8 THE GRAPES OF NEW YORK. 



whether made from wild plants or cultivated ones does not appear. In 

 spite of the encouragement of legislative acts, grape-growing did not flourish 

 in Virginia.' The fact that tobacco was a paying crop and more easily 

 grown than the grape may have had something to do with the failure to 

 grow the latter. Or it may have been that the cheapness of Madeira, " a 

 noble strong drink," as one of the Colonial historians puts it, had a depressing 

 influence on the industry. But still more likely, the foreign plants did 

 not thrive. 



Encouragement of the home production of wine did not cease in Virginia 

 for at least one hundred and fifty years; for in 1769 an enactment of the 

 Assembly was passed to encourage wine-making in favor of one Andrew 

 Estave, a Frenchman. As a result of the act of this time, land was pur- 

 chased, buildings erected, and slaves and workmen with a complete outfit 

 for wine-making were furnished Estave. The act provided that if he made 

 within six years ten hogsheads of merchantable wine — land, houses, slaves, 

 the whole plant was to be given to him. It is stated that this unusual 

 subsidy is made " as a reward for so useful an improvement." Estave 

 succeeded in making the wine but it was poor stuff and he had difficulty in 

 getting the authorities to turn over the property which was to be his reward 

 This was finally done by an act of the Assembly, however, the failure to 

 make good wine being attributed by all parties to the " unfitness of the 

 land." 



An attempt was made to cultivate the European grape in Virginia 

 early in the eighteenth century on an extensive scale. Soon after taking 

 office as governor in 1710, Alexander Spotswood brought over a colony of 



' Roger Beverly, writing a century later, describes the early grape-growing in Virginia as follows: 

 "The Year before the Massacre, Anno 1622, which destroyed so many good projects for Virginia; 

 some French vignerons were sent thither to make an experiment of their vines. These people were 

 so in love with the country, that the character they then gave of it in their letters to the company 

 in England, was very much to its advantage, namely: ' That it far excelled their own countr)- of 

 Langiicdoc, The vines growing in great abundance and variety all over the land; that some of the 

 grapes were of that unusual bigness, that they did not believe them to be grapes, until by opening 

 them they had seen their kernels; that they had planted the cuttings of their vines at Michaelmas, 

 and had grapes from those very cuttings, the spring following. Adding in the conclusion, that they 

 had not heard of the like in any other country.' Neither was this out of the way, for I have 

 made the same experiment, both of their natural vine, and of the plants sent thither from England."' 

 Beverly's Virginia, Second Edition: 107. 1732. 



