- [Narrator] TasteMakers is brought to you with support from: Missouri Pork Association and Midwest Dairy.

(upbeat music) - In this special hour long episode, we are heading to Missouri wine country and exploring its roots as one of the most storied wine making regions in the United States.

I'm Cat Neville and this is TasteMakers.

(exciting music) I'm Cat Neville and for the past two decades I've been telling the story of local food.

In that time American food culture has exploded in tiny towns and big cities from coast to coast.

In TasteMakers I explore the maker movement and take you along for the journey to meet the makers who define the flavor of American cuisine.

(birds chirping) So how did wine making in Missouri actually begin?

Well, as European immigrants began to establish settlements and move West, they brought their beverage traditions with them, particularly cider and beer but of course also wine.

And in 1837, the town of Hermann was founded along the Missouri River and it soon became a thriving hub of wine production.

(soft music) - When Europeans were settling America, they had started on the East Coast and what they started with was stuff like apple cider, things like table wine and bourbon and such, two different categories came in later as we expanded across the country.

So, when Missouri started getting settled and the Germans had this idea of coming to Hermann, they brought their wine culture with them.

- Missouri is a very important part of the story of American wine, the German settlement society which essentially paid people or allowed people support to come to Hermann, Missouri in North Central Missouri to grow grapes.

Some of those people had experience doing that, some didn't, but they all understood that the job was create this beautiful agricultural society that mirrors, if you will, the goals of German society at that time.

- In the mid 1800s, German settlers came and they really established the grape growing in this region because for them it was they like kind of like the Rhineland.

It was literally like you were in Germany when you lived here back then, because they kept all the customs and you spoke German and they did bring all of their agriculture here.

And so it is so deeply rooted in this area that their history is just here, it's everywhere along the Missouri River Valley.

- 1837, this group of intrepid German travelers, they come down the Missouri River, it's the most difficult winter on record.

And when they get here, there's no real infrastructure.

They created the town from just with their own blood, sweat and tears essentially.

And the cultivation of wine was integral to them developing the town.

And I think that's so interesting that like, as part of the industry of Hermann, it really grew up around wine production.

Like that's what ended up becoming a focus of the economy of this region of the state.

- Hermann was settled in 1837 by the German settlement society of Philadelphia.

And they were hoping to establish this German Athens in the heart of Missouri.

They had these grandiose plans that Hermann would become a bigger city than Philadelphia and hence that's why Market Street is the width that is, it's larger than Market Street in Philadelphia.

They brought their culture of wine and beer to the town and started developing a grape growing industry and the two first commercial producers was Michael Poeschel and George Riefenstahl.

Michael Poeschel started right here at Stone Hill Winery with his Poeschel Wine Cellars, which Stone Hill eventually shortly thereafter became his brand.

He took on a partner, John Scherer, and they grew the business quite significantly and were shipping wine actually to Europe and all across the United States and by one account even to Asia.

So it really grew and numerous people got in on it.

The town started giving away lots if you would agree to grow grapes on 'em.

And I think, I wanna say it was like by 1849, Michael Poeschel was quoted as saying that there were 700,000 vines between Hermann and Gasconade.

It was the equivalent of about 700 acres, which is mind blowing when you think about it.

I mean, we're the largest grape grower in the State of Missouri today.

And we have just under 200 acres.

So when you think about 700 acres in this little community in 1849, it's fascinating.

And it continued to grow.

There was some research done way back in the '80s documenting all of these old historical wineries.

And it was over 60 that were in and around Hermann, some very small to the size of Stone Hill, which for a great period of the late 1800s was the second largest winery in the United States.

I mean, we're about 800,000 case winery today.

You know, we're one fifth of what Stone Hill was in its heyday.

- The wine industry in Missouri was thriving by the middle of the 19th century.

And just about that time, a tiny little bug called phylloxera hitched a ride on some American rootstock over to Europe and unbeknownst to them, the French vintners planted those vines.

But because the vinifera that was native to Europe didn't evolve alongside the phylloxera louse, they had no defense against infestation.

Missouri played a massive role in helping to solve the impending crisis.

(soft music) - The 18th and 19th centuries are a time of great discovery.

