The grape before the winery: Catawba dreams and a wine trade

1806 — 1900

Indiana's first wine country was not here: The grape excitement of the nineteenth century belonged to the Ohio River. John James Dufour's Swiss colony at Vevay, in Switzerland County, was making wine by 1809 and thousands of gallons within the decade; Nicholas Longworth's Cincinnati vineyards made Catawba the American wine grape from the late 1820s; and the scholarly summary of the region's viticulture treats the Ohio valley — Cincinnati, northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana — as the whole of the story. The Maumee valley, two hundred miles north, grew grain for whiskey and flour, not grapes for wine, and in the records reached for this section no commercial vineyard or winery appears in Allen County in the whole nineteenth century. What appears instead is wine as merchandise: it stands on John Christen's wholesale price lists beside his ales and brandies, in B. Trentman's "wines and liquors," and in the Nathan houses' wholesale wine stock — a drink Fort Wayne bought, blended around, and sold, but did not press.

Winemaking people, no winemaking record: One local thread runs close to the vine without reaching it. The French farming families who settled Washington Township in the 1830s and 1840s came from Franche-Comté, where, as their parish history at St. Vincent's recounts, life had centered on three harvests — hay, grain, and grapes, the grapes "processed into red wine." They were wine-growing people transplanted to a county whose surviving agricultural record shows no vineyard of theirs. The county-level evidence that could move this entry — grape and wine figures for Allen County in the State Board of Agriculture's annual reports and in the federal census agriculture schedules of 1860 and 1880 — was not reached, and the entry is written to the record that was: before Vinland Reserve, Allen County's wine history is a history of the wine trade.

Sources:

1. David E. Breetzke, "Understanding the Viticulture Industry in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana," in Innovation Nation: The Ohio River Watershed and the Making of America — Dufour's Vevay colony (wine by 1809; 7,000 gallons by 1818), Longworth's Catawba at Cincinnati from the 1820s, and the Ohio River framing of the region's wine history.
2. Jennifer Beatty, "European Backgrounds: The Wave of French Immigrants to Allen County (1830–1850)," in the St. Vincent's parish history — the Franche-Comté homeland's three harvests, "hay, grain, and grapes," the grapes processed into red wine; and the French settlement of Washington Township.
3. Fort Wayne city directories of 1861–62, 1864–65 and 1880, and the History Center's Fort Wayne Ale House materials, as cited above — wine in the county's record as wholesale stock: Trentman's "Wines and Liquors," the Nathans' wholesale wines, Christen's priced wine list.