User:Valereee/Catawba wine

Wine made from Catawba grapes was the first commercially successful wine production in the United States.

Cincinnatian Nicholas Longworth, after experimenting with vinifera grapes, switched to using the Catawba, which is variously described as native and as having been produced by crossing a native grape, vitis labrusca, with the European vitis vinifera, and which was hardy in southwestern Ohio. Local German immigrant farmers, familiar with cultivating grapes in conditions similar to those in southwestern Ohio, produced the grapes, and Longworth by 1840 was barrelling and bottling the wines. The resulting wine was light and dry. An accidental second fermentation incident in 1842 produced a sparkling wine, which Longworth decided to try intentionally recreating.

Longworth hired winemakers from Champagne to recreate the wine using traditional methods. The sparkling wine became popular in the US and was exported. It was described by contemporaries as "rivalling the best French Champagne", by Charles MacKay writing in the Illustrated London News as "transcend[ing] the Champagne of France" and by The Daily Beast as "America's first great wine."

Longworth sent a case of the wine to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote "Ode to Catawba" about it, calling the taste "divine" and "more dulcet, delicious and dreamy" than other wines. In the 1850s Robert Buchanan, author of The Culture of the Grape and Winemaking, wrote "The demand for Catawba Wine is far ahead of the supply, and the quality is constantly being improved". The publication noted that in 1926 the Cape Grape was the only grape grown in Ohio, that the Catawba had been introduced by Longworth and in the District of Columbia by Major Adlum, and that at the time of publication "it is now so great a favorite as to be almost the only variety planted."

By the end of the 1850s Catawba vines had been planted throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Fallout from the Civil War, and Longworth's death in 1863, ended the original Southwestern Ohio Catawba wine industry by 1870.

In 2016 Cincinnatian Kate MacDonald started making Catawba wines following Longworth's notes.