Norton
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| The Chrysalis View | ||
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Here at Chrysalis, we've undertaken a serious commitment
to restoring the native American grape, Norton, to its position of prominence as a source
of world class wines. Cloaked in myth and mystery for decades, Norton thrives in the
mid-Atlantic and Midwestern regions, and produces a robust red wine with big fruit flavors
that ages beautifully over the years. One hundred and twenty five years ago, Norton
wines were deemed the “best
red wine of all nations” at a worldwide competition in Vienna. Chrysalis Vineyards has now established what is believed to the largest planting of Norton in the Eastern United States, with additional vineyards to come. We hope to establish a new standard of excellence for the creation of world class wines from this classic American vine.
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| Paul Roberts on Norton | ||
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We've asked Paul Roberts of Deep Creek Cellars to share his considerable expertise on the history of Norton wine. For even more detail, see Paul's wonderful book, From This Hill, My Hand, Cynthiana's Wine, available through Amazon.com. |
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Norton,
America’s True Grape: Whence, and Whither? By Paul L. Roberts |
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Wind turns grape flowers to berries by pollination. Yeast
turns its berries to wine by fermentation. Such transformations have
captivated man since the dawn of time, but perhaps wine holds its special prominence in
the human experience because in winemaking man and nature do not work at odds. They
conspire jointly. This led the great 19th century French gourmand Brillat-Savarin to
remark that the behavior differences worth noting between humans and other creatures were
that we posses (1) a fear of the future, and (2) a desire for fermented beverages! A more certain truism, as most
people know, is that the world’s most beloved wine grapes (vitis vinifera: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay,
Pinot Noir, Riesling, etc.) originated in southern Europe or perhaps in the nearby areas
of Asia. But what about North America’s native grapes? Surely there cannot be so
great a difference between plants that one continent can produce many grapes for great
wines, while another continent produces none or few. But so it is. Of the roughly 50
species of grapes, nature has seen fit to equip very few with enough natural sugar in most
years to be made into pleasant wine. And among the two dozen or so grape species native to
North America, only one has proven itself capable of good dry table wines. Its scientific
name is vitis aestivalis, and its best
representative — once a staple of American winemaking, decades before Prohibition
— is becoming increasingly well-known once again to wineries and wine lovers in more
than a dozen states east of the Rockies: Norton. _____________ Some call this quixotic variety
Cynthiana. Whether it and Norton are a cross between aestivalis
and another species, or they are a wild grape, a pure aestivalis, is simply not known. Some experts
suspect a cross with vinifera, but no apparent
way exists to resolve the question. Aestivalis and its natural sub-specie variants are
common along the fringes of lowland forests across eastern, southern, and central North
America. Early works on American horticulture, such as Philadelphian John Bartram’s
in the 1770s, describe grapes which we may conclude today were aestivalis. In his travels through hill and valley
in the Mid-Atlantic region of the early colonies, he reports residents’ preference
for a small but highly flavored wild black grape especially suited, it was said, for
winemaking. The type was well-enough known to be gathered already by a nickname: “summer
grape.” (Later scientific classifications would build on that moniker by assigning
the species its Latin description “aestival:
of or relating to summer.”) Many ardent horticulturists
concentrated on this common species in the early nineteenth century — domesticating
native plant species for home gardens and producing hybrid crosses from these natives was
something of a national preoccupation during the period — and Norton as a named
variety was available for sale commercially by 1830. By American standards, this makes it
ancient; in fact, it most likely is the oldest native grape now in wide cultivation. Grapes native to
North America have generally not been prized for their wine, especially for their dry
wines. The reason is a set of chemical flavor and aroma constituents which in the wine
trade are called “foxyness”; sometimes the character is a cloying, bubble-gum
smell and taste, and sometimes it’s more like tart strawberries. A half-dozen or so
commercial grape varieties of native American ancestry are grown in a broad swath from
western Kansas to eastern Virginia, and many wineries turn the odd fruit-cocktail foxyness
to their advantage in sweet wines, where such characteristics are tolerable. But while
many people enjoy the “American” flavor, as found in Concord grape jelly, for
example, this characteristic usually mars dry table wines. Only native American grapes,
principally of the labrusca species, possess
this peculiar property, but for some reason Norton wines have none of the foxyness.
