Full Belly Files | Getting Intel on Indigenous American Grapes

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on June 9, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Like most modern wine fanatics, I spend my sipping time on wines made from grapes like pinot noir and syrah that were developed over the centuries in the Old World. I’ve long understood that there are also grapes of North American origin that can make wine, but my limited experience in trying them and slightly more experience in reading about them has never given much reason to celebrate.

That may be changing. Like most everything else in the world these days, the old ways of wine are being challenged, including the notion that Vitis vinifera — the popular wine grape species originally found from Iran to Central Europe — is the only path to fine wine. Winemakers across the East Coast and Midwest are attracting the open minds of a new generation with their bottlings, and an ever-growing interest in connecting wine to both an interesting past and more sustainable future is only adding fuel to the fire.

So when I got an email a few weeks back to attend a virtual seminar about “The Present and Future of North American Vines and Wines,” I typed it onto my calendar. Then the organizer, longtime marketing pro Tom Wark, and one of the panelists, Jerry Eisterhold, owner of TerraVox Wine, offered to send me some samples from the grapes the latter grows outside of Kansas City, Missouri. And thus began my quick but insightful dive into these indigenous American grapes.

Before I get into what I thought of the wines, let’s go over what I learned during the 90-minute seminar this past Tuesday, which featured Wark and Eisterhold as well as winemaker Clark Smith, who’s consulting on TerraVox and numerous other projects, and Hudson Valley vintner-historian Stephen Casscles, author of the 2015 book Grapes of the Hudson Valley and Other Cool Climate Regions of the United States and Canada.

“This is very much a people business,” said Casscles as he relayed the history of humans taking wild grapes that grew around the East Coast and breeding them to make wine. There were three primary ways this was done from the mid-1800s until about Prohibition.