When Erica Hannickel looks out across the rolling California wine country, she sees far more than a romantic rural landscape or a prospering artisanal industry. As she argues in her eclectic work Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America, underlying those vine-clad hills is a darker story of American expansionism with all its spatial and cultural ramifications. In Hannickel's telling, nineteenth-century horticultural literature promoting grape culture, fictional works that used the vineyard as a setting, and even viticulturists themselves created a bucolic image that obscured imperial ambitions, environmental degradation, and economic and racial exploitation. Grape culture, in other words, was not what it seemed, and Hannickel sets out to reveal the sources of that deception and its role in establishing American empire.
Hannickel's academic training and interests make her well-suited for the task. She holds degrees in ethnic and American studies and is currently an associate professor of environmental history at Northland College. Her interdisciplinary perspective pervades Empire of Vines, and she employs methodologies, such as literary interpretation, not often found in the toolkit of horticultural or business historians. Central to Hannickel's argument is her perception that viticulture is unique in its historical, environmental, and cultural circumstances. She notes the potent imagery long associated with wine in Greek and Roman sources and underscores the importance of terroir, a concept underlying European wine production. Accomplished vintners and their public understand terroir to be a range of unique circumstances—including specific environmental conditions, weather patterns, cultural techniques, and even the particular skill of the vintner—that, when combined, create the distinctive quality of fine wine. Although admitting that the term was not used by nineteenth-century American viticulturists, Hannickel insists that the exclusive, unique nature of terroir highlighted a package of concepts that American advocates readily transferred from refined wine to a refined nation.
Hannickel's broad evidentiary base and interdisciplinary methodologies are evident throughout Empire of Vines. She begins with an exploration of the horticultural literature promoting grape cultivation in the antebellum United States and then focuses on the mid-nineteenth-century grape industry in New York State. After a glance at the U.S. Patent Office's propagating efforts in Washington, D.C., technological advances in grape culture, and the tools of urban viticulturists, the story shifts to Ohio and the development of vineyards under the guidance of speculator and wine promoter Nicholas Longworth. Then it is on to viticulture in the South and a complex analysis of the racial implications of hybridization efforts and subsequent concerns about racial purity and authenticity. Finally, the California wine industry comes under scrutiny, and according to Hannickel, the themes of cultural imperialism and racial dominance grow right along with the grapes. Hannickel concludes her study with a detailed analysis of “vineyard romances,” a subgenre she defines as including books and even recent films like Sideways and Bottle Shock. These fictional sources often portray viticulture as an authentic, artisanal enterprise located in an idealized landscape, but beyond the bucolic façade, Hannickel emphasizes, racism and class prejudice persist.
As Hannickel explores the development of regional grape culture or technological changes supporting the grape industry, she provides a detailed portrait of one segment of America's much broader nineteenth-century horticultural boom, and it is here that readers interested in horticultural history, the business of growing grapes, or wine production may find the most satisfying material. Hannickel, however, is concerned with far more than simply documenting industry growth, and it is her persistent efforts to link grape culture with concepts of American empire and capitalist exploitation that are most problematic. To unearth that linkage, Hannickel focuses her well-honed and often critical contemporary perspective on the writings of nineteenth-century horticultural advocates like Andrew Jackson Downing and William Robert Prince or literary figures like James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Chesnutt. She carefully analyzes their words and, as she does so, is likely to find evidence supporting her claims of racism or cultural imperialism in places that might have surprised both the authors and their audiences. In a discussion of Andrew Jackson Downing's advocacy of vines as a decorative element in domestic landscapes, for instance, Hannickel suggests that the image of twining grapes reminded readers of the “horror and power” of the American revolution and “imperialism against Native peoples” and most importantly served as a “trope for U.S. empire” (pp. 56, 57). One wonders if Downing's readers, looking for advice on home embellishment, really made such interpretive leaps.
The privileging of viticulture so central to Hannickel's argument is also problematic, frequently leading to a distorted representation of sources. In an early example of a pervasive practice, Hannickel quotes nineteenth-century pomologist Marshall P. Wilder's address before the 1858 meeting of the American Pomological Society. In his address, Wilder discussed the advantages of pear cultivation and then encouraged his audience to transform the American landscape with “the choicest fruits of the earth” (p. 4). While Wilder refers to fruits in general, Hannickel ignores the broader advocacy and, as she comments on Wilder's statement, narrows his plea to grape culture. “Grape growing,” she concludes, “thus carried layered meanings” (p. 5). Unfortunately, this reading of sources with a particular end so firmly in mind often blinds Hannickel to the multiple themes inherent in nineteenth-century horticultural advocacy.
As Hannickel fervently points out, landscapes are eloquent, and with careful reading, they can reveal deeply layered stories of natural and cultural interaction. Empire of Vines would be a richer, more convincing work had she teased out the stories behind those vine-clad hills with a more careful, less biased hand.
