Deep Roots
Photo courtesy Stone Hill Winery.
When Paulus Gast’s neighbors heard he was going to plant wine grapes, they urged him to reconsider. Potatoes would be a much safer choice.
Twenty-four-year-old Gast had recently returned from fighting in General Sherman’s army, and after marrying in 1865, he bought a few acres of land in the present-day St. Louis neighborhood of Baden. He and his new wife, Emily, cleared the brush themselves, and harvested their first grapes three years later. Gast had become a protégé of Stone Hill Winery founder Michael Poeschel before the Civil War, when he was just 19 and a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Gast built the successful Gast Wine Co. – he later switched to brewing – according to the tenets of viticulture he had learned under Poeschel in Hermann, Missouri; Poeschel even joined him in the enterprise after selling Stone Hill. Railroads took his wine as far as Florida and Boston – in 1892 alone, he harvested 100,000 pounds of grapes. Not long after Gast’s death in 1906, Hermann boasted 60 wineries. Then came Prohibition. It took more than 80 years to rebuild Missouri’s wine culture to its former volume – and it certainly didn’t happen overnight.
Missouri finally allowed the issue of domestic winemaking licenses for up to 5,000 gallons in 1943, and St. Louis doctor Axel Arneson first planted hybrid grapes in 1951 (what was previously his livestock farm later grew into Peaceful Bend Winery in Steeleville, Missouri). In 1957, William B. Stolz planted Concord grapes outside of St. James. Others followed, and by the time the production limit was increased in 1973, Stone Hill Winery was making 60,000 gallons per year. The Missouri wine industry was back in business, and its legacy would soon be cemented, thanks to a new designation from the U.S. government.
An American Viticultural Area, or AVA, is a wine-grape-growing region defined by specific geographic characteristics and boundaries, as designated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Similar to European requirements – legally, a sparkling wine must be made in Champagne, France, to be called Champagne, for instance – 85 percent of a wine’s grapes must be grown within the AVA if the area is referenced on the label.
But the very first designated AVA was not Napa Valley, or even Sonoma, but Augusta, Missouri. It was granted the designation on June 20, 1980, eight months before Napa Valley became California’s first AVA. The basic idea is that each AVA has climate and soil that affect the characteristics of the wine. In Augusta, the soil is Hayne Silt-Loam, a mixture of clay and silt – heavily clay in lower elevations and more silty at higher elevations. Hermann is characterized by sandstone bluffs and a fertile river valley, the combination of which helps counter mildew caused by humidity. The climate in Missouri’s third AVA, the Ozark Highlands, is drier than the other two, but the soil, a combination of sandy loam and clay, retains moisture. All three are now encompassed by a larger AVA: Ozark Mountain.
When most 19th century settlers began to arrive in rural Missouri in earnest, they weren’t planning to plant vineyards. Although wild grapes wound around the ridges and valleys of the Missouri River, the first German pioneers were hoping to build a center of manufacturing and agriculture, like St. Louis. What they built was the foundation for today’s wine country.