California wasn’t always America’s winemaking leader. During the mid-19th century, that distinction went to Kansas and neighboring Missouri, where winemakers and grape-growers led the U.S. wine industry in production. Bold entrepreneurs, industrious Kansas farmers—many of them German-speaking immigrants—produced 35,000 gallons of wine in 1872. That volume jumped more than six-fold by the end of the decade.

But the growth in Kansas’ wine industry (and its sister industry, brewing) coincided with dramatic changes in the state. From 1860 to 1880, Kansas’ population mushroomed from 107,206 to nearly one million people. Kansans battled over slavery in the Kansas-Missouri Border War (1854-1861) and again during the Civil War (1861-1865). Kansas vintners faced a dynamic and challenging moral, social, business, and political climate. The region’s civic and religious leaders railed against the use of alcohol, which they believed contributed to moral decay and spiritual rot, leading them to implement the first statewide prohibition on selling and manufacturing alcohol in the United States in 1881. For more than a century, this ban caused a slowdown from which the Free State’s winemakers are only now beginning to emerge.

For centuries, Wild Catawba, Concord, Norton, and other grapevines thrived, uncultivated, in the rich soil of the territory. When the explorer Étienne de Veniard de Bourgmont ventured to northeastern Kansas in 1724, Indians supplied his expedition with wild grapes from the Missouri River bluffs, which the captain and his men used to make wine. 80 years later, Lewis and Clark encountered summer and fall grapes at the very same site.

Several thousand German-speaking immigrants who settled nearby in the mid-19th-century sought a “new Rhineland,” a fresh start that offered religious freedom, economic opportunity, and refuge from political and military turmoil in their homelands. These immigrants not only brought large numbers of people, but also cash to foster trade in emerging frontier towns and the know-how to grow grapes and produce wine. Several skilled winemakers and vineyard nurserymen came to Doniphan, Kansas, from Deidesheim, a town in the German Palatinate region known for its winemaking and viticulture since the 13th century. Hardworking and entrepreneurial, they transformed small-scale farm vineyards and wineries into a burgeoning industry.

Winemaker Adam Brenner emigrated from Deidesheim and settled in Doniphan in 1857. As proprietor of Doniphan Vineyards, he manufactured native wines and brandies that were known “world-wide” for their “medicinal qualities.” According to William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas, Brenner’s vineyards spanned 50 acres and had their own cellars, press houses, warehouses, bottling, and packing rooms. One cellar, used for sales, could hold 30,000 gallons of various wines. Two more cellars stored an additional 30,000 gallons each. Later his brother and his nephew both opened vineyards producing thousands of gallons of wine annually, some of it for sacramental use.

Still photograph of teetotaler women from the satirical short film Kansas Saloon Smashers (1901), which spoofs the Wichita temperance activist Carrie Nation. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

No records indicate what the Brenners’ wines tasted like. Since they were commonly sold for medicinal and sacramental purposes, and sugar was an expensive commodity, the wines were likely dry, sweetened only by natural sugar from the grapes. But whatever their aesthetic qualities, they were clearly highly-regarded. By the early 1880s, vineyards in and around Doniphan produced one million pounds of grapes and 75,000 gallons of wine every year. They grew 24 varieties of native American and American-bred grapes and shipped wine to customers in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, and Montana by steamboat and later by rail.

Other parts of Kansas produced wine, too. In A History of Wine in America, a definitive account of winemaking in the United States, author Thomas Pinney noted that a man named A.M. Burns established a nursery specializing in grapevines in Riley County, west of Topeka, in 1856. Within a decade, Burns’ catalog offered more than 150 grape varieties to farmers, including many that he had bred and developed himself.

In 1866, Burns wrote with exuberant optimism about the relationship between Kansas and grapes. “I now think I can with safety predict a glorious future for the grape in Kansas,” he boasted. “It is only a matter of time, and some who, when I commenced to test the vine, sneered at the idea, may yet live to see the day when our bluffs will be teeming with millions of dollars of wealth, while they ought to hang their heads with shame at their own ignorance.” For a time, it seemed that his vision would come to pass. In 1880, the Kansas State Board of Agriculture reported that Kansas produced a whopping 226,000 gallons of wine and reached its peak as a leading producer in the industry.