Certainly people are trying to understand what grows where, how the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom coexist and work together.

And so people are constantly shipping stuff back and forth.

We don't really realize during the 19th century that there's this bug called phylloxera.

There's some other bugs that we're starting to learn about and that can be really troublesome, we just know we can't grow European vines here in the United States, and we can't quite figure out what is to blame.

Now, there's a guy named Charles Valentine Riley, who lives here in Missouri and he's figured out that there's this bug called phylloxera.

He finds it fascinating because it goes through these various different stages.

I mean, in our vineyards here, you can still find phylloxera quite easily.

If you turn a leaf over and there's a whole bunch of little bulbous points on that leaf, that's a phylloxera bug doing its job, which is to gain whatever nourishment it can from the plant and move on.

It doesn't kill the plant.

It can create problems but they're usually not fatal.

Now, the difference here is that phylloxera we think in 1861 takes a trip aboard a steamship across the Atlantic.

We think because it was a steamship, not a sailing vessel that the time was shortened enough to allow the bug to survive.

And it shows up in the Rhone Valley.

And it is no exaggeration to say within 10 years or so, the entire French wine industry is decimated, is reeling.

And it spreads to Spain and Italy and everywhere else.

- The phylloxera plague or crisis was huge.

I mean, it literally was killing tens of thousands of acres of vineyards, killing that whole culture of the wine industry and the French put together these scientific panels of top researchers to try to figure out what was happening.

And they were in touch with leading growers and researchers over here and C.V. Riley finally identified the causal agent the phylloxera root loss.

That's a soil barn insect.

It lives off these grapevine roots, it feeds on 'em.

The native American varieties are hybrids that have a high level of native American genetics in their makeup are resistant to phylloxera 'cause the phylloxera evolved here in the United States or in North America I should say with the indigenous grape varieties.

- 95 or more percent of all the vines grown anywhere in the world are planted on American roots stock because it turned out there's your cure and it's C.V. Riley and it's George Husmann and it's Isidor Bush and Herman Yager, who quickly figure this one out.

They're like, well, we coexist with the plant.

So you graft our American rootstock with European vines.

It's expensive, it's difficult, but it can be done and your plants will be fine, your wine industry will recover.

It took decades for that to happen because it's a very expensive process.

And we think millions of plants were shipped from Missouri by those four individuals to France, such that there is a statue in Southern France to them today.

And because it's understood, they saved not just the French wine industry, but frankly, the wine industry.

- It was actually the Missouri state Entomologist C.V. Riley who completely identified that it was the phylloxera that was causing this damage in this problem in European vineyards.

So to counter it, they took two approaches or two approaches evolved out of this.

One was to graft the Vitis vinifera European grape onto native American rootstocks.

Underground you had the native American resistance and above ground, you had the grape variety that they were used to growing in their areas.

The other approach was to hybridize the two and come up with varieties that could grow in their own roots that were resistant.

And that is how we got things like Vidal, Vignole, Chambourcin all these great hybrid varieties that do so well here in Missouri.

So, there was a huge effort by a lot of people but the real hero was C.V. Riley.

The French awarded him their Legion of honor they have statues to the man, it's incredible.

- C.V. Riley was not only great.

We have an award named after him in our state industry for the best Norton, but he was also the first director of agriculture for our state as they had a agricultural committee.

So you started to see that state government then was starting to pay attention to these.

And he had a platform from helping to solve some of these issues.

So he became important in agriculture as a whole in our state.

- The types of grapes that grow well in this region have names that you might not be familiar with, like Cab Franc and Chardonnay, the grapes that grow well here are hybrids.

And that means that they display the aroma and flavors of the European vinifera along with the hardiness and disease resistance of native American varieties.

(soft music) Missouri has a very diverse environment from North to Southeast to West.

So what really makes it such a great state for wine production?

- For wine production the main thing that you want is to be able to grow grapes that match the soil types and the micro and macro climates that you have.

And so we traditionally haven't been able to grow vinifera here, but we have found grapes that grow well here and produce quality wines.

So it's about matching the type of grapes to the soils in the environment and that's the key to it.

- They were trying to grow grapes along the Eastern seaboard way back at the very earliest settlement.

