figure in Whig political and literary circles, and confidently at work on the book which was to crown his fame.
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