But just as the optimistic prognostications of A.M. Burns and others seemed to bear fruit, a wave of moral and political action unleashed drastic upheaval in the state. Temperance spread west throughout the U.S., fueled by organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. During its early statehood and explosive population growth, Kansas was awash with wineries, breweries, and saloons—as well as large numbers of gamblers and prostitutes who frequented them. Prohibition proponents, especially women, loathed the lawlessness and vice. Men who drank had a reputation for being abusive, and poor providers. By 1855, the Kansas Territorial Legislature passed a law “to restrain dramshops and taverns, and to regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors.” Citizens voted in special elections on local liquor laws. And in 1871, even the Kansas State Horticultural Society had initiated discussions against the use of grapes for winemaking in the state.

Prohibition also appealed strongly to evangelical Kansans who viewed alcohol as an obstacle toward gaining eternal salvation—and who regarded the German winemakers, some of whom were Catholic, with suspicion. By the late 1870s, Kansans regularly heard anti-alcohol rhetoric at church revivals. Many were swayed to the temperance cause by the fiery, religion-fueled oration of reformed drunk Francis Murphy of Portland, Maine, who addressed a large crowd in August 1879 at a national temperance rally at Bismarck Grove, near Lawrence, Kansas. Kansas Women’s Christian Temperance Union president Drusilla Wilson, who was present at the rally, also won many converts to the cause. An indefatigable speaker and advocate, driven by her Quaker beliefs, she traveled 3,000 miles across Kansas by carriage to enlist support for state Prohibition. She organized 13 temperance unions, led efforts to obtain petition signatures for a prohibitory state amendment, and later worked to ensure the legislature passed the amendment in a general election.

In an address to the state legislature in January 1879, Governor John P. St. John framed temperance as an economic, moral, and social issue. “Could we but dry up this one great evil that consumes annually so much wealth, and destroys the physical, moral and mental usefulness of its victims,” he suggested, “we would hardly need prisons, poorhouses, or police.”

Kansas amended its state constitution on November 2, 1880 to prohibit “the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors … except for medical, scientific and mechanical purposes.” The statute went into effect from in May 1881 and preceded national Prohibition by four decades. Most Kansas winemakers, brewers, and other alcohol manufacturers went out of business. Some relocated across the state line to Missouri. As late as 1900, 20 years after state Prohibition, grape growers in Kansas continued to cultivate thousands of acres of grapes, selling them to bootleggers in Kansas or to winemakers working legally in Missouri, or for consumption as fruit.

A temperance poster, circa 1903, claimed that Kansas “reduced the annual consumption of intoxicants from the U.S. average of 16 gallons per capita” to less than two, that the state saved an average of more than $6 million “which otherwise would go to the saloon,” and that Prohibition saved annually “more than 1,200 persons from drunkards’ graves.”

Of course, Prohibition—in Kansas and throughout the United States—did not result in a more morally-driven society. The law unintentionally spawned criminal activity by bootleggers and their customers, and ultimately lost support during the Great Depression. National Prohibition was repealed in 1933. In Kansas, too, people drank. But the state remained officially dry, with its voters in 1934 vanquishing a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have legalized alcohol use. Kansas didn’t repeal statewide prohibition until 1948. Some counties still do not allow liquor sales.

Kansans haven’t exactly raced to revive the state’s wine industry. With the earlier generations of winemakers long gone, and the state’s lingering moral and political distaste for alcohol persistent, there was little incentive for investments in new vineyards or wineries. Meanwhile, grape-growing and winemaking have flourished in Missouri.

In the mid-1970s, a horticultural research center near Wichita conducted experiments on soil and climate, and planted trial grapevines with promising results. Encouraged, Dr. Robert Rizza of Halstead, Kansas, planted a vineyard in 1978 and began advocating for the passage of a law that would allow farms to again produce wines on site. In 1983 the state legislature finally approved a farm winery law and amended it in 1985 to reduce costly fees and to permit tastings and sales at wineries as well. The state Department of Agriculture established an advisory program on viticulture and enology, and Kansans began to apply for official licenses and established wineries.

Two decades later, 13 licensed farm wineries in Kansas were harvesting 170 total acres of grapes to produce 50,000 gallons of wine. By 2010, wine production had more than doubled to 107,419 gallons. Today winemakers throughout Kansas plant native and hybrid grapes in the same mineral-rich soils that their 19th-century forebears once so fruitfully worked, producing an impressive range of wines from French-American hybrid and native grapes. A long-abandoned way of life, practiced by some of the state’s first frontier entrepreneurs, is on the rise again.