Those vines quickly failed because they weren't adapted to this climate, the cold winters and natural pests that they didn't know about at the time, but they started immediately trying some of the native grapes and crossing those indigenous varieties were adapted to this climate and soil.

So that started on the East Coast and it came back here with the settlement of Hermann.

The grapes that consumers know that people know are called vinifera.

Vinifera is the family of grapes out of Europe.

Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grow in Burgundy in France.

Riesling grows in Germany.

Cabernet Sauvignon grows in Bordeaux, in France.

These are places where the grapes have grown hundreds if not thousands of years and they know what grows everywhere.

When the Europeans started exploring on the other side of the flat earth, they were trying to find these other places, there was no wine culture, there was really no grapes other the wild grapes, wild grapes that had developed over the centuries.

And as the population moved such as Missouri settled by a lot of German immigrants, they wanted to have a wine culture.

European grapes didn't grow, European grapes grow in a continental climate and there was nothing continental climate about Missouri.

Were too hot, too cold, too wet, too erratic and that's at least three too many toos.

So that it's not something that is friendly for the European varieties.

So we had to find grapes that would grow in our climate and soil , our terrior.

So we found these hybrids that were developed mostly in Europe or grapes that have parented from American great varieties and parented from European grape varieties.

So by those two, you're getting some of the elegance and style of the European varieties, but more of the winter hardiness and sturdiness and disease resistance of American rights.

So we grow hybrids and hybrids, there's hundreds if not thousands of these hybrids.

- During this time people were certainly trying to grow the grape vines that they brought with them, but it was very difficult to get those grape vines to grow.

So people like George Husmann were involved in making what we today call hybrids, but that's essentially to take a great vine that is native here.

And that is therefore impervious to some of the or at least resistant to some of the problems that we have here either, mildew or phylloxera bugs like that.

And to cross breed those two different species to make something that is more likely to survive.

So a bunch of grape vines pop up that maybe we don't see much anymore.

I don't think people are drinking a lot of Martha, not a lot of Herbemont being grown and consumed these days, but it worked for a time and we'd just gotten better at making those hybrids, I think in the 20th century.

So people continue to breed grapes to try to find just the right grape to grow here.

Some of the grapes that grow like Seyval Blanc and Vidal Blanc and Vignole and Chambourcin I think at this point are proven to be incredibly successful throughout the Midwest, not just in Missouri, but particularly here.

- So one of the most interesting aspects of wine making in Missouri, but also the Midwest generally is that the grapes that grow here are not typically familiar to American wine drinkers.

They're not the Cabs and the Pinots of the world.

There are grapes that have dual parentage typically.

So native American vines crossed with vinifera so that things can actually grow well in this climate, because this is not it's kind of an unforgiving climate.

- It is and I think that is what is so unique about this area and also what's very exciting.

People know Merlot and they know those names and it's they're all household names.

Here that's not the case because they are newer and they're a little bit different.

And we have had to cross even some French and American and we've found so much research has been put into finding vines that will be cold-hardy, and that will grow well here.

- I've heard people describe Missouri wines with European grape names.

This is like a Pinot Noir.

This is like a Cabernet look, this like a Merlot and that's not true, it's not true any more than a banana taste like a cherry.

I mean, these are different products.

So when I'm looking for descriptions of Norton in particular, 'cause that's the one people are always messing up, I say Norton reminds me of wines from Southeast France and from Northwest Italy.

Wines in that style, not a grape, it reminds me of wines of a place.

- I had an experience last night where I had a Chambourcin with a woman who told me that as soon as she smelled it, she knew she wouldn't like it.

And it was like, okay, that's cool.

I mean, I kind of like it, it's not really like the red wine you usually drink, Chambourcin usually doesn't have much of tannin and it's a little bit tart, but I really like those tart flavors and we were having it with a beet salad.

And it was really cool because literally by the third sip she went, this is really good together.

And it's like, yeah, a lot of it is expectation.

I think these grape vines that we are talking about now, these hybrid vines don't have, particularly amongst the reds, they don't have tannin and they don't have that bitterness or astringency that a lot of us look for in a powerful red wine, they are not powerful red wines typically.

