American Wine: The Complete History

American wine is the story of a spectacular comeback. For three centuries, settlers tried and failed to make wine in the New World; then, in barely fifty years, the United States rose from the ashes of Prohibition to become one of the greatest wine nations on earth — a transformation sealed on a single afternoon in Paris in 1976, when California wines beat the finest of France in a blind tasting and stunned the wine world. From Spanish missionaries and a grape called Mission to the cult Cabernets of Napa and the Pinot Noirs of Oregon, this is the history of wine in America.

Missionaries and the first vines

Wine in America began with three hundred years of failure. English colonists at Jamestown and, later, Thomas Jefferson at Monticello tried repeatedly to grow Europe’s Vitis vinifera on the East Coast, only to watch it die of pests, disease, and cold; the native American grapes that survived made wine with a strange, musky “foxy” flavour that Europeans disliked.¹ For generations, a truly fine American wine seemed impossible.

The breakthrough came from the opposite coast. Spanish Franciscan missionaries moving up California planted the continent’s first successful wine grapes: Father Junípero Serra reached Mission San Diego in 1769, and the hardy black Mission grape (the Listán Prieto of Spain) spread north along the chain of missions on the Camino Real.¹ In the warm, dry California climate, European vines at last thrived — and the foundation of American fine wine was laid.

Haraszthy and the rise of California

If the missionaries planted the first vines, it was a flamboyant Hungarian émigré who dreamed of greatness. Agoston Haraszthy, often called the “father of California viticulture,” founded Buena Vista in Sonoma in 1857 — among the state’s first premium wineries — and in the 1850s and 60s imported well over a hundred thousand vine cuttings of hundreds of European varieties, determined to prove California could rival Europe.² The Gold Rush had flooded California with thirsty fortune-seekers, and a wine industry boomed to serve them.

By the late nineteenth century California was making serious quantities of wine, and its future looked bright. Phylloxera and other setbacks slowed the momentum, but the deeper structure of a great wine industry — the vineyards, the know-how, the ambition — was taking shape. Then, at the height of its promise, the whole edifice was demolished almost overnight.

How America saved the world’s vineyards

Before that catastrophe came one of the great ironies of wine history. When the phylloxera louse — itself native to North America — escaped to Europe in the 1860s and destroyed millions of acres of vineyard, the solution came from America too.³ American native vine species were resistant to the pest, and the answer was to graft European vines onto American rootstock — a technique that saved the vineyards of France and, in time, the entire wine world.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of the world’s fine-wine vines grow on American roots. It is a debt rarely acknowledged: the same continent whose bug nearly destroyed European wine also provided the cure, and American rootstock remains the hidden foundation beneath Bordeaux, Burgundy, and almost everywhere else.

Prohibition: the great destruction

In 1920, the United States did something no other great wine nation has ever done: it banned wine outright. National Prohibition, enforced by the Volstead Act, made the commercial production of wine illegal for thirteen years, and the industry collapsed — from roughly seven hundred wineries to fewer than a hundred and fifty by Repeal in 1933.⁴

Yet the vine did not quite die. The law left loopholes: wineries could make sacramental wine for churches, and — crucially — households were allowed to make up to 200 gallons of wine a year at home.⁴ Demand for grapes actually soared, and growers shipped “grape bricks” of concentrated must east with winking instructions warning that, if dissolved in water and left too long, they might “ferment and turn into wine.” America kept a taste for wine alive through Prohibition — but the craft of making it fine had to be rebuilt almost from scratch.

The Judgment of Paris

The moment American wine announced itself to the world can be dated exactly: 24 May 1976. In a Paris hotel, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier and his colleague Patricia Gallagher staged a blind tasting — timed to the U.S. Bicentennial — pitting unknown California wines against the greatest names of France, judged by a panel of eminent French experts.⁵ The result was an earthquake. A California red, the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet, topped the reds; a California white, the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, topped the whites — both beating the finest of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Only one journalist was in the room: George Taber of Time magazine, whose short report coined the phrase “the Judgment of Paris” and flashed the news around the globe.⁵ Overnight, the idea that fine wine could come only from Europe was shattered. Investment and ambition poured into California, and winemakers from Australia to Chile took heart. American wine had arrived — and the wine world would never look the same.

