Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America. By Erica Hannickel (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 298 pp. $39.95 cloth

Abstract

This provocative book analyzes the pre-Prohibition history of American grape growing and winemaking in the context of imperialist expansion. It does not break new ground; other books—particularly Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989) and Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (New York, 2000)— cover much the same territory. Instead, it shifts focus away from the story of wine per se to an account of wine as one example in a larger, more complex story of national identity. Unfortunately, Hannickel subverts her project by treating interpretations of that identity as unquestioned facts, and by inventing facts to fit her interpretations. Her argument becomes increasingly predictable; it is as much about her own political views as about wine.Those views see American history as a record of imperialist conquest disguised by rhetoric upholding various myths of nature’s beneficence in a new world Eden. Hannickel contends that the ways in which people talked about grapes and wine contributed to the attractiveness of this rhetoric. Whether in New York, the Ohio Valley, or California, the language used to describe grape growing “was generative of nineteenth-century American national identity and ideal visions of urban and rural life” (17). It was, however, always a masquerade. Such language failed to depict reality; in fact, it deliberately hid reality from view. To Hannickel, what really happened was simply violent conquest and exploitation, and she is most interested in the reasons why Americans did not see what was happening all around them.The problem with this view is not just that other interpretations of American history are equally plausible but also that Hannickel distorts the story of American wine in order to make it fit her political viewpoint. Viticulture in nineteenth-century America was largely a series of failures; only California wine near the close of the period could even approach the style and quality of European wine. Most other American wines were unpleasant to drink. The literature of American wine is replete with questions about why a land filled with so much natural bounty yielded such bad wines (the answer concerns vine diseases against which fragile European grape varieties never developed an immunity). Hannickel ignores this issue, instead arguing that wine and grapes became symbols of American efforts to justify an empire of bourgeois consumerism.Three of the myths of American identity that Hannickel sees as implicated in the wine industry are the Dionysian myth of nature as alternately bountiful and wild, the imported myth of terroir (the interaction of environment with plant genetics), and the Jeffersonian myth of an agrarian republic. Not surprisingly, she thinks that all three of them served to conceal the realities of empire building. Whether or not she is correct (the story appears to be much more complicated), the specifics of her argument do not work. Although certain American writers, including early winemakers, described the country in Edenic terms, no one envisioned it as a locus for a new Dionysus. Similarly, early grape growers paid attention to locale, but they did not focus on terroir, as that word had not yet acquired its contemporary meaning in French, let alone English. Moreover, Thomas Jefferson certainly tried to grow grapes for wine, which he praised as a gift of nature, but he, like many others, failed. For that very reason, he ended up with a collection of European, not American, wines at Monticello.In Empire of Vines, Hannickel advances an intriguing, though flawed, thesis that is as much about American politics as American wine or wine culture. She wants to give the wine grape in nineteenth-century America a cultural significance that far exceeds its actual social or economic significance. Wishing for something, however, does not make it so, and a great deal of this book is just that—wishful thinking.