American wine
[4] With more than 1,100,000 acres (4,500 km2) under vine, the United States is the fourth-largest wine producing country in the world, after Italy, Spain, and France.
[5][6] The first Europeans to explore North America, a Viking expedition from Greenland, called it Vinland because of the profusion of grape vines they found.
The earliest wine made in what is now the United States was produced between 1562 and 1564 by French Huguenot settlers from Scuppernong grapes at a settlement near Jacksonville, Florida.
[5] In the early American colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas, wine-making was an official goal laid out in the founding charters.
These early plantings met with failure as native pest and vine disease ravaged the vineyards.
[9] In 1683, William Penn planted a vineyard of French vinifera in Pennsylvania; it may have interbred with a native Vitis labrusca vine to create the hybrid grape Alexander.
Today, French-American hybrid grapes are the staples of wine production on the East Coast of the United States.
[6] On November 21, 1799, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill to establish a commercial vineyard and winery.
The Dufour family abandoned Kentucky, and migrated west to Vevay, Indiana, a center of a Swiss-immigrant community.
[14] In California, the first major vineyard and winery was established in 1769 by the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra near San Diego.
Jean-Louis Vignes was one of the early settlers to use a higher quality vinifera in his vineyard near Los Angeles.
[4] The first winery in the United States to become commercially successful was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the mid-1830s by Nicholas Longworth.
[6] In the late 19th century, the phylloxera epidemic in the West and Pierce's disease in the East ravaged the American wine industry.
Exceptions were made for sacramental wine used for religious purposes, and some wineries were able to maintain minimal production under those auspices, but most vineyards ceased operations.
Many talented wine-makers had died, vineyards had been neglected or replanted with table grapes, and Prohibition had changed Americans' taste in wines.
Wine-makers also cultivated vineyards in Oregon and Washington, on Long Island in New York, and numerous other new locales.
In June 1980, the Augusta AVA in Missouri was established as the first American Viticultural Area under the new appellation system.
[22] For the sake of wine labeling purposes, the use of state and county appellations were grandfathered in and are still used often in lieu of AVAs.
For the majority of states, this led to the development of a three-tier distribution system between the producer, wholesaler, and consumer.
