Overview

In 8vo. Pp. [1] f.e., viii, 269, [10], [1] r.e.

This book was never conceived simply as a technical manual. Paul Lukacs, in "American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine," credits Husmann's writing with a visionary zeal alongside its practical instruction: Husmann wanted Americans to grow grapes and make their own wine, presenting wine itself as "the best agent" of "true temperance." Lukacs calls him, plainly, "the most expert American wine grower of the day." This fourth edition, revised and rewritten, incorporates the expanded treatment of California's grape industries announced on its title page, reflecting a transformation in Husmann's own thinking. Lukacs records that Husmann remained skeptical of California wine as late as 1879; a visit west changed his mind, convincing him that the state's soils and climate offered extraordinary possibilities. He subsequently became deeply involved in California viticulture and in the response to phylloxera, bringing with him the practical knowledge of resistant American vines developed during his Missouri career. His sometimes contentious encounter with Eugene Hilgard's more rigorously experimental Berkeley viticulture places Husmann at a revealing transition between the self-taught American winegrower of the nineteenth century and the institutional wine science that followed. There is something remarkable in finding Husmann's late-life voice still being sold new by Orange Judd in 1928, twenty-six years after his death in 1902. His revised preface looks back over a career that began with a first vineyard planted as a twenty-year-old in the Missouri backwoods and eventually carried him to California. This copy carries the marks of a later reader: an ink signature and matching ownership stamp, both reading "Robert R. Doherty," on the front pastedown and rear free endpaper.

Ref. Simon, 243 (ed. 1880); Lukacs P., American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (2000), pp. 52, 54-55, 68-74, 87 onward (on Husmann's career and place in American wine history).