How American Grapes Saved the World's Wine

The most important grapevines on earth are American. Almost nobody drinks them.

On a day for celebrating American underdogs, here is the greatest one in wine: not a bottle, but a root. Twice over, homegrown American vines rescued wine from disaster and gave the world drinks it still enjoys — and they've been quietly overlooked ever since, including on their own shelves. Pour something native tonight, and here's what you're toasting.

The bug that nearly killed wine

In the 1860s, European wine began to die. Vines yellowed, roots rotted, whole regions collapsed. The killer was phylloxera, a nearly invisible louse that feeds on grape roots — and, in one of history's great ironies, it was a stowaway from the eastern United States, carried to France on imported American vines.

European Vitis vinifera had no defense. Native American grape species did: they had spent millennia evolving alongside the louse, and their roots simply shrugged it off. The cure, worked out through the 1870s and adopted across the 1880s, was humbling for the Old World — graft the beloved European vine on top of a tough American root. The three species that carried the resistance were Vitis riparia, Vitis rupestris and Vitis berlandieri, and their hybrids are still the rootstock under nearly every serious vineyard in France, Italy and Spain today.

Drink a grand cru Burgundy and you are, from the soil up, drinking American.

The Texan who saved Bordeaux

The rescue had an unlikely hero: a grape breeder in Denison, Texas, named Thomas Volney Munson. When French growers needed rootstock that could handle their chalky limestone soils, Munson pointed them to the wild vines of the central Texas hill country — Vitis berlandieri chief among them, which thrives in exactly that kind of ground. In 1888 France thanked him the French way: it made him a Chevalier du Mérite Agricole. Denison and the cognac town of Cognac remain sister cities to this day.

Here's the honest correction to a story you'll often hear told wrong. The grape most people associate with "tough American vine" — the muscadine — was not the one that saved Europe. Muscadine carries an extra pair of chromosomes (40 to vinifera's 38), which makes it refuse to graft cleanly with European vines. It's the strongest vine in the American South and it sat out the rescue. Which makes it, fittingly, an underdog even among underdogs.

Muscadine, the vine that won't quit

If you've driven through the Deep South, you've passed muscadine — Vitis rotundifolia — sprawling over fences and tree lines, thick-skinned and bronze or black. It is almost supernaturally tough: resistant to phylloxera, to the fungal diseases that plague other vines, and to Pierce's disease, the bacterial scourge that makes growing ordinary wine grapes nearly impossible across the hot Southeast. Where vinifera dies, muscadine shrugs.

Its most famous form is Scuppernong, a greenish-bronze muscadine that Southerners have turned into sweet, musky, unmistakable wine for generations. And on Roanoke Island in North Carolina grows the "Mother Vine," a scuppernong reputed to be around four centuries old and often called the oldest cultivated grapevine in North America. Treat that age as legend rather than lab result — it's been disputed since 1909 — but stand under it and the point lands anyway: this is a distinctly American vine, still alive, still bearing.

Before Napa, there was Cincinnati

America's first great wine boom didn't happen in California. It happened on the Ohio River.

In the 1840s and '50s, a Cincinnati lawyer named Nicholas Longworth planted the hillsides above the city with Catawba — a pink native grape found wild in North Carolina around 1801 — and made a sparkling wine from it by the traditional Champagne method. It became a sensation. The Illustrated London News declared his Sparkling Catawba superior to the Champagnes of France, and in 1854 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote an actual poem, "Ode to Catawba Wine," rating this American bottle above the pride of Europe. For a moment, the center of American wine was Ohio, and its grape was a native.

Concord, Welch's, and the grape that went sober

The most famous American grape of all took a stranger road. In 1849, in Concord, Massachusetts, a farmer named Ephraim Wales Bull selected a hardy native seedling and gave us the Concord — the taste of grape jelly, grape soda and childhood.

Then, in 1869 in Vineland, New Jersey, a Methodist minister and dentist named Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch did something quietly radical: he pasteurized Concord juice to stop it from fermenting, and sold it as "Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine." A temperance man, he wanted an alcohol-free communion cup. The wine world barely noticed. But that bottle of stopped-fermentation juice became Welch's, put a native American grape in every refrigerator in the country, and — during Prohibition — helped a lot of Americans quietly keep the grape in their lives without the wine. It's the underdog grape that conquered America by refusing to become wine at all.

Norton — the serious one

Save room for the grape that deserves a real glass. Norton was introduced by Dr. Daniel Norborne Norton of Richmond, Virginia, in the 1820s, and unlike its cousins it makes a genuinely serious dry red — dark, savory, ageworthy, and free of the musky "foxiness" that European palates held against native grapes. It became the backbone of the Missouri wine industry around the German town of Hermann, and at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair a Missouri Norton was celebrated among the best red wines shown by any nation.

Its parentage is debated — Norton is probably not a pure native but an aestivalis-based hybrid — so treat "America's true native grape" as a fond nickname rather than a botanical fact. What isn't debated is the wine. If you want to actually taste the American underdog story rather than read it, this is the bottle: browse Norton on Wine.com. For the sweeter Southern side of the family, look for Muscadine and Scuppernong.

Why this is the underdog's holiday

The throughline of this whole site is that great wine doesn't have to be famous. No grapes prove it harder than the American natives. They saved the entire industry and got a footnote. They made world-beating sparkling wine and got replaced. They produced a serious red that beat Europe in 1873 and then nearly vanished. And the toughest of them all, the muscadine, couldn't even join the rescue it was built for.

That's the American wine story: overlooked, resilient, and better than its reputation. Exactly the kind of underdog worth raising a glass to on the Fourth. If you want the wider world of overlooked grapes, start with the lesser-known wines worth switching to or the Underdog Starter List — and pour something the crowd forgot.