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The deaths and damage of this year’s Wine Country wildfires are a historic disaster. They are also the product of an epic California success.

That triumph is the growth of the wine industry, which has come to dominate our state’s land, culture, and image. Indeed, it’s now outdated to refer to the burning stretches of Napa and Sonoma counties as California’s Wine Country. The truth is that the whole state is Wine Country. And these awful fires—and the hotter fires that are to come as the climate heats up—will only make it more so.

Californians frequently fight over water, but we famously connect through wine. It’s a passion and pursuit that binds together rural and urban, business and labor, Hollywood and Silicon Valley (both of whose stars dabble in it), and rich and poor (we produce both $3,499.97 Screaming Eagle varietals and the $2.99 Charles Shaw wines they sell at Trader Joe’s). Wine is at once an export that defines us to the world (only three nations on earth—France, Italy and Spain—produce more wine than we do), and our leading home remedy, the best available balm for a state that dramatically inspires the sweetest of dreams and the most bitter of disappointments.

California is a state of disaster, and where there is disaster, you will find wine close by. Over the past 40 years, wine has boomed not only in Northern California—from 25 Napa Valley wineries in 1975 to more than 400 in Napa and Sonoma counties—but also in the Central Coast, the Central Valley, the Sierra Foothills, and even Southern California’s the Inland Empire. Much of this growth has come at the edges of cities and towns, in the space between human development and our wilder lands.

These are the places where California’s wildfires rage, and so the success of wine has lured many more people to live in more risky places. This era’s giant blazes have hit all our wine countries. In addition to the awful scale and human carnage of the Napa and Sonoma fires, multiple wildfires this summer did damage to the Central Coast, including its vineyards and wineries. And the current fires are only the latest disaster that wine has endured in California. Wine, like a vampire, has taken what might be mortal blows, such as droughts and depressions and Prohibition, and kept coming back stronger.

The history of wine in California is a century older than the state itself, and touches almost all of our most revered figures. California’s saint, Junipero Serra, had vineyards planted in the missions he founded in the 18th century. Los Angeles was originally a wine country (“The City of Vines” was an L.A. nickname of the 19th century), and the Napa Valley’s origins as a wine producer coincide with the Gold Rush.

By the late 19th century, wine was a major California export. And while wine is often seen as an artisanal exception to California’s newer industries, it actually established the template for the culture and economy that produced aerospace, movies, and software: People from all over the world bring their ideas and technologies to California, where they spin them together into new products that are then exported back to the world.

Long before there were tech incubators and venture capitalists, Californians were innovating with wine. Alfred Tubbs traveled to France in the 1880s to get important vine cuttings. Back here, he was among the first to plant root stocks that were resistant to Phylloxera, the disease that once destroyed Europe’s vineyards. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the Tubbs Fire—named for its suspected origin near Tubbs Lane in Calistoga—was one of the major blazes destroying wide swaths of the Wine Country last week.

California also popularized wine as it did so many other products. In the second half of the 20th century, Robert Mondavi made wine the drink of the middle class, replacing bourbon and scotch, and soon every nook and cranny of space had a few vines. Now many Californians make their own, growing the grapes in their yards and stomping on them in their garages.

California has privileged wine to a degree that might embarrass your local aristocrat. Our state is famous for its high taxes, but makes an exception for wine. Our taxes on alcohol, a legacy of a powerful 20th-century liquor lobby, are so much lower here that Californians have gotten used to getting great wine at low prices—a bit of the Golden State’s largesse in every bottle. (In California, a $10 bottle of wine is pretty good. In the rest of the country it’s pink supermarket swill.)

In the aftermath of the fires, wine’s exalted status may come under pressure. Before the blazes, there had been conflict between wineries and their local governments and residential neighbors. Wineries often see housing development as encroaching on their land. Homeowners and local governments have complained about the traffic and noise that comes with the thousands of winery events and the 24 million tourists who visit the Northern California Wine Country each year.

Perhaps the tragedy of the fires will inspire new collaborations and smart, resilient planning to buffer wineries and houses. But if the fires create more limits on where structures—be they wineries or houses—can be built, more conflict is inevitable. The wine industry could also see internal turmoil and ultimately consolidation, as newer or smaller players, facing the high costs of rebuilding and insurance, sell out to bigger players. But look for wine to emerge stronger and win most of the battles—Californians like their wine more than they like other people’s houses.

