A Tale of Grape Expectations

A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine, published this month by Clarkson Potter, Kliman tells the story of Norton, Virginia’s oddball wine grape, and the evangelistic winemakers who are making a case for Norton wine as the state’s signature bottling.

This is no ordinary wine book, although you will find it in the wine section of your local bookstore amid the typical grape guides, vineyard atlases and “Don’t you wish you were me?” travelogues that define the genre. Kliman plays historian-detective as he tells the story of Daniel Norton, the Richmond doctor who bred the grape in the early 1820s and gave it his name. Norton’s discovery came just a few years before the death of Thomas Jefferson, whose failure to grow European grapes at Monticello still unfortunately defines Virginia wine for many people. Norton apparently tried to get some of his grapes to Jefferson, but there is no evidence that he succeeded.

That irony, that America’s greatest oenophile was unaware of the country’s first viticultural breakthrough just a short distance away, permeates the book as Norton (the grape) struggles to gain respect and fulfill its potential as a great wine grape. Initial successes in the form of medals won at European expos in the 1870s were followed by obscurity and failure with the rise of California winemaking and, ultimately, Prohibition. And the grape has always had its skeptics because of its strong flavors and high acidity.

So it should come as no surprise that Kliman weaves the grape’s fortunes and travails with those of its champions. The yearning for respect and acceptance seems to be infused in the grape itself, which is neither European vinifera nor native lambrusca but a half-breed called aestivalis. We see it also in its creator, Norton; in the German immigrant community of Hermann, Mo., where it first achieved prominence and is once again widely grown; and in its modern proponents in Virginia. Kliman’s perspective is not so much that of a journalist as of an artist peering within his subject to discern a hidden, defining characteristic.

Virginia’s and Missouri’s wine industries today are flourishing, yet they, too, struggle to win respect and recognition from their better-known competitors.

Norton might never be more than a niche wine. But in the hands of Kliman, the author as vintner, it makes a fascinating story, complex and with a haunting finish.