Sometimes, in some years, from some regions, it does have an intensely “grapy”
flavor which hints at Concord, though more often in smell than taste. There’s even a
hint of elderberries in Norton’s flavor, especially when the wine is young. The
tantalizing hints of such flavor components in some Norton wine, identifying it as a
distinctively American beverage, may also help explain why consumers have been so fond of
this grape’s wine during the last two centuries. Capitalizing on
the naturally flavorful trait of this grape — after all, grapyness is pretty much
ideal for making wine — vintners in several states are making wines today of
world-class value from Norton. Missouri leads the pack, both historically and in recent
years, but it is a Virginia winery — Horton Vineyards near Charlottesville in Orange
County — that is spreading the story of Norton farthest and most successfully.
Another Virginia winery, Chrysalis Vineyards, is also completing plans to take Norton to a
national audience. At Horton Vineyards, owner Dennis
Horton has, since the early 1990s, trumpeted the variety’s virtues to an
ever-expanding crowd. His wine is now sold in all of the nation’s most important wine
cities — Washington, New York, San Francisco, Chicago — and Horton has done more
than anyone to encourage acceptance of the wine as an important varietal. Missouri’s winemakers,
meanwhile, have chosen to pursue a more provincial path. And who can blame them? Prices
for their Norton and Norton wines have tripled and quadrupled in recent years — now
averaging more than $20 a bottle at the wineries and in-state liquor stores — and
they cannot make enough to satisfy their local and regional customers. Certainly the consumer fascination
with this wine, which is typically the richest, darkest red on a winery’s list, has
coincided with the huge spike in red wine sales since the “60 Minutes”
ground-breaking report on the health benefits of red wine in 1995. (Missouri researchers,
incidentally, announced in 1998 that Norton possesses up to twice as much of the
beneficial chemical (reservatrol) as, for example, Cabernet Sauvignon contains.) At most
Midwestern wineries, vintage after vintage, the Norton varietals are the first to sell
out. Horton, on the other hand, has
pursued a national mass-market approach with his consistently fine $12 Virginia Norton. ________________ Many grapes have fantabulous
“creation stories,” and in this botanical world of wayfarers and wanderers, in
smoky dens of luxury and decadence, Norton claims a shadowy origin to match any.
Throughout its history, this dark orphan created a stir wherever it took root. That mysterious air — its
impossibly deep, nearly black robe; its velvety texture; its penetrating aroma and flavor
— definitely helped to spread its fame (and to rekindle interest in recent decades).
But Norton’s long history as a cultivated variety certainly must be seen as a mixed
blessing, for while recorded commentary of all manner exists about the wine, much is of a
dubious nature. Confusion began right from the
start — about the variety’s proper name — and it continues to this day. The year is 1820. Among the
countless backyard plant hybridists experimenting during this period was Dr. D.N. Norton
of Richmond, Virginia. The good doctor tinkered with a number of plants, but the grape
attributed to Dr. Norton, who brought no other examples to commercial prominence, was so
accidental that no one has determined the varieties he crossed to produce his namesake
hybrid. John McGrew has come closer than
anyone. The retired U.S. Department of Agriculture extension specialist’s research
about the doctor and his Norton grape occupied the better part of two years in the late
1980s. Exactness is not possible, McGrew concluded. “A real problem is that there’s
no known description of Dr. Norton’s grounds. I can’t find anything about his
garden in any historical papers,” he said. “All that is known comes from
second-hand accounts — statements about him and his work in the writings of others.” Still, McGrew figures he has a
pretty good idea of how Dr. Norton made his discovery. He reasons that since grapes from
seeds often mature into plants with characteristics somewhat different from their parents’,
the original Norton vine grew from the seed of a grape genetically related. Certainly aestivalis grows in the Richmond area. McGrew
guesses the winning “seedling” was one of many others the doctor planted in his
garden. Because grapes mutate so readily from seeds, planting the pips is the easiest way
to “create” new varieties. Creating new varieties from seed is certainly much
easier, requires less technical skill, than gathering pollen and manipulating it among the
tiny flowers on growing vines. Who knows — maybe the seedling caught the doctor’s
attention as he ambled past his compost pile one day; maybe his “experimentation”
was accidental; perhaps a robin robbed a grape from his garden, digested it, and planted
the seed for him with a drop of fertilizer to boot, and then he discovered the plant
already growing. It happens. Even though Norton was a
physician, professional training in horticultural experimentation was scarce. Speculation
