page_title: Catawba (grape)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Catawba (grape) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: American winemaker Nicholas Longworth
context_page_description: Catawba is a red American grape variety used for wine as well as juice, jams and jellies. The grape can have a pronounced musky or "foxy" flavor. Grown predominantly on the East Coast of the United States, this purplish-red grape is a likely cross of the Native American Vitis labrusca and the Vitis vinifera cultivar Semillon. Its exact origins are unclear but it seems to have originated somewhere on the East coast from the Carolinas to Maryland.
  Catawba played an important role in the early history of American wine. During the early to mid-19th century, it was the most widely planted grape variety in the country and was the grape behind Nicholas Longworth's acclaimed Ohio sparkling wines that were distributed as far away as California and Europe.
  Catawba is a late-ripening variety, ripening often weeks after many other labrusca varieties and, like many vinifera varieties, it can be susceptible to fungal grape diseases such as powdery mildew.
context_section_description: From its obscure origins, the Catawba grape began appearing on nursery inventory lists across the United States and soon became a major grape in the growing American wine industry. From 1825 to 1850, it was the most widely planted grape in the United States. One early adopter was Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati, Ohio who founded America's first commercially successful winery. After difficulties cultivating the Alexander, Longworth purchased Catawba cuttings from Major Adlum and planted a vineyard along the Ohio River. After accidentally stumbling upon sparkling wine production in his winery, Longworth began producing a sparkling Catawba modeled after the wines of Champagne.
  From the 1830s through the 1850s, Longworth's still and sparkling Catawba were being distributed from California to Europe where it received numerous press accolades. In the 1850s, a journalist from The Illustrated London News noted that the still white Catawba compared favorably to the hock wines of the Rhine and the sparkling Catawba "transcends the Champagnes of France". The wines were also well received at home in the United States where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a poem dedicated to Nicholas Longworth titled Ode to Catawba Wine. The popularity of Longworth's wine encouraged a flurry of plantings along the Ohio River Valley and up north to Lake Erie and Finger Lakes region of New York. So influential was Longworth's Catawba wine that newspapers began referring to him as "the founder of wine culture in America, author of sparkling Catawba."
  Longworth was a fervent champion of Catawba, particularly grown in the Ohio River Valley, as a grape that he believed would lead the American wine industry for years to come. Prior to his sparkling Catawba, no other American wine had received the level of critical acclaim in Europe that his wines received. In the American journal Culture of the Grape and Manufacture of Wine, Longworth wrote in 1847, "The day is not distant, when the Ohio River will rival the Rhine, in the quantity and quality of its wine. I give the Catawba preference over all other grapes, for a general crop, for wine."
  The year 1859 was Catawba's peak in the Ohio wine industry, with the state being the largest producer in the United States, producing more than 568,000 US gallons (2,150 kL) of wine from 2,000 acres (800 ha) acres of mostly Catawba vines. But the 1860s brought an end to the enthusiasm when powdery mildew decimated Catawba plantings and the economic turmoil of the American Civil War led to many vineyards being pulled up or abandoned. Another labrusca variety, the Concord developed in 1849  in Concord, Massachusetts by Ephraim Wales Bull soon eclipsed Catawba in plantings and ended its dominance of the American wine industry.
caption: Nicholas Longworth
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