Throughout the twentieth century Pleasant Valley was deemed the first successful winery in what is now called the Finger Lakes region. Newly uncovered evidence, however, indicates that virtually forgotten log-cabin pioneer Samuel Warren of York, in Livingston County, was the first successful commercial wine producer in the counties encompassing or sharing one or more of New York's Finger Lakes.

Even more surprisingly, Warren, who had come in 1816 to the western New York frontier to do farm work as a 19-year-old, would advertise his wines in a nationally-read publication several years before Brotherhood Winery (then Blooming Grove) - supposedly New York's first - was founded in 1839 in Washingtonville on the Hudson. Brotherhood is still considered the oldest continuously operating winery in the U. S.

Wine historians Thomas Pinney and Hudson Cattell, who have seen Warren's recently discovered advertisement, agree: the overlooked pioneer Samuel Warren of York, is now to be regarded as New York State's first successful commercial winegrower.

Delayed Domestic Wine
Beginning with the earliest colonists, scores of attempts to establish a wine industry in the colonies had failed. Explorers had found grapevines growing virtually everywhere, but those wild, American grape species - subjected only to natural selection - yielded very unattractive wines, even when carefully cultivated.

In the colonies, neither official prizes offered for success in growing European grapes, nor threatened punishments (even, in at least one case, the threat of death for colonists who didn't try to grow them!), nor imported European vineyardists succeeded in creating a commercial wine industry here.

American wine historians have written hundreds of pages detailing these failed attempts to grow vinifera in the colonies and early Republic, but their Dean, Thomas Pinney, at a 2008 conference at NY State's Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station, summed it up in three words: " . . . and they died."

As a result, wine here was imported, expensive, scarce and often adulterated. But locally produced, grain-based, high-alcohol distilled spirits were abundant and cheap. By 1810 there were more than 14,000 stills in the young republic. In 1823 per capita consumption of these high-alcohol spirits was 7.5 gallons. Observers agree: Drunkenness in America during the first half of the 19th century was appalling.

That notorious drunkenness would help launch the Temperance Movement, the Second Great Awakening, and, because of the extensive spousal abuse connected with the drunkenness, the Women's Rights Movement.

Against such a background of extraordinary drunkenness rooted in abundant, cheap, high-alcohol spirits, Thomas Jefferson held (1818) "No nation is drunken where wine is cheap."

Wine for Churches but not Taverns?
Although it is surprising to many post-Prohibition Protestants, accustomed to drinking unfermented grape juice during Holy Communion, there was demand for wine in the Christian churches. Wanting to observe the age-old sacrament of the Lord's supper (rooted in the Seder of Judaism, Exodus chapter 13, verse 8) in the traditional way - with wine - the churches were a promising market for American winegrowers like Warren, whose first tiny vintage was in 1832.

Aspiring winegrowers in the young republic had recently come to have at their disposal new accidental hybrid grapes bearing the DNA of both European and American species. New varieties like Alexander, Catawba and Isabella - unlike the European varieties - survived harsh Eastern winters and indigenous fungal diseases and pests, and they yielded acceptable wine. Eastern winegrowers could now offer - and the churches could now purchase - pure, native wines made from these new indigenous grape varieties.

Warren's 1836 ad - directed to the churches of Western New York - appeared in a widely read religious periodical, New York Evangelist, alongside ads for "Temperance hotels". Understandably - given the infamous drunkenness of the time - the anti-alcohol movement was well under way.

But the widely-read Warren had a moderate's mission. Like renowned Protestant leaders and writers of earlier centuries - John Calvin, John Milton, John Bunyan - Warren was no teetotaler. Wine historian Pinney points out that "the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay planted vineyards for wine almost as soon as they had set foot on dry land. . . ." John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist communion in the eighteenth century, "was in fact a prohibitionist as far as distilled spirits were concerned; . . . But Wesley had no idea of preaching, let alone enforcing, total abstinence."

This devout Christian winegrower (and music lover), Warren had helped to found the York Bible Society, and was a long-term Deacon and Sunday school teacher in York's congregationalist church. Samuel and his wife Sarah had given religiously significant names to their children.

