Composed during the autumn of 1827, Herbemont’s summary treatment of vine culture and wine making drew upon eighteen years of experiment in cultivating wine and table grapes in the southern hill country of the United States. These experiments had concentrated his attention on six varieties of grape—all of them natives or native-French hybrids: Herbemont’s Madeira, Lenoir, Red Muscat (Bland’s Madeira), Isabella, Arena, and Muscadine. In 1828 he grew thirty-six varieties of Vitis vinifera grapes at Palmyra, yet none of these proved sufficiently productive or resistant to black rot, phylloxera, and Pierce’s disease to warrant wine production. His palate judged...

When Gideon B. Smith, editor of the American Farmer, tasted Nicholas Herbemont’s wine in the summer of 1831, it proved a revelation. He shared his bottles with members of the Maryland Society for Promoting the Culture of the Vine, a group of planters and wine connoisseurs organized in 1829 to advance grape cultivation in the region beyond where John Adlum had taken it. While the group cultivated the clubby epicureanism that became a fixture of bachelor companies of the era, it did have certain serious preoccupations. One concern of the group was the medicinal use of wine for stomach ailments,...

When John Stuart Skinner began publication of the American Farmer in April 1819, the United States for the first time possessed a periodical exclusively devoted to the arts of agriculture and horticulture. Herbemont, as director of the board of the Agriculture Society of South Carolina, reckoned himself one of the persons for whom the journal was intended as a forum. One topic taken up during the weekly’s first year of publication was the problem of grape culture. In volume 1, issues number 34 through 41, Skinner reprinted “On the Grape Vine, with its Wines, Brandies, Salt and Dried Fruits,” by...

In autumn 1822 Nicholas Herbemont sent John S. Skinner, editor of the American Farmer, a copy of his tract Observations on the Late Occurrences in Charleston by a Member of the Board of Public Works, which Skinner reprinted in American Farmer 4, no. 35 (November 22, 1822), 274–76. A portion of the tract recommended silk production as a means of developing the Carolina midlands. Skinner replied on November 19, 1822, by shipping a sample of New England silk and a request for information about Herbemont’s trip to France collecting vines for transplantation to South Carolina. This venture proved to...

Nicholas Herbemont’s experiences with grapes in Pennsylvania and South Carolina convinced him that the traditions of cultivation practiced in France had to be altered in North America if viticulture would succeed. The growing conditions—the soil, the climate, the insect and animal predators, the diseases—differed so markedly in the United States from those in most of the French wine regions that a different way of growing things had to be devised. Practice pushed Herbemont to new ways of doing things. He began in the 1810s by replicating the best accepted practice of the old world; when it failed, he...

In the American Farmer 6, no. 47 (February 11, 1823), Thomas McCall of Dublin, Georgia, published a letter detailing his method of making wine addressed to John Adlum of Maryland, the pioneer vintner and Revolutionary War veteran. McCall began experimenting with wine in 1816; he “pressed the juice, and made no additions of sugar or brandy; the wine was vapid, and tart, like Rhenish wine.” The letter chronicled experiments over several years to correct the vapidity of wine made simply from the juice of the grape. He argued for the extensive use of sugar to regularize the fermentation and strength...

Herbemont’s 1826 oration before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina elaborated an argument made in the final section of his 1822 tract, Observations on the Late Occurrences in Charleston, contending that grape culture would revalue the waste lands of middle Carolina. The intervening four years had convinced Herbemont that the dollar drove the thinking of many of his contemporaries, and so the speech projected value gain in dollar amounts. These replaced the generalizations found in his earlier writing. The speech amplified his earlier call for government aid in bringing about the establishment of viticulture and the importation of European vintners....

Formation of a standing committee on agriculture in the U.S. Senate in 1825 and in state legislatures inspired a brief moment of hope that the national and state governments might fund agricultural projects. In December 1825 James C.W. McDonnald and Antonio Della Torre petitioned the South Carolina Senate for funds to underwrite five years of labor (the time from planting to fruiting) establishing vineyards, olive groves, and silk production in the hill country of South Carolina.¹ While the petitioners had cribbed the idea from Herbemont’s Observations on the Late Occurrences in Charleston, they brought something more to the table than...

Production from the eight acres of vines Herbemont had planted at his farm, Palmyra, were sufficiently great from 1823 onward to permit the commercial production of wine. By 1826 he had mastered the craft of wine making, leading to a series of excellent-tasting vintages. This report whetted the taste of a group of planter connoisseurs in Maryland who wished to manufacture fine wine themselves.

After drinking Herbemont’s samples of the 1827 vintage, George Fitzhugh, John S. C. Monkur, Henry W. Rogers, William Gibson, James Cox, John B. Morris, and William Mc-Donnald incorporated the Maryland Society for Promoting the Culture of...

