In 1846, a weary American vintner penned a confession of failure that now reads less like defeat and more like prophecy. The experiment he abandoned — after three decades of effort — mirrored, in ambition if not in method, the work of contemporary viticulturalists who continue to test the boundaries of where grapes belong. His name was Nicholas Longworth, and his conclusion was blunt: European wine grapes, he wrote, were “unfit for our climate.”
As I’ve learned more and more about native and hybrid grapes, Longworth’s story is one that has stuck with me. Perhaps that’s because it was clear that he was never simply dabbling in winegrowing. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, he devoted more than thirty years to cultivating vitis vinifera in the young United States, importing tens of thousands of vines from overseas. Five thousand alone came from Madeira, 10,000 from France, and many others from Germany. Half of his French vines comprised more than twenty of the most celebrated varieties from the Jura — then, as now, among Europe’s most exacting wine regions — and those were supplemented by cuttings from Bordeaux, Paris, and the Rhine. He painstakingly terraced hillsides, trenched soil by hand, laid stone and gravel for drainage, and built compost beds three feet deep to mimic the soils he knew from Europe. It was, by the standards of the day, meticulous, expensive, and visionary work.
And it failed. Completely.
“Not a single plant is left in my vineyards,” Longworth wrote. His advice, offered without bitterness but with finality, was to cultivate native grapes alone — and to raise new varieties from their seeds.
To be clear, he wasn’t the only grower in America striving to make European varieties work. As is documented in The Grapes of New York by U.P. Hedrick, three generations of work by the Prince family on Long Island in New York culminated in William R. Prince publishing A Treatise on the Vine in 1830. The short of it: their experimentations failed. Alphonse Loubat, also in New York, gave up his own efforts on vinifera varieties after losing battles against mildew and sun-scald.
There were many other examples, including outside New York and Ohio, but the takeaway here is basically the same: Longworth’s statement might have read like resignation, but in hindsight it was more like a diagnosis.
The myth of inevitability
Today, vinifera dominates the global imagination of wine so thoroughly that it feels timeless — almost inevitable. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir: these grapes form the lingua franca of the modern wine trade.
The cultivation of vinifera began around 6000 BCE in or near the Caucasus. From there, it moved slowly: westward to the eastern Mediterranean thousands of years later, by roughly 2500 BCE. Then it moved north into much of Europe by around 400 CE. And then it stalled. For more than a millennium, wine remained stubbornly local, not because cultures lacked curiosity, but because technology lacked the means. Before corked bottles became common in the 1700s, wine deteriorated quickly. Long-distance trade was impractical. Knowledge around vine cuttings, farming techniques, fermentation practices traveled far more easily than finished wine.
Even the so-called “global” spread of vinifera proceeded haltingly. Latin America saw its first vines in the 1520s, South Africa in 1655, Australia in 1788, California and New Zealand around 1820. Each introduction was an act of faith that European plants could be made to conform to foreign soils, pests, and climates. Sometimes they did. Often, they did not.
The nature of that spread reflected, of course, something deeper than trial and error. European grapes often traveled alongside colonial ambitions, carrying with them assumptions about taste, status, and what counted as “civilized” agriculture. In many places, vinifera was planted not because it was well suited to local conditions, but because it conformed to European ideas of legitimacy — ideas that frequently ignored existing crops, climates, and knowledge systems already adapted to those environments.
What changed was not just agriculture, but economics. Postwar globalization, the rising prestige of French wine, and advances in shipping and storage reshaped the market. Exports as a share of global wine production rose from roughly 5 percent in 1960 to 15 percent by 1990 — and then surged to about 40 percent by 2012. In a matter of decades, wine transformed from one of the least traded agricultural products into one of the most internationally mobile.
This commercial triumph, however, obscured a parallel history — one rooted not in Bordeaux or Burgundy, but in North America’s own native vines.
America’s forgotten grapes
Long before Prohibition flattened the American wine industry, native grapes — and later, hybrids — played a serious and often celebrated role in domestic and international markets. Varieties like Catawba, Concord, and Norton were not curiosities; they were popular. Sparkling Catawba wine, in particular, became a sensation in the mid-19th century. It was exported to Europe, and even praised.