Because of his Christian moral convictions, Warren did not want to contribute to that era's exceptional drunkenness. So he did not, apparently, market his wine to inns and taverns, although that market could well have been more lucrative.

Glimpses of the Second Generation: Josiah, Fidelia, Harlan Page
Despite Samuel's having contracted consumption (tuberculosis) about 1850, the family winery flourished as his older son, Josiah, took on much of the work. Considering the realities of production and distribution in the mid-nineteenth century - no electricity, mainly muscle and water power, dirt roads, horses, stagecoaches and ox-drawn wagons, a few canals when not washed out or frozen over - it is indeed remarkable that in 1853 the Warrens' wine production had expanded to more than 3,400 gallons, and the reputation of the wines stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific!

Samuel and Sarah's first child, Fidelia, undoubtedly did her share of labor on the family's farm, where, among other crops, sheep were raised and sheared, and woolen yarn was made for clothing, like the mittens the Warrens entered in the local agricultural fair.

And as the oldest of the children, Fidelia had helped with making the family's dairy products, like the 57 pounds of cheese the family entered in the county agricultural fair. In the vineyard, where - with no trellis wire on the scene yet - vines were trained on posts and slats, Fidelia may have helped keep weeds under control and helped harvest the late ripening Isabellas, Catawbas, and others.

But Fidelia is best remembered as a poet, a teacher, and brilliant of mind. Perhaps moved by having witnessed, as a child, the death of her infant brother, and surely with parental support, Fidelia broke with her era's conventional role expectations for women, and entered the Central Medical College in Syracuse.

Research by historian Jane Oakes shows that, with her classmates, Fidelia was accused of robbing graves for their study of anatomy. They replied to the charge in a Syracuse newspaper. With a list naming each student, they deny having stolen any corpses. They had been assured by faculty that "the material" had been properly acquired.

Only a few weeks before graduation in 1851, reportedly at the top of her class, Fidelia died tragically of typhoid fever. In an era when the very idea of a woman doctor was being ridiculed, Fidelia Warren - mourned and eulogized at what would have been her graduation - would have been among our nation's first female physicians. In private correspondence Emerson Klees informed me that the first medical degree earned by a woman in the Western world had been awarded just two years earlier to Elizabeth Blackwell, at Geneva College, predecessor of Hobart College, Geneva, NY.

Having received his abolitionist father's poignant dying blessing, younger son, Harlan Page Warren, left York in 1862 to volunteer for the Union Army. In Harlan's absence, his brother, Josiah, conducted the family businesses and entered no fewer than twelve highly regarded native varietal wines in Livingston county's agricultural fair in 1863. As the Civil War was coming to an end, Josiah built a large stone wine cellar near the homestead.

Harlan served - eventually as a musician - in the 33rd and 49th NY Infantry units, which saw fierce combat. Following his return to York after the war Harlan further expanded the family businesses, adding a mill to grind grain for feed and flour, as well as facilities for grinding apples to make cider. Bidwell's Creek, a.k.a. Warren's Creek, powered the mills. Business was good.

But at the beginning of the 1880s, thanks, apparently, to an unregulated and unrestrained power of eminent domain, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, backed by industrialist J. P. Morgan, ran a line right through the Warren farm. It destroyed the businesses the family had conducted there at what had become known as the Warrens Mills area of York. Emerson Klees observes that had the D. L. & W. not brought about the end of the Warren winegrowing operation, the Warrens' long-gone winery in York might today be the oldest producing commercial winery in the United States.

When travel on the D. L. & W. began in 1882 through what had been Warren property, Harlan Warren - Civil War veteran, farmer, miller, musician, and purveyor of musical instruments - tragically hung himself in the remains of the winery.

A few yards from the Warren Homestead, the large limestone blocks visible in the abutments for the former D. L. & W. overpass may well have come from the walls of the family's winery.

The New Chapter: the Warren Story, Wines, Site
Although the long-forgotten story of the Samuel Warren family and their York Wines ended tragically and was missed by wine historians, its 21st century resurrection by the Town of York Historical Society has led to a new chapter in the Warren story.

At last, wine writers are beginning to recognize the winegrowing Warrens themselves as the first successful commercial winegrowers of New York State. In the latest edition of his Wineries of the Finger Lakes Region, Klees has led the way.

