REPORT OP COMMITTEE ox PUBLICATION 77 



VITIS VINIFERA IN EASTERN AMERICA. 



By U. P. HEDRICK, 

 Experiment Station, Geneva, N. Y. 



I need only remind this audience of the many efforts to grow European 

 grapes in America. The various attempts, some involving individuals, others 

 corporations and in early days even colonies, form some of the most in- 

 structive and dramatic episodes in the history of American agriculture. All 

 endeavors, it will be remembered, were failures, so dismally and pathetically 

 complete, that we are wont to think of the 200 years from the first settlement 

 in America to the introduction of the Isabella, a native, as time wasted in 

 futile culture of a foreign fruit. The early efforts were far from wasted, how- 

 ever, for out of the tribulations of two centuries of grape-growing came the 

 domestication of our native grapes, one of the most remarkable and one of 

 the noblest achievements of agriculture. It is possible, too, that we may find 

 that the failures of the fathers of American viticulture are the foundations 

 for the success of the sons. 



The advent of Isabella and Catawba wholly turned the thoughts of vine- 

 yardists from Old World to New World grapes. So completely, indeed, were 

 viticulturists won by the thousand and more native grapes that came trooping 

 in that for the century which followed no one has planted Old World grapes 

 east of the Rockies, while vineyards of native species may be found north 

 and south from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 



Meanwhile, much new knowledge has come to agriculture, old fallacies 

 have had many hard knocks and chains of tradition in which the culture 

 of plants was bound, have been broken. In no field of agriculture have 

 workers received greater aid from science than in viticulture. 7 Particularly 

 this is true of the diseases of the vine. The reports of the old experimenters 

 were much the same, "a sickness takes hold of the vines and they die." What 

 the sickness was and whether there were preventives or remedies no one 

 knew a hundred years ago. But we have learned something about the ills 

 grape flesh is heir to, with preventives and remedies for the same. We 

 know that the early wine growers failed in part, at least, because they fol- 

 lowed empirical European practices. Is it npt possible that in the last hun- 

 dred years we have advanced sufficiently in our knowledge of plants, soils, 

 insects, and fungi, and that by breakip^ away from European dictums we can 

 now succeed in growing vitis vinifera in eastern America where old experi- 

 menters failed? The Geneva Experiment Station is putting this question to 

 test, with what result I am now to tell 



In the spring of 1911 the station obtained cuttings of 101 varieties of 

 European grapes from the United States Department of Agriculture and the 

 University of California. The object was to obtain European varieties to 

 hybridize with American grapes. I hasten to say that at first there was no 

 thought nor plan to experiment with thesp grapes as a cultivated crop. The 

 cuttings obtained were grafted on the roots of a heterogeneous collection of 

 seedlings five years set representing a half dozen species of Vitis and hybrids 

 between them then growing on the station grounds. These stocks had little 

 to recommend them except that all were vigorous, well established and all 



