From Bordeaux to California: Cabernet Sauvignon’s Journey Westwards

Let’s imagine a dinner party where around the table you have seated Sir Joseph Banks, Thomas Jefferson, Louis Devignes, Antoine Delmas, William Lee, Peter Legaux and Agoston Haraszthy.  They were all – give or take a few decades – contemporaries in the late 18th and early 19th century with nationalities ranging from British (Banks), French (Devignes, Delmas, Legaux), Hungarian (Haraszthy) and American (Jefferson, Lee).

All larger-than-life explorers with an eye on what history would say about them. And all united by their impact on the growth of Cabernet Sauvignon in California.

They shared a love of science, exploration and travel, so we could expect the conversation to be lively. And the food copious, as they all seem to have had serious appetites, so let’s serve them up beef tenderloin, braised lamb, veal tongue, turtle soup venison chops and soufflés, all of which would have been typical foods for the wealthy around this time.

Conversation might start out with Sir Joseph Banks being peppered with questions. Certainly I have a few. This is a man who had a front seat for Captain Cook’s 1768 expedition on the Endeavour to South America, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia. He might not have directly set foot in California (he died 30 years before the state joined the Union), but he is in many ways the grandfather of the modern wine industry right across the so-called New World.

Images above from left to right: Antoine Delmas Vineyard.  William Lee, first American consul in Bordeaux.  Agoston Haraszthy introduced thousands of European grape vines into California.

He spent his career importing and exporting botanical samples, including countless vine cuttings, building up 11,000 cultivated species in London’s Kew Gardens and sending a further 20,000 samples around the world. We have records of numerous letters being exchanged via various mutual friends discussing the work of both Banks and Jefferson, almost always filled with botanical queries over anything from dry rice seeds to geranium bulbs, but they don’t seem to have met directly. Jefferson only visited Kew once, in 1786, and there is no record of Banks being there to receive him, so our dinner party would serve as an excellent opportunity for these two men to exchange ideas directly. What is certain is that both were polymaths, their interests mirroring each other on other sides of the world, both wine lovers and gourmets – and both provided inspiration for the world of botany and viticulture for centuries to come.

Jefferson had more direct contact with two other men around our dining table; Peter Legaux and William Lee. Each one played key roles that get us closer to landing Cabernet Sauvignon in California. Lee, who was born in Boston, began his career aged 18 as a commission merchant, meaning a trader who bought and sold a variety of goods on behalf of others, taking a fee each time. He travelled to Europe, moving through Great Britain and Holland before ending up in to Bordeaux in 1796, where he settled and was appointed, in 1801, American Consul by the newly-sworn-in President Jefferson. This was a time when Bordeaux was the most important port for transatlantic trade, with 173 American ships registered in the local docks in 1801 alone.

A consul’s job was essentially to be a shipping agent, overseeing the transatlantic trade, assisting captains and their crew, and sending intelligence to Washington about the local political situation – something that would dominate Lee’s time as Consul from 1801 until 1816, with war between France and England ever threatening. Lee was, by all accounts, the most successful of the Consuls who worked across France during those years, described as orderly and efficient, writing regular updates and above all extremely loyal to Jefferson (a book of his letters is entitled A Yankee Jeffersonian, a phrase that he used to describe himself on many occasions).

You can picture him at the dining table dressed, as all consuls were, in the uniform of the American navy, with a deep blue coat with red facings, linings and cuffs, blue breeches with yellow buttons, black cockades and a small ceremonial sword. I’m hoping someone is pouring him a large glass of wine in recognition of the role he played, in 1805, in spreading the fame of Cabernet Sauvignon in the young nation of the United States of America. He did this by sending 4,500 vine cuttings of Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion to the Pennsylvania Vine Company in an attempt to ensure its new planting project was a success.

This was half a century before the 1855 classification anointed these châteaux as First Growths of Bordeaux, but they were already the most prestigious properties in the region, and choosing them as donors of vines was a clear vote of confidence in the project. We don’t, as is often the case, have a record of exactly which varieties he sent, but plantings in those châteaux in the early 19th century would have been dominated by Malbec along with Cabernet Sauvignon (also known as Petite Verdure or sometimes Petit Cabernet), Cabernet Franc, traces of Merlot and a host of now rare names such as Castets and Sainte-Macaire. There were white varieties also, lots of them – most importantly for this story of course Sauvignon Blanc, one half of a spontaneous crossing in Bordeaux vineyards with Cabernet Franc a century earlier to produce Cabernet Sauvignon.

The recipient of the vines was Peter Legaux. Born in Metz, northeastern France, Legaux had emigrated to the United States in 1786 after what seems to have been a colourful and slightly shady life as a local politician in both France and the French West Indies. He seems to have wound up several of his new neighbours in America also, but he is also the first of the men at our dining table to have genuinely focused his life on bringing viticulture to the United States.

On arrival in Philadelphia, he bought a 206-acre estate at Spring Mill, Montgomery Country, where he began planting European vines and building vaults for storage of wine. In 1793 the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized the incorporation of a company to promote Legaux’s vineyard by subscription – making clear that he was looking for investors.

The source for much of this is the Historical Society of Montgomery County, and I thoroughly recommend reading its research in detail. He was nothing if not ambitious, writing to Jefferson in March 1801 to congratulate him on the presidency and offering to send him thousands of vines to plant in Virginia. When Jefferson politely declined, Legaux tried again, writing to him about the difficulties in establishing his vineyard and inviting the president to become an investor. He apparently was not able to coax any money from him (in fact let’s assume Jefferson would not want to be sat next to him at our dinner), but he did send vines to Jefferson’s Monticello estate in 1802.