And that as I say is for some a weakness and for some a strength.

- We know Norton, this area knows Norton.

And then we also have Traminette, Vignole and Chambourcin, and those are on our Southern facing hills.

Again, just to kind of help with lessening the harsh winters so that they can survive and that rootstock takes root.

But all three of those hybrids produce wonderful wines and Traminette has German heritage and Vignole is a little bit unknown.

There is a little bit of an interesting story with Vignole and then Chambourcin also is a red that is a little bit more of a medium body and has kind of a spicier.

It's just so interesting how each of these wines produces something so unique.

And really, I think that is like you said, the opportunity, the opportunity is to educate folks and to make these grapes known because they produce amazing wines.

- By the turn of the 20th century, Missouri was one of the largest wine producers in the entire country.

It was a huge source of economic vitality for the state.

And when prohibition was introduced, the entire industry was practically decimated overnight.

The impact of prohibition was personally and economically devastating, but it also set American wine making back generations.

- When prohibition went in the 18th amendment, you had wineries growing all over the country.

There was a boom of wine knowledge and wine interest that was stopped overnight.

There's a sign in Hermann in one of the wineries that says closed by order of the federal government and the sign is still up there, 'cause it just to remind people this did happen and was devastating.

Hermann had way more wineries before probation than they do now and they were all family wineries and that they were all run outta business.

- There were wineries that survived in California and I think there was one out east as well by making sacramental wine.

It wasn't gonna happen in Hermann.

The vineyards were ripped out.

It killed the town's economy because it was centered on wine and grape production.

Prohibition just took out a whole generation of winemakers and the technology was lost, the craft was lost.

- It was devastating on all accounts, prohibition was devastating to Missouri's wine and grape industry.

The loss of knowledge I think was one of the keys and it was the biggest gap that was present when my father started the winery with my mother and we didn't really have the research happening at the state level, all that experience was gone, and just the old vines and the culture and the traditions that were lost because of prohibition.

So you missed all that period of what natural innovation would've occurred and you had to depend on entrepreneurs like my father or Mr. Held to restart the industry and start that road again.

So, it's very sobering to think about what could have been versus what is given the devastating impact of prohibition on Missouri.

- Stone Hill, when the wine industry was killed, they converted the underground sellers to a mushroom growing farm.

All the casks were gone, they built these beds for putting in compost.

They were stacked all the way to the ceiling and planted the spores for the little white button mushrooms you buy in the grocery store and it was a huge industry.

So prohibition ended the American growth period for wine making.

It was a horrible, horrible experiment, but they turned it around eventually but what happened when prohibition ended and we wanted to start drinking in the United States, wine was not the first thing people thought of because there weren't any grapes, nobody saved grapes, essentially, most vineyards were pulled out.

So the prohibition got people drinking beer and got people drinking spirits 'cause you could make both of those relatively quickly.

- Prohibition, the noble experiment, the benefits of prohibition have just never left us.

But yeah, it destroyed the wine industry for sure.

There was a group of people who were allowed to keep making wine for sacramental purposes, no question about that.

There were famously wine bricks that were being shipped from California with a little packet on top that said caution, packet contains yeast, do not add yeast to compressed wine bricks and water, otherwise alcohol beverage will result, gotcha.

I mean it was a very popular item in Sears and Roebuck catalogs for crying out loud.

So people were figuring out how to do business, but it was basically, the Missouri wine industry was destroyed virtually every wine industry other than maybe New York, maybe California, and a few other places, Pennsylvania, Ohio had a little bit of stuff still going on for sacramental purposes but yeah, we were outta business.

- In Missouri, prohibition was part of a one two punch because of the anti-German sentiment that was stoked by World War I, which led up to prohibition and then was book ended with World War II.

So with so many people in Missouri claiming German heritage, it was a very difficult time for folks out here in wine country.

(soft music) - There was a very big anti-German bias in our state.

And we also had some of the other big alcohol producers in Missouri with Anheuser Bush in St. Louis.

And we also had spirits producers on the Western part of the state.

And so all those things went together to say, when prohibition hit, they wanted to make sure the wine industry really didn't get started again.

