foggy property and moved down the San Francisco peninsula about 40 kilometres (25 miles) to Crystal Springs, where by 1856 he had managed to acquire some 1,000 acres. Cattle, fruit trees, strawberries, grain, grapes; he raised them all. He also went into the gold-assaying business which was frantically overstretched by the flow of gold from the mines, and in no time was made the US government’s smelter and refiner: the head of the San Francisco mint. No novelist could have invented Haraszthy. There is a surprise around every corner of his life – and how many lives have had so many corners? After two years of supervising the blazing furnaces of the mint, which ran day and night, he was charged with embezzling $151,000 worth of gold. What had happened, as the jury discovered, was that the rooftops of San Francisco were liberally gilded with the specks of gold that had flown up the overheated chimney. While the mint was too hot, Crystal Springs, Haraszthy found, was too cold. Even down the peninsula he had a fog problem: his grapes were failing to ripen. In his mind’s eye he had an earthly paradise north of the Bay, where he had called on General Vallejo. Sitting on the porch of Lachryma Montis, the legend runs, he had sipped his host’s wine and delivered the deathless line: ‘General, this stuff ain’t bad!’ In January 1857 he bought 560 acres almost next door to Vallejo and set his son Attila to planting cuttings from Crystal Springs, while he projected a sort of Pompeian villa to be called Buena Vista. This is where his contribution to California’s wine growing really began. In contrast to the General and everyone else, he planted dry slopes with no possibility of irrigation. Most of his vines were still the faithful old Mission, but there was no mistaking the difference in quality that dry-farming made. Furthermore he persuaded a dozen prominent San Franciscans to invest with him in the new experiment. Charles Krug, shortly to become the virtual founder of the Napa Valley wine industry and the deadly rival of Sonoma, was among them. For the moment the competition was between Haraszthy and Vallejo. A newspaper reported in 1860 that ‘there is still an active rivalry [between them] as to who shall have the neatest-looking vine-fields and make the best wine. Dr Faure, a French gentleman, has charge of the General’s wine department. His last year’s make of white wine is of excellent quality.’ Meanwhile Haraszthy, at the request of the Californian State Agricultural Society, wrote a Report on Grapes and Wines in California, a manual on planting and winemaking, urging experimentation of all kinds, particularly with different vines on different soils – but also a polemic urging the government to spend money on collecting cuttings in Europe using the consulate service, and distribute them in California. At Buena Vista he propagated vines by the hundred thousand. And he dug deep tunnels in the hillside to store their produce.
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ON THE CUSP OF DISCOVERY…
Haraszthy was still not ready to pause for breath. He urged that more research was needed. In 1861 the state governor commissioned him to visit Europe to learn all he could in the best wine areas and to bring back vines. His journey from San Francisco via New York to Southampton took six weeks. From late July to October he stormed round Europe, from Paris to the Rhine, to Switzerland, to Piedmont and Genoa, to the Languedoc, to Bordeaux, round Spain, to Montpellier and Burgundy, and back to Liverpool. Within six months he was back in Sonoma, finishing his book on the whole experience and awaiting the arrival of 100,000 vines of 300 different varieties, which the Wells Fargo Company delivered in January. Most writers agree that this collection was the Hungarian’s most important contribution to California’s viticulture. It (theoretically) made possible all the experiments that were so necessary to match vines with soils and climates. That they were largely frustrated by the legislature, who declined to distribute the cuttings, or even to pay him for them, was partly perhaps due to the Civil War in the distant east (Haraszthy, as you might expect, supported the rebel South), but largely to the stinginess and apathy of civil servants. Nothing (or not greatly) daunted, Haraszthy did his best to distribute them himself. Just how essential his imports were is shown in the plantings that, even two years later, he and Vallejo had in Sonoma, the most go-ahead district in the state. Both were still planting the Mission massively. Haraszthy had 120,000 Mission vines established, plus 140,000 newly planted, as against 6,000 ‘foreign’ vines established, and 40,000 new-set. Vallejo had 40,000 old Mission and 15,000 new, with 3,000 established foreign vines and 12,000 new. It was only from the mid-1860s that superior vines were available in any numbers in California, with Sonoma enormously in the lead. The next few years saw the apotheosis of Buena Vista, and its collapse. The final act of Haraszthy’s frantic story should be told here, before we survey the rest of the awakening state. In 1868, disillusioned with California, he decided the future lay in Nicaragua, rum and sawmills. In 1869 he fell into a stream where there were alligators.
This excerpt is from The Story of Wine – From Noah to Now by Hugh Johnson, Chapter 35 ‘East Coast, West Coast’, Académie du Vin Library (London) 2020. Reproduced here with kind permission of the author.
THE MADNESS OF AGOSTON HARAZTHY
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