Nicholas Herbemont’s donation of three bottles of wine to John S. Skinner inaugurated a growing engagement between him and the circle of Maryland and northern Virginian planters. In 1828, when Skinner handed the editorship of the American Farmer to Gideon B. Smith, one of the Maryland group most interested in wine, the relationship would grow even stronger. The cover letter for the gift of wine reveals one of the great difficulties facing even the most experienced and well-schooled oenologists in America, the fog of misinformation about grape origins. Hybrid grape varieties, such as Herbemont’s Madeira and the Isabella, differed sufficiently...

By spring of 1828 Nicholas Herbemont’s writings on wine in manuscript and print were circulating widely. The first three installments of “An Essay on the Culture of the Grape Vine and Making of Wine” (January–July 1828) had appeared in the Southern Agriculturist. J. S. Skinner, editor of the American Farmer, printed a rumor from a correspondent from Alabama in volume 10, no. 4 (April 11, 1828), 31, that Herbemont’s method of pruning (contained in his discussion “Cuttings” that appeared in the March issue of Southern Agriculturist) had led to the ruin of a crop: since 1815 a rather lively...

Nicholas Longworth (1783 1863) was the first winemaker to build a national clientele and secure a fortune from the sale of his vintages. Born in New Jersey, he had lived in South Carolina from ages eighteen to twenty-one, moved to Cincinnati in 1804, and read law for half a year with Judge Jacob Burnet before setting himself up as a lawyer and land agent. Recognizing the unique potential of the city, Longworth invested heavily in real estate. By 1819 his holdings produced sufficient income for him to retire from the bar permanently, and by 1829 they were so great as...

This letter on the challenges facing cultivators of the vine could have been written to any one of the persons who had recently organized the Maryland Society for Promoting the Culture of the Vine. Herbemont’s closest friend in Baltimore was George Fitzhugh Jr., the future sociologist of the South. Usually Herbemont addressed him by name in correspondence. This writing has more the tenor of an informational discussion than a familiar letter. Perhaps Dr. John S. C. Monkur, corresponding secretary of the society, may have been “the friend.” Herbemont appears to have written in response to a formal request for information...

Edward Stabler (1794–1883), the recipient of this letter, was a Quaker agriculturalist and postmaster at Sandy Spring, Maryland. Inventor of a seed drill and a corn-husking mechanism, he stood at the forefront of the movement to apply scientific technology to agriculture. Later he would become the most skilled seal-maker in the mid-Atlantic states, creating the seals of both houses of Congress, the State Department, the Post Office, Supreme Court, Treasury Department, and virtually every other branch of the U.S. government. He owned Harewood, a plantation in Montgomery County, Maryland. Like Herbemont, Stabler had an abiding concern about soil exhaustion...

At every annual meeting of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina from 1819 to 1829, Nicholas Herbemont presented a report on the progress of his experiments in viticulture. His report in 1826 and the one below possessed sufficient formal shape and topicality to merit publication. The subject of vine spacing in American vineyards had occupied grape cultivators since they realized that the vigor of growth in American vines made Old World close spacing impractical. John Adlum had recommended a spacing of six feet between vines. John James Dufour, following the advice of Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal,¹ planted vines closely—from two feet...

Herbemont was not above dissembling to increase the reading interest of his letters. In this elaboration of his April 20, 1828, epistle on pruning, he begins in the apologetic mode, confessing fallibilities and inaccuracies, while confirming and strengthening the point of his earlier letter—that pruning vines in spring when they are prone to sap bleeding has no injurious effect on them. In a sly coda, the end of the letter reveals the height of his authority on agricultural matters in the eyes of the reading public when he disavows the title “Dr.” given him by a correspondent in North...

The author who provoked Herbemont’s “Observations,” George J. F. Clarke, was one of the larger-than-life creatures who peopled the early South. Born in St. Augustine in 1774 when Florida was an English colony, he prospered after its reversion to Spanish rule, eventually rising to the post of surveyor general of east Florida, a post whose powers he amplified well beyond the bounds of custom and law. Old Spanish grants would shift their bounds with a rub of his eraser. When queried by persons about record books, he cavalierly indicated he didn’t keep them. He purchased his slave mistress, Flora, manumitted...

By 1830 Nicholas Herbemont’s reputation as a vintner advanced because of three causes: the clarity with which he argued a scheme of vineyard management suited to American conditions, the generosity with which he supplied interested persons with grape varieties proven to flourish in the difficult growing conditions found in the United States, and his skill as a winemaker. In the later years of his life, the last reason predominated. As bottles of his vintage circulated and published reports lauded their quality, Herbemont became the American authority on making flavorful wine. The “gentleman in Alabama” whose request prompted this letter typified...