about his original intentions and methods would be just that — speculation. But based
on the fact that the grape was first offered for sale at a commercial nursery in 1830, McGrew figures Dr. Norton isolated the
seedling as early as 1817, and perhaps as late as 1823 or ’24. Dr. Norton would have
spent most of the decade of the 1820s propagating the vine — with difficulty. For
reasons still unknown, the species will not produce roots routinely from “cuttings”
(branches clipped off the plant and buried in soil to force roots to grow from the
clipping). Most varieties root fairly easily using this technique. “But aestivalis is just one of those species that doesn’t,”
notes McGrew. “That’s been one of the factors that has held it back as a
commercial variety.” Recently, horticulturists have
perfected “green-growing,” e.g. planting green shoots clipped from the mother
vine in a carefully controlled environment of heat and moisture that quickly produces
roots on the shoot. But for centuries, what horticulturists did with hard-to-root plants
is likely what Dr. Norton did. He probably covered a cane from a growing vine in shallow
soil to force roots to grow from the covered buds and nodes. This trick, called “layering”
in the nursery trade, is one of the grape plant’s own survival traits. Its
ready-to-root personality makes vitis a highly
successful competitor in the world’s temperate and semi-temperate latitudes. This can be confirmed by an
average walk in the woods. Trying to find the original trunk of a single wild grape plant
is nearly impossible because everywhere the vine runs along the forest floor it sends out
new roots from nodes covered by moist humus. New leafy growth — a potential new plant
— shoots up above ground. In this way, the plant can withstand great vagaries; if all
of its roots could be dug up at once, or, say, frozen during a bitter winter, the vine
would die. It will regenerate, though, from any undamaged node in contact with damp soil
by sending out roots from the covered bud. Once a potential new plant shoots
up from a covered cane, the cane can be clipped on both sides of the new growth. Roots
below, leaves above — presto, a new plant.
And unlike propagation from seeds, these new plants genetically are identical to the
original. Layering is tedious and time-consuming but a sure-fire way to raise plants that
won’t root from cuttings. Dr. Norton probably stuck with the method, turning out enough
young plants to offer a bunch for sale after several years. This make sense. As McGrew
reasons, Dr. Norton would have learned first-hand after a few growing seasons that his
Norton’s Virginia Seedling was a handsome picture of vigor and health. Undoubtedly,
it was as free from the grape’s typical pests as any variety he had grown. (There are
very, very few varieties known anywhere in the world that resist disease as well or grow
as vigorously.) Maybe, just maybe, the Norton’s
joyful growth is why the doctor chose to name it for himself, instead of honoring a
favorite daughter, pony, stud ram, or horticultural comrade, as was the custom of the day.
(Angeline, Iona, Lenoir, Noah, and Stark’s Star are some of the more straightforward
examples.) Some reports, more reliable than
most from the era, contend that Dr. Norton’s homemade claret — not the grape
itself — was what the public clamored for most around his native Richmond. But
however it was that the news traveled, the Norton variety reached William Robert Prince by
1830. This fact is known, among precious
few in the saga, because that is the year of publication for Prince’s two-volume
A Treatise on the Vine, Pomological Manual. Prince
unceremoniously describes Norton among hundreds of other grape plants in his commercial
nursery. His work is considered the first of real consequence on viticulture to be
published in America. Since Prince’s off-hand
mention, hundreds of pages have been written about the aestivalis grape in plant science and wine industry
journals, as graduate students and their professors continue to explore the variety’s
past. More than 30 books published during the last century mention the grape and extol its
wine. Probably because of the grape’s commercial importance in the Midwest,
university research continues to be funded. But no account of the grape —
and specifically of the controversy surrounding its name — surpasses a summary
published nearly a century ago. The author was U.P. Hedrick. He
would go on to direct Cornell University’s esteemed school of horticulture and to
become, arguably, the leading figure in American horticulture between 1920 and 1940. As a
researcher at Cornell in the first decade of the 20th century, Hedrick was part of a team
that mounted several impressive studies of the nation’s fruit farming. The studies
were then published by the New York legislature. Among them was
The Grapes of New York (1908). In it, Hedrick tells
Norton’s story masterfully. As if to emphasize the shortcomings of contemporary
competitors to Prince’s nursery, Hedrick notes that William Robert Prince’s
writings were “characterized by a clear, vigorous style and by accuracy in statement.”
