Herbemont GrapeHERBEMONT

Named for the early nineteenth-century viticulturist and author, Nicholas Herbemont, the complex hybrid of Vitus aestivalis v. borquiniana and Vitis vinefera gained a reputation as a versatile table and wine grape during the 1810s and 1820s in the American southeast.  It had substantial resistance to Pierce's disease and Phylloxera, some resistance to black rot and mildew, and grew well in hot weather zones.  In the 1820s it became the hybrid wine grape that produced the best quality wines and made up most of Herbemont's pioneering vintages.  

Called the Warren grape in Georgia and the Herbemont Madeira in the midwest, the Herbemont grape was processed into  white wines, rose wines, and light red wine.  Herbemont and his followers used the Lenoir, or Black Spanish grape, for deep red wines.  They became the foundation grapes of deep southern viticulture, much as the Catawba, the Norton, and the Delaware became the foundation hybrids for viticulture in the Ohio River Valley.  Only in Missouri did the Herbemont, the Norton, and the Catawba get planted in substantial acreages in proximity with one another.  The heyday of the Herbemont ended for much of the United States in 1870s when the phylloxera outbreak in France caused nearly every Herbemont planting in North America to be uprooted and shipped across the Atlantic to provide resistant rootstocks upon which to graft the various Vitis vinefera varieties found in Europe's great wine estates. Because it did not grow easily from cuttings and sometimes rejected grafts, it would be replace by other North American Native rootstocks in the later 1880s.  While Herbemont vineyards dotted the southern half of the United States to the end of the 19th century, only in Texas did it become the focus of robust viticulture and breeding experiments. 

Nicholas Herbemont discovered the grape growing on the plantation of Judge Huger in Columbia, South Carolina.  Its presence there had been noted as early as 1798.  The grape favored hillsides on limestone soil. It lacked cold tolerance, so did not thrive north of Cincinnati.  

Thomas V. Munson described the Herbemont thusly: "Vine exceedingly vigorous; healthy and long-lived throughout the South . . . . The vine is prolific; the berries are of a dull brownish-red color; skin thin, tough, never cracks, pulp all juice, of a sprightly very sweet agreeable flavor when fully ripe; seeds small." Though consumed as a table grape, the berries were too small to compete on the produce stand; consequently they were mostly enjoyed by home growers.  In Texas the Herbemont was used primarily for wine-making, producing white or amber colored vintages of solid merit.  [Thomas Volney Munson, Foundations of American Grape Culture (1909), 143.]

Image:  Ulysses Hedrick, Grapes of New York (1913). 

David S. Shields