And so there were a lot of political forces against the wine industry and those anti-German forces really manifested themselves in pulling out a lot of the vines that we had in our state, but just wasn't a good environment for these specialty crops at that time.

But the state persevered and a lot of it was just from the entrepreneurial nature of a lot of the immigrants that we have.

- There was so much lost, economic losses, the culture of grape growing, the technology of grape growing.

We had viticulturists that were world renowned working with the French on the phylloxera.

George Husmann, who started here, went on to California, University of California.

And was like the premier viticulturist in the State of California when he moved out there.

So, I mean, we lost everything really.

We lost grape varieties.

There are grape varieties that were grown here that are lost to all time because they were ripped out, they weren't kept, they had so many grape varieties was part of the reason.

And it's like everything today you go to the grocery store, you've got one kind of broccoli or two kinds of tomatoes.

There was this huge diversity of varieties in the grape growing community back then and globally since probably the 1960s and '70s, we've seen this very huge shrinking of the grape cultivars grown to where it's Cabernet, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, and then most people have a problem naming many other after that.

Well, that diversity has shrunk globally and it's really sad because there are so many flavors available.

(exciting music) - Things finally started to ramp up in the middle of the 20th century because that is when we started to see a resurgence in viticulture and a renewed interest in wine making as well as wine drinking.

- It took until the '50s and '60s for Americans to decide that wine was even a thing.

I mean, if you go back to those times and by those times I can include even the '70s, you can find wine lists that include nothing but New York Port and New York Sherry and New York Riesling which isn't Riesling at all and a few wines from California, but it's the '60s and '70s, as things start to turn around and people start to show interest as well.

We think and I think it's appropriate to say that that was the aftermath of World War II as GIs were spending time in Europe, learning about wine there, coming back and going why can't I have wine.

- In 1976, there was this wine competition and it was blind tasting in France.

And two California wines ended up winning.

A 1973 from Chateau Montelena and then a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag's Leap, I believe are the two that won.

And that really put America, from a wine perspective, back on the worldwide map.

- Wine suddenly became popular again.

If you look at the number of wineries in the country and you start back in the 18th century, 19th century, one of the low points was around 1970, where there are fewer wineries in the country than any time.

And from that, you had like the judgment of Paris and other events that gave publicity to the wine industry as a whole.

So suddenly you had an environment where people were not only interested in wine, but the quality was improving too.

And so that's almost like a perfect environment for the industry to restart worldwide in United States and in Missouri.

- Not to overstate Julia Child's importance, but Julia Child, who of course was the predecessor to the CIA and learned about wine and enthused about wine and food when she and her husband Paul were in Europe, she comes back and starts this food show and she thinks wine is fantastic.

So she actually has wine on her show, that was a big deal, that's not something people did.

So people started showing an interest in it.

And if there's a market, people will fill it.

So even Missouri, people figured out, well, let's start making wine again.

- In Missouri, two families in particular anchor the revitalization of the wine making industry through grit and determination.

The Helds and the Hofherrs took somewhat parallel paths, educated consumers and learning grape growing and wine making essentially from the ground up.

So what was the growth trajectory for Missouri wine once the industry started to reemerge in the '60s and '70s, like how long did it take for the industry really to kind of rev up.

- It took a long time.

The first generation that came, that really restarted the industry, Mr. Held and Mrs. Held, then my father and my mother, they came from other sectors.

So where Mr. Held came out of diversified farming and my father, his father was a pharmacist.

And so they didn't have the technical background to really start these wineries and UC Davis' impact on the quality of wine wasn't integrated into a lot of our state programs at that time.

So the struggle was to create better wines and continually improve quality, the type of grapes you were growing, and then interact with the consumer base to show that we could make quality wines here.

- My dad happened to have gotten into grape growing.

There was an effort at the state fruit experiment station in Mountain Grove, Missouri to look at different kinds of crops for some of these hill type farms and grapes were one of the crops that they were pushing, Catawba grapes specifically.

And my dad got connected with them and was the Northern most grower of that co-op marketing group.

And because he had that little four acre vineyard, Bill Harrison who owned Stone Hill said, "Hey, why don't you come try making wine?"

