THE MADNESS OF AGOSTON HARASZTHY Hugh Johnson introduces the Hungarian count and ‘all-purpose adventurer’ who revolutionized California wine growing at a time when gold miners had ready thirsts to slake. HUGH JOHNSON (1989/2020) There are many parallels between Agoston Haraszthy and Australia’s James Busby. Each is known as the ‘father of wine growing’ in his respective adopted land. Both introduced many of the vines that were to shape the flavours of the future. Both travelled to Europe to investigate and report, in most readable journals, on the regions that every ambitious wine grower would want to emulate. They were both quixotic men who left schemes half finished because something else caught their fancy. The principal difference is that Busby, the young Scot, set his heart on wine growing from the start, while Haraszthy, a nobleman (so he claimed) from a part of Hungary which is now in Yugoslavia, was an all-purpose adventurer who happened to pick on wine growing to absorb the energies of his middle years. Haraszthy arrives on the scene (and departs from it, too) in an aureole of legend. He was (it says) educated in law, served in the Austrian Imperial Guard at the age of 18 and acquired the rank of colonel, became private secretary to the Viceroy of Hungary under the Austrians, left to grow wine and silkworms on his country estate, married a Polish countess, the beautiful Eleanora de Dedinski, and became embroiled in the Magyar independence movement. Political exile was the reason he gave for suddenly taking ship from Hamburg to New York in 1840, at the age of 28. A young cousin who went with him said it was just wanderlust. The count – or colonel, he answered to either – made straight for Wisconsin, where he formed a partnership with an Englishman named Bryant to found the town that is now Sauk City. (He called it Town Haraszthy.) America was buzzing with such entrepreneurs at the time. They operated steamboats and stores, farms and construction companies. Haraszthy also found time to travel round the States and write a book encouraging his fellow-Hungarians to emigrate to this bountiful land. Indeed, he went home and fetched his family and his parents himself.
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ON THE CUSP OF DISCOVERY…
Agoston Haraszthy, already a legend in his own mind, took a ship from Hamburg to New York in 1840, his eventual destination California. Wine was one of his many motivations.
News of the gold-strike in California was bound to attract Haraszthy. He had been sadly disappointed that wine was not a proposition in icy Wisconsin. The whole family and a number of friends joined the ’49ers in the gruelling slog by ox-wagon down the Santa Fe trail, losing only one member, his 15-year-old son Gaza, who decided to enlist with a cavalry unit in New Mexico. Their goal was the new town of San Diego, just developing from the little mission pueblo and with a population of 650. Haraszthy was soon (instantly, rather) speculating in real estate, running a livery stable and even a butcher’s shop, and also running for election. In 1850 he became the town’s first sheriff. The jailhouse he built fell down, but the gallows did its work. Then in 1854 he tired of San Diego, and went to serve on the state assembly in California’s new capital, Sacramento, where he backed a move to divide the state in two. At the same time he bought land between San Francisco and the ocean: 200-odd acres near the old Mission Dolores. Was he about to settle down? If he had enquired about the mission he would have learned that its vineyard was never a success. Haraszthy nonetheless had a bundle of vines just arived from Hungary, and he planted them. According to his son Arpad, writing years later, they included the first plants of the vine that is inextricably associated with his name: the Zinfandel, and also the Muscat of Alexandria. There was a brisk market in San Francisco, Haraszthy discovered, for eating grapes. What he could not supply he bought in Los Angeles – the Mission grape was good to eat. Perhaps by buying different varieties from ‘Don Luis’ in Los Angeles he realized the possibilities (and the need) for more varieties in much larger numbers in North California. In any case he rapidly abandoned his
THE MADNESS OF AGOSTON HARAZTHY
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