In 1830 the idea that French grape varieties might thrive in America if grafted to native rootstocks spread through the agricultural community like wildfire. Herbemont had practiced grafting since 1819 at Palmyra and detailed his method to members of the Maryland Society for Promoting the Culture of the Vine in his letter of August 1829. Pomologist William Coxe of Burlington had published on the subject in 1828. Then the New England Farmer jumped on the idea, publishing letters by W. R. Armistead and John Lowell on the subject in their volume 7. General Armistead, like Herbemont, had begun his experiments...

Nineteenth-century America was smitten by fruit. Gardeners and pomologists strove to find the most flavorful new varieties and perfect their cultivation. Nicholas Herbemont participated in this quest, cultivating apples, plums, mulberries, and strawberries besides his multitude of grapes. While Herbemont generally dismissed the notion of a hard and fast distinction between wine grapes and table grapes, he recognized that for an increasingly sizeable portion of the agricultural readership—the evangelical temperance crowd—the cultivation of grapes for wine making seemed Satan’s business. Only the cultivation of grapes for consumption as fruit was innocent. Herbemont willingly acceded to Gideon B. Smith’s...

Of all the grapes that Herbemont grew, he cherished most one that he discovered growing on the plantation of Daniel Huger in Columbia, South Carolina, shortly after his arrival in the city. He invariably called this grape “the Madeira” throughout his writings and never claimed it as his patrimony. A globular, round, brownish grape, it most resembles Verdelho of the classic Madeira quartet of Sercial, Bual, Malvasia, and Verdelho. But it would not be mistaken for a true Madeira grape by any person familiar with the varieties. A complex natural hybrid that appeared in the late eighteenth century in Georgia,...

Weather has always been the bane of grape growers. No matter how experienced, how scientific, how fortunate the cultivator, sooner or later a season of excessive rain will come and ruin the crop. The problems that afflicted Herbemont in the 1831 growing season rivaled those of 1828. In the wake of this trouble, the normally positive Herbemont fell victim to a bout of depression, but his sense of responsibility to the cause of science and the spread of agricultural information prompted him to pick up the pen, report the bad news, and reflect on the general principles that could be...

Herbemont in this letter collects most of the horrors that face grape cultivators—wet weather, rot, birds, and insects. The terrible weather of the 1831 growing season opens the account, a letter on two of the insect pests troubling vineyards closes it. Yet the depression that characterized his “Observations” of September 4 has given way to a sardonic jocularity. The letter extract introduced to the reader two of the more lurid insects preying on the vine. The first insect—the grape root borer, Vitacea polistiformis—is the larval form of a moth that resembles a paper wasp.¹ It particularly troubles...

Publication of this letter to George Fitzhugh Jr. marked Herbemont’s anointment as the premier vintner in the country. Gideon B. Smith, editor of the American Farmer, prefaced the text with a testimony asserting the medical utility of Herbemont’s wine for gastric complaints and proclaiming the supremacy of its flavor over all other American wines of his experience. Smith, besides being an active promoter of grape culture in the pages of his journal, was a connoisseur of note and an intimate of that circle of planters and wine enthusiasts who had formed the Maryland Society for Promoting the Culture of the...

Herbemont used a disagreement with neighbor and vintner Abraham Geiger as a pretext to discuss how the root system of the grapevine could be sculpted by the cultivator to maximize the vigor of the plant and its resistance to disease. In a letter to the Southern Agriculturist titled “On the Cultivation of the Grape Vine,”¹ Geiger had doubted the efficacy of deep trenching in planting vineyards and also preventing black rot. Like Herbemont, Geiger struggled to understand the nature of that malady of the grape. He speculated it might be a pollution introduced by the predations of the Hessian fly....

Publication of An Essay on Calcareous Manures, a landmark tract of American agronomy, launched its author, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, into international celebrity. An agricultural reformer and cultural campaigner with the will of a rottweiler, Ruffin used his celebrity to publish an organ that could serve as a platform for his views, the Farmers’ Register. Ruffin contacted Herbemont for a contribution. After publishing his two-part treatise “Wine-Making” in the American Farmer, Herbemont felt that he had said all he had to say about viticulture to the readerships of the two journals with which he corresponded. He began publishing his series...

In his second letter to Edmund Ruffin, Herbemont made a statement of faith about the efficacy of large-scale systematic experimentation in overcoming the problems that hinder grape cultivation. He indicated that the regions encompassed by the United States are so various and their climatic conditions so variable that much work remained to be done to determine which vine types were suited to which place. He chided persons who hastily concluded that European wine varieties could not be cultivated in the United States. He held out hope for the viability of French-native hybrids as a solution to growing good wine grapes...