And my parents had a net worth of $1,200 in 1965.

This is my father said I had nothing to lose.

So he tried it.

Two years later, he bought the facility and went down the path of reestablishing a famous old winery.

- One of the defining aspects of Stone Hill is the hand dug 19th century cellars that are original to the 175 year old winery.

This massive network of limestone cellars, thankfully survived prohibition although during the mid 20th century, they served quite a different purpose.

- In 1965, when my parents started the winery, it was all in this cellar.

- And the rest was mushrooms.

- You open the door and the rest were mushroom beds.

Now, if you look closely, you see this seam that was plastered over, there was a wall there.

And when Bill Harrison brought dad down here, Bill said, we'll take that wall out so you have a little more room.

My dad's standing over and he goes, oh, this will be fine, this will be all the room we ever need.

Bill said, I'll take the wall down for you.

My mom was taking care of customers and helping bottle and helping clean in the winery and raising four kids and you know, but we lived second floor of the winery.

- [Catherine] Which was built when?

- The main building was built in 1868 and so we lived right above it.

And I remember people like knocking on the door at seven o'clock at night, she's making dinner.

They're like, "Are you still open?"

"I will be just gimme a moment," and she'd run downstairs and pour 'em a taste of wine and sell 'em a couple bottles and come back up and finish dinner.

So, growing up the first expansion, we had 13 of these casks in the cellar.

My dad and mom bought 'em from a bottling plant in St. Louis and they were old used casks.

When you emptied 'em, you had to clean 'em.

You had to go inside and scrub 'em out.

- That's a very small opening.

- You go in with your arms over your head and on your side.

- You could fit in that hole?

- I could back then.

- Oh my gosh.

- I can't anymore, Cat.

But grew up scrubbing those out, went away to California, studied enology, then I did an internship in Switzerland.

I get to the Swiss winery.

They gotta row of these, that their skin fermenting Pinot Noir in.

- Oh my gosh.

- So guess what I had to do, crawl all in 'em.

And when the first time I did that, I'm like, "Why didn't I go to grad school?"

It was fun.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

- Thank you.

- And now we're going to leave Hermann and head to St. James.

There are five AVAs in Missouri and wineries throughout the state.

In the Ozark Highlands AVA, it was the Italian immigrants who settled and brought their wine making traditions with them.

In 1970, when Jim and Pat Hofherr opened St. James, they of course were pioneers in this reemerging industry and they positioned the tasting room right off of the highway hoping to catch the attention of passers by.

Well, that strategy worked and combined with Pat's focus on marketing, they built the base for what is today Missouri's largest winery and one of the top five gold medal winning wineries in the entire country.

- When I first moved to St. James, I went to the library and I investigated the history of the area with the Meramec Springs and the history of the Italians that came up here through Northern Arkansas and settled here and brought all their grape growing with them.

So I could explain the history to the customer of the whole area and how it was steeped in the culture of grape growing and wine making 'cause each of the Italians had their own barrels of wine that they had and it was just a tradition for them to drink the wine.

In '73, we bought an existing Concord vineyard in the area.

And before that, Mr. Bill Stoltz had 100 acres of vineyard out here and he was trying different varieties to see what grows in our area and we didn't really know the best varieties to grow.

So, we started planting different types of grapes and some of 'em we pulled out and some of 'em did fine in the area.

At that time, at the beginning was just an experimental thing but the Norton grape now the native to the state of Missouri, it did well.

And a lot of the Italians around here had that planted in their individual, lots of grapes besides the Concord grape, which they grew for Welch.

As the wine industry grew, you got more small wineries coming into Missouri starting up and I don't know how many are in there here now, but I know it's quite a few.

And the people in the wine industry are very enthusiastic about growing the industry, growing their grapes and having good products on the market.

- There's the adage, what grows together, goes together.

And so if you are really interested in seeking out local food, it makes complete sense to pair a local wine with it because it's coming from the same soil.

- Yeah, and that's what I think my father saw.

This area is a lot different than the other areas in Missouri.

The amount of heat degree days that we get here is higher than a lot of the other traditional wine regions in Missouri.

So, our grapes ripen differently.

And so we produce a little different flavor profiles.