He stressed that when Dr. Norton sent his specimens in 1830 to Prince, fourth in a family
line of proprietors of America’s most renowned nursery in Flushing, New York, the
doctor informed Prince that his namesake had originated from the seed of two other
varieties. The varieties, Dr. Norton advised, were Bland and Miller’s Burgundy,
growing near one another in his garden. But, continues Hedrick: This
parentage, it appeared later, was undoubtedly an error as the Norton shows none of the
characters of either Bland or Miller’s Burgundy. Prince’s description leaves
little doubt that his Norton was the Norton of to-day. In 1861 there was an article
published in the Horticulturlist
by a Mr. Lemosy
saying that the original Norton had been discovered in 1835 by his father, Dr. F.A. Lemosy
of Richmond, Virginia, on an island in the James River and that Dr. Norton secured the
variety from this source. The Lemosy angle would come to
haunt Dr. Norton. For many decades after the journal article cited by Hedrick, the man
(Dr. Norton) who had been credited in the three previous decades with the gift of this
fabulous little grape to America — a grape that, by 1850, was delighting growers and
international wine connoisseurs alike — was suspected of presenting as his own what
he had found growing wild on a riverbank. It seems the man
who had created the hybrid and named the grape was unofficially but effectively stripped
of honors. _________________ As the Lemosy theory made its
rounds, a group of German immigrants living in Philadelphia but itchy to move on bought
several hundred acres beside the Missouri River in Gasconade County, Missouri. They
proceeded to build a town, Hermann, with a main street exactly one foot wider than
Philadelphia’s Market Street. By the time their little nirvana
might be considered a place with staying power (the early 1850s), these Germans had
established a local economy as tied to wine as any ever in the New World. And one grape
above all the others, arriving there in about 1840 after being pronounced worthless by
Nicolas Longworth, the best-known winegrower in America at that time, had solidified its
influence in the hills around Hermann (as well as in Arkansas and Virginia at roughly the
same time). Missouri essayist, politician, and
winegrower Friedrich Muench proclaimed the little blue grape a gift “worth millions”
to his new home, for the red wine of Norton, he boasted, “when three or four years
old, is hardly to be surpassed.” While unanimity about the wine’s
quality developed quickly, debate about the grape’s origin was far less conclusive.
The appearance of the article about the Lemosy theory in the respected journal, the
Horticulturilist, certainly gave that theory clout.
Commentators and nursery catalogs were quick to quote it. Circulars in the 1870s from
nurseries that sold the grape, such as Bush & Son & Meissner near St. Louis,
credited Dr. Norton, but by 1883 the catalogs from the renowned firm gave one “Dr.
Lemosq” the honors. Bush & Son’s publications included a fruit-growing
manual, and were so popular that they became college agricultural texts. The firm was
among the Missouri nurseries credited with saving Europe’s vineyards in the late 19th
century after the phylloxera crisis. Their fruit-growing guides were even translated into
French and Italian. In its 1883 catalog, Bush &
Son, noting that Dr. Norton had propagated the vine by “transplanting layers from the
original vine to his garden,“ put a bizarre twist on the known truth by adding that
Dr. Norton had “introduced it to public notice.” Perhaps the company was
unwilling to breathe the name of their competitor Prince. Whatever the cause, the curious
words chosen by the influential Midwestern nursery to describe Norton’s provenance
were to be repeated dozens of times in print thereafter. A one-page
account in 1906, for instance, by Liberty Hyde Bailey, the well-regarded dean of
horticulture at Cornell who described Norton in his popular book as an epoch-maker, is
virtually identical to the falsity spread by Bush & Son. The confusion should have persisted for only two more years — a total of almost 50 — because in 1908 Hedrick came along in Grapes of New York to restore sanity. He does not mince words: "Since Dr. Norton had sent this variety to Prince prior to 1830, the [Lemosy] story is evidently wrong as to dates and is suspicious as to facts. It is probable, " he concludes, "that the true story of Norton will never be known." Thomas Munson, a pioneering