Secondly, wines made from those 19th century varieties, including those the Warrens grew and vinified in York, are arousing renewed interest. The fruity, semi-sweet Isabellas, Ionas, and Diamonds are undeniably popular with regular folks. Owners of six Finger Lakes wineries offering them in their tasting rooms have confirmed to me "These are the wines that pay the bills." Hazlitt's Red Cat - made mainly from the Catawba - annually sells 100,000 cases.

More surprising is the performance of these native wines in West Coast competitions, where virtually all the judges are Californians, accustomed to tasting vinifera wines professionally almost daily. Popular native Eastern rosés (sometimes totally omitted from articles on rosés by Eastern wine writers!) have been impressing the judges in Western competitions:

• At the 2008 Long Beach Grand Cru, the 2007 Goose Watch Rosé of Isabella, having won a gold medal and been judged best of its class, went on to the sweepstakes round and was judged the best rosé of the entire show.
• At the 2010 Long Beach Grand Cru, the 2009 Torrey Ridge Catawba also went to the sweepstakes round and was judged there as best rosé of this very large international competition.

Some might downplay those results thinking that, despite their popularity with tourists and others, "serious" winemakers and wine authorities typically ignore rosés.

That may be. But they certainly don't ignore whites.

And in 2009, at the Long Beach Grand Cru, the 2008 Goose Watch Diamond - having been judged best in its class and having been awarded a gold medal - went to the sweepstakes round and tied for best white wine of the entire show, surpassing virtually all the fine, gold-medal-winning, best-of-class Rieslings, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios, Sauvignon Blancs, Viogniers, etc. that had been entered from around the world.

Strange that many wine "authorities" tend to ignore indigenous American varietals that both delight regular folks and receive top awards from sophisticated West Coast wine judges!

Before knowing any such results, members of the Town of York Historical Society had decided to select and market a line of high quality commercial wines based on heirloom 19th century American hybrids such as the Warrens grew and vinified in York. The New York Heritage Collection is labeled to help tell the Warren story. A dollar donation to the Society to help restore and responsibly develop
the landmark Warren Homestead site is built into the $9.99 price.

In a double-blind tasting, we had already chosen that winning Goose Watch Isabella (our Fidelia) as well as the winning Goose Watch Diamond (our Miner's Diamond). Other wines in this collection are also award winners, including the only Vergennes (our semi-dry The North Star) and the only varietal Iona to be found - apparently anywhere - both produced by tiny Arbor Hill Winery.

The New York Heritage Collection, still with very limited distribution, now consists of seven delicious native wines. Information about these wines can be found elsewhere on this website.

Developing The Samuel Warren Homestead Site
Having seen the beginning of recognition for the Warrens and the growing respect for the native varieties they vinified, York's historical society now envisions appropriate restoration and development of its modest Warren Homestead site.

In an admittedly challenging economy the Society hopes to find the right cooperators to help restore and responsibly develop its landmark site located on the western slope of the verdant valley of the Genesee -

• ninety minutes from Niagara's roaring spectacle,
• fifteen minutes from the quietly awesome Grand Canyon of the East carved by the Genesee through what's now historic Letchworth State Park,
• ten minutes from the nation's largest salt mine - it was Samuel Warren's 1830s brine well at the Homestead site that first excited interest in the region's important salt resource,
• at the edge of the East's most important wine region, with its cornucopia of grape varieties - not only natives and hybrids, but world class vinifera - especially Riesling and Cabernet Franc - and its forthcoming world class museum - www.FingerLakesMuseum.org - The region's various wine trails and the Little Finger Lakes Wine Path, where FLM partner - the Warren Homestead - is located, await your visit.
  
  When you spend some time in the beautiful Finger Lakes region, savoring its many attractions, do visit the modest Warren Homestead, now a modest house museum with seasonal hours. It still stands in its rural setting next to the former overpass of the J. P, Morgan-backed D.L. & W., that railroaded the Warren family's flourishing winery - New York's first successful commercial winery - into oblivion, after half a century and two generations of the remarkable Warren family of York.

Those pioneers are gone, but no longer forgotten.