My father knew that and historically he knew that it really could show up in the wines here.

So his goal when he started the winery was really to bring back the wines that were grown here before at a really high quality level and just reflect the region.

And I didn't realize this till a few years ago when I was going back to read the articles from interviews my father had given and he talked about the winery and he talked about the need to really reflect the region in which it's grown.

- As the industry grew as these families worked 24/7 to feed their family and grow these wineries, we started a second generation, whether it's people from Augusta or Hermann or St James, we had a second generation where the families now could send their kids to school, learn biology, learn viticulture, learn this, learn the technique and the details of the scientific side of wine making 'cause wine making is art and science.

- About an hour outside of St. Louis is a small wine country town called Augusta and believe it or not, this is the country's first American viticultural area.

It was established right here in 1980.

So as the American wine industry was reemerging and reestablishing itself, AVAs were introduced to help define the industry and the Augusta AVA was the very first AVA in the US right here along the Missouri River.

- The purpose of an AVA is to recognize and promote areas of American wine making that are distinctive, unique and it's not like planting corn, why does this area make better wine than another?

Basically built on the same mentality as you have to grow Pinot Noir in burgundy, you have to grow Cabernet in Bordeaux.

This is something that's been set up in Europe for a long time.

And some foresighted people in the United States said, if we're gonna grow our industry, we need to have more information and controls about how wines are produced.

- It's a defined area that has similar impact on the wine.

So it's weather related, it's soil related, it's cultural related.

And so they're very distinct regions.

And we're very proud that Augusta's the first in the United States.

We do have very unusual weather patterns in Missouri.

And so the old adage has always been, if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes and it's gonna change.

And that really impacts the type of grapes and stuff that we grow.

So, we have some very unique growing regions in Missouri.

If you were to divide Missouri up from a growing perspective, we should really be four or five states just because we have deep south agriculture, as well as plains and all different types of agriculture climates and that lends itself to these very unique growing regions.

And so AVAs are a critical part of what we do.

- So we're sitting here in the middle of the Augusta AVA, the first AVA in the entire country.

What distinguishes Augusta as an American Viticultural Area?

- So an AVA is an American Viticultural Area that is federally designated.

You need a defined border, a unique climate, a unique soil and something historical about the area.

And Augusta really so easily fits those four defining things that are needed for the AVA.

We have a very well defined border, it's a 15 square mile crescent shaped area that is defined by a ridge actually.

And so that ridge also plays into the climate.

And so the ridge elevates this area so that a lot of that Northeast harsh winter winds that come, it protects the grape growing area from those harsh winds.

And the soil is really probably what is the most special thing about this area.

The last continental glacier came through this area and it kind of stopped right here and with it, it brought organic matter rocks minerals, and it really deposited it all right in this area.

And so you just have this beautifully rich soil that is perfect for grape growing.

I think it just solidifies our history.

History has had to repeat itself and it's a hard uphill battle to recover from completely being decimated.

And so to have that designation and to say, no, this place is set apart, this place is special.

And even though it has gone through such a difficult time in its history that I think it just solidifies that this area should be doing what it was meant to do from the beginning.

For my parents, they came here and my dad fell in love with the land.

He knew the history of Augusta, the AVA, and he knew that this land was in the AVA.

So he knew that there was a lot of value in that.

I do believe that we are able to grow some really amazing grapes in this soil, in this climate, on these hills.

Everything that is defining about this AVA is happening right here on this piece of ground, really, and we see that year to year.

- I love telling people this story because it's true.

In my advanced sommelier exam, which I passed my first go and I walked out of it and everybody turned and looked at me and a couple people were bumping me going, I bet you love that Augusta question.

And I was like, what Augusta question?

They were like, the question that asked what's the first AVA in America.

I was like, "Oh, is that Napa?"

(laughs) So, I didn't know, that's kind of sad, but anyway, it's true.

It's the very first one that got that AVA approval from what was then called the BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms.

And when the purpose of all that is to control the use of the name.

I mean, you can certainly, maybe with Augusta people have trouble understanding why that's important, but imagine if I was making a wine in Kansas City and I decided to call it Napa.

