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Winemaking in Missouri |
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Debow's Review June 1858 |
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Among the receipts in our city by the Pacific Railroad, a few days ago, were eight thousand gallons of Catawba wine, from Hermann. This wine has been bought by N. Longworth, of Cincinnati, to be manufactured into Sparkling Catawba, and was on its way to that city. The price paid for this wine at Hermann was $1.25 per gallon, and the shipment was therefore worth ten thousand dollars. The annual grape yield in Missouri has been found liable to great fluctuations. One grower in Hermann, (M. Poeschel,) found the product one year from his vineyard to be eleven hundred gallons; the year following it was only one hundred gallons. That isolated fact would look discouraging, but it is found that so remarkable a falling off only occurred one year in ten, and that the average yield of wine to the acre of grapes, preserves as great regularity through a series of years as is shown by any other crop in this climate and latitude. It may be calculated to startle those tillers of the soil who know nothing of grape culture in the West, to learn that M. Poeschel's vineyard, at Hermann, Missouri, has yielded during the past ten years an average of four hundred and twenty-five gallons of wine per acre per year, and that this wine has been sold at from one to two dollars per gallon. It requires but brief figuring to ascertain that M. Poeschel has realized over five hundred dollars per acre per annum from his grape culture. Wm. Poeschel, a brother of the above, cultivating a smaller vineyard, had even a greater yield. The latter received annually one hundred and fifty dollar's worth of wine from two hundred and fifty vines, planted six by eight feet apart; and his average yield per annum per acre was lour hundred and eighty-seven gallons, or over six hundred dollars per acre. If we take the annual crop of wheat, corn, oats or tobacco, grown in Missouri, it will be found that at least once in ten years there will happen as near a total failure as has happened with the grape crop; so that by the actual showing of experience, nothing can be deduced to the prejudice of grape-growing, as compared with other crops, for certainty of yield; while as to profitableness, and the lessened labor and increased pleasantness arising from the small compass of oversight required, the odds are incalculably in favor of grape-growing. There has never failed to be ready sale for all the wine produced in Missouri. In former years it was sold mainly to Cincinnati manufacturers, but in 1853 three of the most enterprising citizens of St. Louis, Wm. Glasgow, Jr., A. Vallee, and A. H. Glasby, formed a partnership for the manufacture of wines in St. Louis. After one year of operation a charter was obtained, and the enterprise was merged in the "Missouri Wine Company." About twenty stockholders form this Company, aid under the intelligent management of Mr. Glasgow, as President, the Company has gone on to establish a reputation for Missouri wines inferior to none in the United States; and with many of the best judges the Missouri wine stands at the head. |