hybridist in turn-of-the-century Texas whose drawings of grapes are considered a national
treasure in the U.S. agriculture library in suburban Washington, undoubtedly had read
Hedrick’s description. Yet Munson also denied Dr. Norton his due when his eminently
scholarly Foundations of American Grape Culture
appeared
in 1911. Munson repeats the Lemosy theory, glossing over Hedrick’s point that Lemosy
could not have “discovered” the variety in 1835 if Dr. Norton had sent it to
Prince five years before that. As myth is known for its staying
power, Gerald Asher in a 1993 Gourmet article
calls the Lemosy theory the “accepted origin.” I consider the vines I own and
manage Cynthiana but tend to use the name interchangeably with Norton. If one works with
the varieties, a choice is required or otherwise a lot of time is chewed up saying “Norton,
er… Cynthiana” when talking with growers, winemakers, writers, retailers,
wholesalers, restaurateurs, tasting panelists, the press, the public. Wives. ____________ But what of the wines made from
this mysterious grape during the era of intrigue about its name? By the 1870s, the center of the
“Virginia claret” region, producing wines labeled Virginia Seedling or Norton,
was the southwestern part of the state near Charlottesville (a half-century after the
untimely death of a grape promoter who split his time about equally between governance and
gastronomy — Thomas Jefferson). In Missouri,
fine wines came from the central, eastern, and southwestern sections. In 1873, a Norton
made just south of St. Louis was declared the “best red wine of all nations” at
a worldwide competition in Vienna. The following year, a French
commission studying American wines at Montpellier gave Missouri’s Norton wines the
same high marks. Many of the nation’s finest hotels and restaurants stocked Missouri
and Virginia vintages. The wine was traded in probably two dozen states. President U.S.
Grant is known to have kept a righteous supply in his White House cellars. The grape was
tried but did not bear well in California conditions but
thrived as far north as Bass Island in Lake Erie off the Ohio shore, and
east to New York and New Jersey. (A few dozen old Norton vines still exist in New Jersey
vineyards, and plantings are occurring once again.) Between 1850 and
1900, producers in a dozen mostly southern and Midwestern states reported nothing but
success with the grape. It was also grown in France, certainly on a small scale, for at
least two decades in the late 19th century. In the modern
era, one of the earliest producers to make headlines outside his home state was Robert
Cowie of Cowie Cellars, near Altus, Arkansas. Cowie’s wine sneaked in among what was
otherwise a California landslide at a major eastern wine competition in 1984. This event
really started the current period of national recognition for the variety. Mentions of the
grape by national wine magazines are now fairly routine. Perhaps the biggest modern break
for Norton came in 1993, when Gourmet wine
columnist Gerald Asher devoted his April feature to a review of Missouri’s industry,
emphasizing an “indigenous grape that might yet do for Missouri what Cabernet
Sauvignon has done for California.” His was the first really substantive discussion
of Norton in a national periodical in more than a century. Lavished with five older
vintages from Stone Hill’s cellars in Hermann, Missouri, Asher wrote: “I was
astonished to find the wines so remarkably good. They were more meaty than fruity, with
something of the Rhone about them. The 1985, in particular, rounded out by its time in
wood and fully developed by several years in the bottle, was quite delicious.” ____________ Although Norton was described in
texts and catalogs for a century and a half as distinct from Cynthiana, and many growers
still insist there are subtle distinctions in the field, modern isozyme analysis has
proved them to be genetically identical. Researchers reached this
conclusion after exhaustive studies in the
early 1990s at the State Fruit Experiment Station of Southwest Missouri State University.