I mean, that would create confusion, it would also be trading upon the value of someone else's name that they theoretically have built value into over decades of time.

And Augusta saw the same thing that we have a heritage that goes back to the 19th century.

We make wines of a particular style and a particular place from particular grapes and we want people to know when they see the name Augusta AVA, that it comes from this place and has that heritage.

- So we've heard all about the history and the question really is what's next?

Over the past couple of decades, we've seen a greater emphasis on supporting local and regional makers and as the interest in local wine ticks up, the industry is also learning how to adapt to climate change and experimenting with grape varieties that previously were not able to be grown in this region.

- Wine is one of the few farming products where the end result is made by the farmer.

Farmers grow corn, sell it to somebody, grow wheat, sell it to somebody, wineries grow grapes, make wine, sell wine.

They're the, like to me, the ultimate locavore.

The locavore in beverage did transfer to beer and spirits very well but not wine because wine is distinct with a grape variety.

If you're making beer and you want to have a local brewery, lager, ale, stout they're international terms.

If you're making distilled products, bourbon, gin, vodka, those are names that take no explanation, but because wines typically are labeled by a grape name, it takes an explanation.

- In terms of looking forward in wine making, techniques and grape growing techniques, what do you see kind of on the horizon?

- Climate change is having a huge impact on our industry.

So, when my father and mother first started the winery, the first thing they did was put in a large research and development vineyard and tried new types of grapes from all over the place, whatever they could get a hold of.

And the reason is, is because the historical knowledge was lost with prohibition.

And then when we started to work at the state level, we put a system together that would try those types of grapes out in all the different growing regions and be able to draw broader conclusions about, would these be of interest to consumers.

So now with climate changing, we're seeing grapes come out of our R and D vineyard that we couldn't grow 10 years ago, that now we're able to grow.

- Like what?

- Well, we're growing some vinifera that we've not grown before.

We're growing some Eastern European varietals that we've not grown before.

So I think we're going to see this future as different than the past than what my mother and father faced.

I think those partnerships are gonna be even more important as we learned to grow and produce quality wines out of these new cultivars.

I anticipate that it's almost like resetting the playing field for Missouri wine in a lot of ways.

I think the country is more interested in wine now than it's ever been and there's also an interest in food in general, that's locally grown and really reflects the terrior in which it's grown and I think that lends itself to wine.

And again, the key is finding the cultivars and the grape varietals that will grow in your climate that produce the flavor profiles that you're after as a wine maker.

So that combined with the food, make it sort of a local play, where this is the taste of St. James because it's what we produce from mother nature.

- Taking the local lore of everything and learning and really understanding where our food comes from and understanding how it's produced and people wanna know.

It wasn't something that even 20 or 30 years ago people thought about and now it's all you think about.

I mean, a lot of people, I think, really wanna know where their food and beverages are coming from.

- Go to wineries, I can't stress that enough, 'cause to me that's just a luxury.

I'm from St. Louis, I was living in Hawaii, came here to visit my parents and it was just when things were starting in the early '70s with Missouri wines.

And we went to Augusta and I said, "This is just beautiful."

And this was in the very beginning of really the growth of Missouri wine culture.

And I said, "This is fabulous."

- I think that the regional interest of course is the locavore thing.

It's always seemed bizarre to me that people are like, oh, well, these tomatoes came from over there and the pork is from that farm right there and our wine comes from 5,000 miles away, we're locavores.

So, it makes no sense.

And yes, I agree that there are wines that have a particular style because of where they come from.

And if you want that style, you probably need to go get the wines of that place.

But that is both the strength and the weakness of the wine industry in so much as if you want to enjoy a particular place, the strength is that you can actually taste wine that is distinctly from that place and so I think that's really exciting.

(uplifting music) - So the next time you drive through wine country, whether it's here in Missouri or anywhere else, look beyond the glass and consider the depth of knowledge and focus on craft that generations of winemakers have put into each bottle.

I'm Cat Neville, and thank you for joining me.

(exciting music) Connect with us online at wearetastemaker.com or through social media on these handles.

- [Narrator] TasteMakers is brought to you with support from Missouri Pork Association and Midwest Dairy.

(upbeat music)