The time covered so far is the two hundred years in which America was
being colonized. We have seen that all of our European forefathers
brought with them a love of the vine, or more correctly, a love of wine,
and that throughout the period many experiments were made in all parts
of the eastern United States to grow varieties of _Vitis vinifera_. The
experiments were on a large scale and in the hands of expert
vine-growers, as well trained as their fellow colonists in South Africa,
New Zealand, Australia and South America, countries where the colonists
grew the Old World grapes as easily and as well as they are grown in the
most favored parts of Europe. It is certain that the failures recorded
for these two hundred years were not due to lack of effort on the part
of the settlers. We now pass to more recent efforts, even more
thoroughly carried out, to grow the grape of the Old World in this part
of the New World. The discussion of these later attempts cannot be full.
The reader can readily turn to the horticultural literature of the
century just closed and find much fuller records of them than space
permits in this work.
One of the first and most notable of the vineyards in the eighteenth
century was that of Colonel Robert Bolling of Buckingham County,
Virginia. An account of his undertaking written by one of the Bolling
family some years later reads as follows: "It is now but little known
that this gentleman had early turned his attention to the cultivation of
the vine, and had actually succeeded in procuring and planting a small
vineyard of four acres, of European grapes, at Chellow, the seat of his
residence: that he had so far accomplished his object as to have the
satisfaction of seeing his vines in a most flourishing condition, and
arrived at an age when they were just beginning to bear; promising all
the success that the most sanguine imagination could desire, when,
unfortunately for his family, and perhaps for his country, he departed
this life while in the Convention in Richmond, in July, 1775. Thus all
his fond anticipations of being enabled, in a short time, to afford to
his countrymen a practical demonstration of the facility and certainty
with which grapes might be raised, and wine made, in Virginia, were
suddenly frustrated; all his hopes and prospects blasted; and owing to
the general want of information, in the management of vines, among us at
that time; and the confusion produced by the war of the revolution,
which immediately followed, this promising and flourishing little
vineyard was totally neglected and finally perished."[19]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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