Wines of Eastern North America from Prohibition to the Present: A History and Desk Reference

摘要

This remarkable book represents a lifetime of work for Hudson Cattell, its author. Now 83 years old, he has been around the wines of the Eastern United States long enough to have personally known and photographed (he receives the credit for many of the photos in the book), the characters who were instrumental in the slow rebirth of the Eastern wine industry at the end of Prohibition. Despite the rebirth's origins in the work of Konstantin Frank and Philip Wagner, the movement began to reach critical mass only in the past decade. As Cattell shows, from 1975 to 1995 the total number of wineries in the East grew from about 200 to 600. By 2005, however, there were over 1,200 Eastern wineries, and by 2011 there were nearly 3,000. These numbers trace a growth curve that has not yet reached its inflection point. To put things in perspective, California has around 3,500 wineries, and Washington and Oregon combined have about 1,200. The largest Eastern producer state is New York, with 320 wineries, but Virginia is not far behind, with 223. Believe it or not, at last count Nebraska and Kansas each had 29 wineries, and an experimental hybrid grape (a cross between riparia and tempranillo) called Temparia had been developed and successfully grown in Nebraska.