Mondavi and the modern boom

The Judgment of Paris crowned a revolution already under way, and no one embodied it more than Robert Mondavi. When he opened his winery in Oakville in 1966 — the first major new Napa winery since Prohibition — he set out to make wines to rival Europe’s best and to sell them with showmanship and pride.⁶ A tireless ambassador, Mondavi did more than perhaps anyone to convince Americans, and the world, that California belonged in the front rank.

The boom that followed reshaped the country. To bring order to it, the United States created the American Viticultural Area (AVA) system at the start of the 1980s — the first AVA approved in 1980, and the Napa Valley AVA in 1981 — a framework of place-names that now covers hundreds of distinctive regions.⁶ From fewer than 350 wineries in the 1970s, America grew to several thousand within a generation.

Beyond California: a nation of wine

America’s wine story is no longer California’s alone. In the cool, green Willamette Valley of Oregon, the pioneer David Lett planted Pinot Noir in 1965 in the belief that this fickle Burgundian grape could thrive where others said it could not — and Oregon Pinot Noir is now spoken of alongside Burgundy itself.⁷ In Washington State, the sunny Columbia Valley became a powerhouse of Cabernet, Merlot, and Syrah, making Washington the country’s second-largest wine producer.

On the East Coast, the story came full circle. In New York’s Finger Lakes, the émigré scientist Dr. Konstantin Frank proved in the mid-twentieth century that noble European vines — especially Riesling — could survive brutal cold, finally succeeding where Jefferson had failed.⁷ Today wine is made commercially in all fifty states, from Virginia to Texas to Michigan, and the “American wine” of the twenty-first century is a genuinely national achievement.

American wine today

The United States now ranks among the largest wine producers and by far the largest wine consumer in the world, and its wines run the full spectrum from mass-market bottlings to some of the most sought-after and expensive cult wines on earth.⁸ California alone would rank among the world’s leading wine nations; add Oregon, Washington, New York, and the rest, and the range of styles and climates is staggering.

What unites them is the spirit of the comeback that made them — a willingness to experiment, to ignore old rules, and to prove the doubters wrong. From a grape called Mission to the Judgment of Paris and beyond, American wine has, in a single lifetime, earned its place among the great wine cultures of the world. Explore the regions below to follow each thread of the story.

Explore America’s wine regions

• California — the heartland of American wine, from the missions to the modern era.
• Napa Valley — the region that beat France and became a legend.
• Sonoma — Napa’s larger, more diverse neighbour and a cradle of California wine.
• Oregon & the Willamette Valley — America’s great home of Pinot Noir.
• Washington State — the Columbia Valley powerhouse.
• New York & the Finger Lakes — cool-climate Riesling and the Eastern revival.

Read more

To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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American Wine

Jancis Robinson & Linda Murphy

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References & further reading

1. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (University of California Press, 1989), on colonial failures, the missions, and Haraszthy. ↩
2. Charles L. Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine (University of California Press, 1998), s.v. “Haraszthy” and “Buena Vista”; and Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 2: From Prohibition to the Present (UC Press, 2005). ↩
3. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “phylloxera,” “rootstocks,” and “grafting.” ↩
4. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 2 (UC Press, 2005), on Prohibition, the Volstead Act, sacramental wine, and home winemaking; U.S. Constitution, 18th and 21st Amendments. ↩
5. George M. Taber, Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (Scribner, 2005), the definitive first-hand account by the only journalist present. ↩
6. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, s.v. “Mondavi,” “California,” and “AVA”; U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), AVA regulations (from 1980). ↩
7. Paul Pintarich, The Boys Up North: Dick Erath and the Early Oregon Winemakers, and Oxford Companion, s.v. “Oregon,” “Washington,” and “New York”; on Konstantin Frank and the Eastern vinifera revival. ↩
8. Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson, The World Atlas of Wine, 8th ed. (Mitchell Beazley, 2019), the United States chapters. ↩