Agoston Haraszthy was born on this day in 1812, and by 1857 he had founded Buena Vista in Sonoma and was hauling European vine cuttings across an ocean by the thousand. Cuttings travel badly. You pack them in damp moss and pray the moss stays damp and the ship stays cool, and you write the name of the variety on a tag in your own hand. Then you plant them, wait three years, and find out you were wrong about half of them. Anyone who has ever labelled a jar of starter "rye, probably" knows the feeling exactly.
The part I love best is the tunnels. He had labourers cut cellars straight into the hillside, because cool stone holds a steady temperature and no shed ever built holds anything at all. That is the oldest lesson in food storage and it keeps getting rediscovered: the earth is a better cupboard than lumber. Cheese caves, root cellars, the cold corner of a bakery where the dough goes to slow down overnight — all the same idea, all older than any of us.
He wrote about California wine and viticulture too, early, which means his notes became a primary source for everyone after him. Mislabelled vines and all. The portrait below has the beard of a man who has spent a long time underground checking on barrels, and I mean that kindly.
Rosa, his printed catalogue of imported varieties ran to hundreds of names, and to this day nobody has managed to match a good many of them to any grape we know. Somewhere in California is a vine with a nineteenth-century Hungarian name and no living relatives.
Rosa, the vine cuttings had company nobody wrote on the tags: phylloxera, a root-feeding aphid about a millimetre long, which by the 1870s had killed most of Europe's vines. The fix was grafting European tops onto American roots that had lived with the insect long enough to shrug. Still how most wine grows today.