By 1833 Herbemont had allowed himself to become persuaded by the “grape lore” of Thomas McCall that the Herbemont grape had its origins in Europe. His observations told him that the American form of the grape had departed greatly from the European progenitor—whether through mutation, sporting, or the chance adaptation of a seed to the New World environment. But McCall was trading in hearsay. One ancestor of the American hybrid came from Europe, but it is doubtful that even current flavonoid analysis could unravel the grape’s genealogy beyond its current designation as a cross between Vitis aestivalis, cinarea, and...

Herbemont’s fundamental observation about vine culture was that it differed in the United States from that of France. An encounter with James Busby’s Journal of a Recent Visit to the Principal Vineyards of Spain and France reminded him of the extent of that difference. In the first letter of this pair of communications to Edmund Ruffin, Herbemont puzzled over the extraordinary vitality of the Herbemont Madeira vine contrasted with certain Vitis vinifera vines he had seen in Europe that were growing in his plot at Palmyra. These letters also reveal the inveterate inclination to experiment that Herbemont possessed. Despite his...

Climate and soil have ever been the two environmental conditions that determine most materially the character of wine. Too much cold, too much rain, or too much heat diminish the possibility of producing a vintage. Having grown up in the north of France, Herbemont knew about the limitations that cold and frost impose on viticulture. Living in the American South, he learned that humidity, not heat, was the great bane of wine making. Here, Herbemont digested the writings of André Julien about the geography of viticulture to show that it is practiced in the tropics in various parts of the...

This last of Herbemont’s reports to the agricultural press on the status of his vintages conveyed the essential message of his wine-making experience—that despite the usual obstacles (rot and predation), his wines produced with such abundance that good wine was made despite the losses. In this letter, too, Herbemont supplied evidence which suggests that the illness from which he suffered during his final years was malaria. Published in Farmers’ Register 5, no. 6 (October 1837), 378–79....

Herbemont’s correspondent in this last of his published writings, Sidney Weller (1791–1854) of Halifax, North Carolina, exemplified the generation of younger men, such as George Fitzhugh, James McDonnald, and Dr. John Davis, who embraced the vision of viticulture that Nicholas Herbemont had proclaimed. In Halifax, North Carolina, Weller planted his vineyard in 1828 and began commercial production in 1835, first selling as “Weller’s Vineyard,” later as “Medoc Vineyard.”¹ Weller applied Herbemont’s and later Nicholas Longworth’s instructions on wine making to scuppernong grapes, including the “Weller” variety mentioned in Herbemont’s final published letter to the agricultural press. In a postscript...

In 1820 Nicholas Herbemont was appointed to the South Carolina Board of Public Works. In 1821 he presided over the body in a period when it actively engaged in a host of projects: road building, the creation of a state map, the construction of a canal that would permit waterborne commerce from the coast to Columbia, and the erection of a water system for the capital. In the spirit of this activism, Herbemont, speaking in the persona of a public official, advanced the idea that the state consider the renovation of its agricultural system. The immediate occasion of this tract...

The highlight of Nicholas Herbemont’s life was the award of the gold medal of the United Agricultural Society of South-Carolina at its 1828 annual December convocation. This special award recognized Herbemont’s contributions to the improvement of agriculture in the state. The legislators of South Carolina may have revealed their lack of imagination in turning down his 1826 scheme to vitalize the Midlands of the state. The society would not evince such stupidity. They requested that Herbemont present a summary view of an alternative political economy for South Carolina. Herbemont used the occasion to think deeply about the concerns that occupied...

The American Farmer attracted a great many letters, reports, and notices. Few of its many contributors composed cogently argued essays about the art and theory of agriculture. In order to stimulate such writings, editor Gideon B. Smith instituted an essay contest that would be reinstated intermittently throughout the 1830s. Herbemont, having puzzled over the inability of his state’s politicians to engage seriously in the reform of the agricultural system, even when a political crisis threatened its destruction, came to a conclusion that the political economy of the South suffered from a kind of falsity, a bad faith, practiced by exploitive...

In 1829 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (not the Revolutionary founder, but the planter and lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1832 to 1834) requested that missionaries of the Methodist Church evangelize his slaves. Under the leadership of William Capers, the Methodists began a slave mission that spread from South Carolina to neighboring states.¹ A component of this mission was the dispatching of African American preachers to witness to the slaves, a prohibited action. Pinckney supplied a rationale for the mission to his fellow planters in An Address Delivered in Charleston before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina at Its Anniversary Meeting:...