The Wine Country fires reflect the unpredictability and cruelty of nature—amplified by any number of human failings in managing our environment. The fires will rightfully force a reassessment of those failings, at least for a while.

But human beings only can handle so much misery, at least by themselves. Eventually, we gather with others and reach for the bottle. And then, as has been practice since an ancient supper described in the Gospel of Matthew, the wine “is poured out to forgive the sins of many.”

The post All California Is Wine Country—and the Wildfires Make It More So appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

An outsider might think I live in exactly the wrong place to satisfy this love: Perry, Ohio has just 1,500 people and sits in the farmland along Lake Erie, about 35 miles east of Cleveland. But, like so many of the misconceptions about my oft-maligned state, the notion of rural Ohio as a backwater a world away from the tasting rooms of Napa is dead wrong. In fact, Northeast Ohio has an aquifer similar to that of the wine-growing regions of France, so we have bottles at least as good as that $150 Burgundy, at probably a tenth of the price. And entrepreneurs have caught on: today, there are probably 30 wineries within 30 miles of my home.

But living in the best wine region for thousands of miles isn’t all good. Even reasonably priced wines cost something, so a couple of years ago I noticed I was becoming wine poor. Markups on wine by the glass make it much more economical to buy whole bottles, which penalizes a writer who spends much of her time alone. And until recently, it was illegal in Ohio to recork a bottle and bring it home. Drinking less wine wasn’t much of an option, so I was on the lookout for a cheaper way to indulge.

Then I stumbled on my first micro-winery, a small wine producer that doesn’t have its own vineyard and doesn’t make everything by the bottle, keeping costs low. The one I visited had no ambience and the wine was truly awful, making me skeptical of the whole concept. Then I found the one that would quite literally change my life.

I was driving down Main Street in Painesville, just five minutes from home, and saw that a new micro-winery called Your Vine or Mine? was almost ready to open. Burned by the first one, I nearly didn’t bother, but I found myself keeping an eye on the place as the opening date neared. That first day, I walked in and sat at the bar. The décor and feel of the little shop were warm and welcoming.  There was nothing that felt commercial about the place, with its beautifully accented walls and ceilings, original hardwood floors, antique chairs and wood tables resting on bases made from antique cast iron sewing machines.

With some trepidation, I ordered a glass of blueberry Pinot Noir. A flavored wine probably wouldn’t appeal to a wine snob no matter how good it tastes, but take my word for it: this one was excellent. The berries and grapes danced on my palate. One sip in, and I realized I’d found my spot.

Since then, Your Vine or Mine? has become my home away from home, or perhaps I have become one of the fixtures. I stop almost every afternoon, sipping a glass of Riesling, Amarone or that blueberry Pinot to smooth the transition from my day job to the responsibilities waiting at home. It’s one of the rare places that feels welcoming to people coming in alone; I’m never treated as an incomplete party and I don’t glance enviously at couples, wishing my husband was there. On Thursdays, I bring my laptop along, setting myself up in a corner to work on my latest book or article and enjoying the solitude of my work.

But paradoxically, while the shop has led me to embrace solitude, it’s also given me community. The owners who created this warm atmosphere, Penny and Alex Schebal, have become two of my closest friends. And I don’t get much work done on Thursday evenings anymore because a constant stream of other friends comes through the door. I stash my laptop in favor of catching up on town news and the gossip du jour. We all raise a glass and pass around some appetizers. As a writer, it’s not in my nature to make friends easily or be a social butterfly, but “The Vine,” as we call it, has transformed me. It’s made me a friendlier, more outgoing version of myself. I find myself participating in social events that are miles outside my old comfort zone: donning a Halloween costume, singing bad karaoke, participating in cooking competitions, dressing up for a murder mystery night on New Year’s Eve.

I also make my own wine at The Vine at least twice a year–300 bottles total. I started with the blueberry Pinot Noir, of course, moving on to the peach-apricot Chardonnay, white cranberry Pinot Grigio, pomegranate Zinfandel and, most recently, blackberry Cabernet and Amarone. People are always very impressed to receive a bottle with my custom label displayed, and I’m always proud to present it as a gift. But it’s funny: although every batch has been excellent, I rarely open a bottle at home. Somehow the grapes just taste better when shared with friends.

Betsy McMillan is a professional pharmaceutical/biomedical writer and editor by day, a freelance copywriter and published author of four non-fiction books by night, and a frustrated singer in between.

*Photo by Betsy McMillan.

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