A thousand years ago, Leif Erickson came to North America and found so many wild grapes that he called the new world “Vinland.”

Four hundred years later Virginia was found to have vines in abundance, too: in 1606 Captain John Smith’s men produced nearly twenty gallons of wine from their uncultivated grapes.

Early settlers drank wine and other fermented beverages —water quality was unreliable— consuming, on the average, about forty gallons per capita each year.

Nearly all the wine had to be imported, mostly from France and Italy, a dependency that the British government early on hoped to reduce by creating vineyards on the seemingly hospitable Virginia soil. Rather than trying to make wine from the native grapes, however, the colonists imported European vine cuttings and brought in French vignerons to oversee winemaking operations. Other European crops, such as wheat and apples, had been successfully brought to these shores, but the Vitis vinifera plantings repeatedly failed, succumbing to frosts, pests, and diseases, and so this 17th-century experiment was abandoned.

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Vineyard in Albemarle County, by Rufus Holsinger ca. 1885; courtesy U.Va. Special Collections.

"High stakes" in local grape nursery, 2004. (Jane Myers)