In his 1826 book, The American Vine-Dressers Guide, Jean Jacques Dufour detailed how the Alexander grape was doing remarkably well, particularly in one vineyard in what’s today known as Kaskaskia, Illinois, just beyond the Mississippi River, in what was then French territory. What he wrote next stopped me in my tracks.
“The Jesuits had there a very successful vineyard,” he wrote, detailing how, upon hearing this, it was “afterwards ordered by the French government to destroy it, for fear the culture of the grapes should spread in America and hurt the wine trade of France.”
These success stories rested on a biological reality Longworth understood intuitively: North American vines had evolved alongside North American pests, pathogens, and weather patterns. They were not immune to disease, but they were resilient in ways vinifera was not. Where European grapes succumbed to humidity, cold, or unfamiliar fungi, native species endured.
The irony is that this resilience did not just serve American interests. When phylloxera ravaged European vineyards in the late 19th century, it was American roots that saved French wine. Grafting vinifera scions onto American rootstocks became the industry’s lifeline. Without native North American vines, the Old World wine economy would have collapsed.
Hybrids followed. Crossing European grapes with American species produced vines that balanced familiarity with fortitude: wines closer in profile to vinifera, but better suited to marginal climates and disease pressure. These hybrids flourished across the Upper Midwest, the Northeast, and parts of Central Europe. They were pragmatic solutions to real agricultural constraints.
Then came Prohibition. The rupture was not just economic, but cultural. Vineyards were ripped out. Knowledge chains were broken. A century of experimentation with native grapes and hybrids was dismissed as provincial or inferior. When the industry rebuilt, it did so by chasing European prestige, not American inheritance.
The long view returns
What makes Longworth’s story newly relevant is not nostalgia, but context. Climate volatility, disease pressure, and sustainability concerns are once again forcing a reckoning with the limits of vinifera. The same questions Longworth asked — where will these grapes actually thrive, and at what cost? — have returned, sharpened by a warming planet.
The resurgence of interest in native grapes and hybrids is not accidental. It is the product of decades of quiet research and renewed collaboration among agricultural scientists. Institutions such as University of California, Davis, Cornell University, and University of Minnesota have played well-known, central roles in breeding programs that prioritize cold hardiness, disease resistance, and flavor integrity.
In Europe, parallel efforts at the Freiburg State Institute of Viticulture and Austria’s Haidegg Experimental Station for Fruit and Viticulture have advanced what are known as PIWI (fungus resistant) hybrid varieties that reduce chemical inputs while maintaining quality. These programs are not ideological; they are empirical responses to changing conditions. And I’ve documented here how many vineyards across Europe are embracing them. Just look to Franz Strohmeier, Gut Oggau, and Ploder Rosenberg in Austria. Or Daniel Molitor’s Stairs n’ Roses in Mosel. Or Thomas Niedermayr in Northern Italy. And, of course, the vanguards of the movement in France.
Beyond traditional wine regions, researchers are also probing new frontiers. That includes amazing work by an incredible viticulturalist that I met this year, Michael Striem, in Israel, who is exploring how hybrid and adapted varieties perform in desert-adjacent climates where water scarcity and heat stress are defining constraints. These efforts echo Longworth’s original impulse, which was not to force grapes into unsuitable environments, but to ask what kinds of grapes belong there in the first place.
What might be reclaimed
The dominance of vinifera did not arrive because it was universally superior. It arrived because markets, myths, and momentum aligned. Prohibition erased competing narratives, and postwar globalization reinforced a narrow definition of legitimacy. In that process, America lost not only vineyards, but confidence in its own agricultural solutions.
This loss was neither natural nor necessary.
The history of native grapes and hybrids is not a footnote; it is a suppressed alternative path—one that valued adaptation over imitation. Longworth understood this long before climate models or export data made the case explicit. His advice to cultivate native grapes was not parochial. It was strategic.
As the wine world confronts a future shaped by environmental limits rather than romantic ideals, the question is no longer whether hybrids and native varieties deserve a place at the table. The question is how much time was wasted pretending they did not already earn it.
Longworth’s vineyards failed so that others could succeed. The tragedy is not that he abandoned vinifera, but that the industry ignored his conclusion for nearly two centuries.