A few years later, the Bordeaux vines arrive from Lee. Legaux’s diary entry from April 15 1805, held by the American Philosophy Society, records: ‘This day at ½ past 10 o’clock at Night, I received a letter from Mr. McMahon with 3 boxes of Grapevines, sended by Mr. Lee Consul Americain from Bordeaux, all in very good order and good plantes of Chateaux Margeaux, Lafitte, and Haut Brion. 4500 plantes for 230 # . . . and order to send in Town for more etc.’

We don’t know if any of these vines ended up in California in the following decades, but we do know that Legaux’s vineyard went a long way to establishing an industry that was slowly but inexorably heading west, and we know that early vines in California came from two sources: European imports, and shipments from these earlier-established vineyards in New England, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Twenty years later, and we finally have near-certainty of Cabernet Sauvignon making its way west. It came care of Jean-Louis Vignes (or Don Luis Vignes as he was known locally in a region that was dominated by Spanish-influence at the time). Vignes (yes, his name really does translate as Vines) emigrated in 1826 from the Bordeaux region, arriving in El Dorado, California, in 1831.

Vignes was born in Cadillac, a small wine producing town on the Right Bank of Bordeaux that has, incidentally, had an outsized influence on American culture, first with Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701 and was immortalised with the Cadillac car, and now Vignes, who is less well known but whose legacy can be felt every time you open a glass of Napa Cab.

Descendants of Vignes still live in California, looking after a family archive that is partly kept at the Seaver Center in LA and was initially created by Pierre Vignes, brother of Jean-Louis and a man who emigrated to work on his brother’s successful vineyard in the 1840s. The current generation very kindly sent me the only known photograph of Jean-Louis Vignes, and ensured access to whatever research has been done to date.

Vignes apparently left France, with his wife and four children, in November 1826 intending to establish a plantation in the Sandwich Islands but ended up near Honolulu, where he raised sugar cane, vines and cattle, before finding a job heading up a distillery. When the distillery closed, Vignes was already 51, but uprooted his family again, boarding the trading vessel Louisa in May 1831 to set sail for Monterey. Two years later he made his way to the pueblo (or small town as it was then) of Los Angeles.

Vignes bought a tract of land adjacent to the Los Angeles River (I’m thinking not coincidentally a similar layout to the one he came from in Cadillac – a winegrowing town set on the banks ofBordeaux’s Garonne river). Here he laid out El Aliso Vineyard and became the most important winemaker in California, producing as many as forty thousand gallons (something like 20,000 bottles) a year. We know that he planted the local Mission grape that was popular at the time, but also that he sent to Bordeaux for cuttings of the varieties that he knew from back home, and that almost certainly included Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. The cuttings were brought in via Boston and Cap Horn and then grafted onto local American rootstock – several decades before other locals popularised European vitis vinifera plants in California.

So much of tracing Cabernet Sauvignon’s early journey is guesswork because it would take another century, and Frank Schoonmaker’s championing of varietal labelling, to really make the concept of recording individual grape varieties a reality. But we have another Frenchman to thank for the first time that we can unequivocally see Cabernet’s footprint.

This is our last-but-one dining companion, Antoine Delmas, who arrived in San Francisco aged 31 in 1849. He had been a nurseryman back in France and established a similar nursery in San José in 1851, importing 10,000 cuttings in 1854 alone. It was here that he planted – and kindly wrote it down – both ‘Cabrunet’ and ‘Merleau’ (he also imported, apparently, the French snail with the intention of indulging his culinary passion for them, something that has gone down less well with local gardeners over the years).

By this point, Delmas was far from alone. During the decade from 1852 to 1862, California nurserymen and ambitious winemakers brought in endless vinifera cuttings and rooted vines to plant in California to satisfy a growing thirst. Local records show that in 1855 alone, total sales of still wine came to almost 14,000 barrels and 120,000 cases.

All of which brings us neatly to our final dinner guest, Agoston Haraszthy. This Hungarian nobleman, traveller, writer, distiller, plantation owner and general all-round adventurer gets perhaps the most credit from history for introducing European grape varieties to California. Unquestionably he deserves much credit for importing 100,000 vine cuttings of 350 varieties following his trip around the wine regions of Europe in 1861. He was appointed to do this by the Governor of California, John G Downey and his book Grape Culture, Wine and Wine-making that was published in 1862 had a huge impact on local production. He had founded Buena Vista winery in Sonoma back in 1857 and – right up until his death in the jaws of a crocodile in Nicaragua in 1869 – was a tireless promoter of quality wine from vitis vinifera grapes. But he was not the first.

Cabernet’s fame was cemented over the following decades, when men such as Gustave Neibaum planted the variety at Inglenook in 1883, along with John Drummond in Sonoma and Morris Estee in Napa. In 1885 the most expensive wine in Napa was recorded as a Cabernet Sauvignon from Spring Mountain, called Miravalle, owned by San Francisco financier Tiburcier Parro, another early proponent of a variety that today dominates the psychological landscape of the much of California. But all owe a debt of gratitude to our earlier explorers. Let’s raise a glass to them here.

First published in On California, Académie du Vin Library, 2021

Official publication date is 25th October but already available for pre-order via https://academieduvinlibrary.com/shop/