Using similar equipment and procedures, plant scientists in 1992 at Cornell reached the
same conclusion. As Hedrick wrote in 1908, “The
botanical differences of the two varieties are not greater than might be attributed to
environment, soil, climate and culture; but side by side the two grapes ripen at different
times, and the quality of the fruit, and more particularly of the wine, is such that the
varieties must be considered distinct. “The
distinction,” he adds wryly, “should be maintained, for Cynthiana is the better
grape of the two.” To this day,
plenty of growers and winemakers believe, like Hedrick did, that there are two distinct
varieties. Many people contend Cynthiana, which was introduced commercially as a named
variety in the 1850s, some 20 years after Norton, is simply a clone of Norton (in the same
way that Pinot Noir, for example, occurs as at least a half-dozen prominent clones in
Burgundy). In any event, Midwestern wineries seem to market Cynthiana wines as a lighter
drink for immediate enjoyment, while the wine from Norton, generally, is presented as the
one for longer aging. The variety
seems to possess an almost chameleon-like ability to adapt to local growing conditions
— it is very durable, hearty to at least –20° F, and nearly immune to all
diseases — and as a wine, to maintain a family resemblance while allowing individual
site conditions to shine through. In Missouri, aromas of coffee and mint are common, along
with intense raspberry and even cassis flavors typical of Bordeaux wines. A dark, almost
black, brickish red color is universal. Heavy oak aging is also the norm. And some Norton
wines from very old Missouri vineyards have a concentration and viscosity comparable to
Côte Rôtie in great years. Arkansas
wineries, on the other hand, always use the name Cynthiana and the wines typically are
lighter in color, more supple in texture, and are intended for drinking within two years
of the vintage. There are even frankly sweet Cynthiana table wines from Arkansas, while at
least one winery in nearby Kansas makes a highly acclaimed super-sweet port-style Norton
(as do a few producers in Missouri and Virginia). In fact, the success of these styles has
led some to wonder whether Norton made in the manner of Italian Amarone, from partially
raisined grapes, might make a wonderful libation. In the rolling
Allegheny Mountain foothills of Pennsylvania, where I introduced the grape in 1992 (and
produce a wine from it at our winery, Deep Creek Cellars, near Friendsville in western
Maryland), our Cynthiana has classic mountain-grown characteristics: taut acids and
intense flavors on a medium-light frame, with some mint but little coffee on the nose, and
more blueberry than bramble flavors in ripe years. We prize the grape in blending; in tiny
amounts, it seems to make any red cuvee taste just a little better! At least three
other growers now raise the grape in Pennsylvania. As noted
earlier, Virginia is quickly staking out a contemporary claim for its Norton wines. Horton’s
efforts to date have been consistently fruity early-drinkers with a heavy dose of oak. His
Norton resembles mid-weight Missouri efforts, though typically the Virginia wine has less
herbal character and often nice chocolatey complexity on a lithe frame. The fruit flavors
are less defined, being general “red fruits,” as the French say, and all in all
the wine seems to resemble a Rhone rather than a Bordeaux model. This may be because
Horton often blends in a dab of some Rhone varietal he grows on his estate. Ingleside
Plantation, in the Virginia Tidewater area due south of Washington, D.C., does not break
its Norton out as a varietal, but uses it as a base for a very popular blended red table
wine. At Pontchartrain
Vineyards in Louisiana, winemaker John Seago fashions a light-colored Cynthiana varietal
that knowledgeable enthusiasts compare to French Burgundy. One would think the heat of
Louisiana’s growing conditions would produce hulking tar-colored wines, but Seago
says the warm night-time temperatures are believed to somehow alter color pigments in the
grape’s skin, while also softening the wine’s acidity. “I have a
customer who said he was looking for the one word that describes my wine,” Seago
relates. “Finally he called and said. ‘Got it: Volnay!’ I said, ‘Man,
I’ll take it!” Cynthiana and
Norton were grown in Louisiana for at least four decades in the years leading up to
Prohibition. A chapter on agricultural in the history of the parish where Pontchartrain
Vineyards is located mentions both of the grape’s names prominently — as well as
its other old-time synonyms, Virginia Seedling and Norton’s Virginia Seedling. There are also
Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida Norton wines now on the
market, though they are never seen far from home. This condition represents a stunning
example of how interstate commerce is disrupted and consumers’ rights are trampled by
antiquated state liquor laws. Because so many states severely restrict the selling and
shipping of wine by mail order, most people have no way to acquire the wines of these
small producers and to appreciate the grape’s fascinating impact on American history.
Zinfandel is
often described as America’s first and most original gift to the world of wine.
Actually, it’s Norton. |
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Technical Notes: Norton (sometimes referred to as Cynthiana). The Norton is dark in color with big fruity flavors, firm acidity, and a sweet taste that does not deliver typical "foxy" flavors and fragrances. It is very Bordeaux-like with no grass, herb, hard acids, astringency, or tongue-wrenching tannin. The very best drinks effortlessly, ages magnificently, and no American wine cellar is complete without it. It is hardy to -20°F, not susceptible to the pesty and often highly destructive Japanese beetle, or to Black Rot. This is the most expensive non-vinifera grape in eastern America.
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