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 and this vintage bottle of
port wine by I. Landsberger (no relation?) & Co.
In 1856
Agoston Haraszthy (Haraszthy Ágoston), Hungarian by birth,
moved to Sonoma, about fifty miles north of San Francisco,
and bought a small vineyard northeast of the town and
renamed it Buena Vista. He moved his vines there from his
original location in Crystal Springs and expanded his
vineyards. In 1857, he began to bore tunnels into the sides
of a nearby mountain and build stone cellars at their
entrance. He eventually had two large stone winery
buildings, equipped with underground tunnels and the latest
wine-making equipment in California. Haraszthy’s cellars at
Buena Vista were the first stone wineries in the state. He
added acreage to his original purchase, eventually holding
more than 5,000 acres (20 km2) of valley and hillside. He
was a proponent of hillside plantings, arguing that vines
should be permitted to grow without irrigation. He divided
some of his acreage into smaller plots, inducing prominent
Californians to come to Sonoma, where he planted vineyards
for them. He was a vocal advocate of Chinese immigration,
arguing that Chinese should be permitted to come to
California and provide much-needed labor. He built a
Pompeian-style villa in the middle of the Buena Vista
vineyards, in which he lived with his family.
On April
23, 1862, he was elected president of the California State
Agricultural Society, recognized as California’s leading
winemaker. He contributed articles to newspapers and made
speeches to gatherings of agriculturalists. He entered his
wines in the competition of the California State Fair and
received the highest awards. However, in 1863 his focus
changed from developing and promoting small independent wine
farms and sold his lands, vineyards, and winery to an
organization called the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society
(BVVS). The society, incorporated in April, had a variety of
purposes: to develop land, to quarry stone, etc. but its
main aim was to become the biggest winemaker in California,
and soon Haraszthy himself, who held 2,600 of the society's
6,000 shares, was a trustee and the superintendent of the
firm. He was joined by such winegrowing Sonoma neighbors as
Isidor Landsberger, Emil Dresel, and Major Jacob Snyder. The
crucial backing, though, was provided by the William J.
Ralston, lord of the Comstock Lode and builder of San
Francisco's Palace Hotel. In 1864, an article in Harper's
Magazine proclaimed that Buena Vista was “the largest
establishment of the kind in the world.”
It began
manufacturing sparkling wines with the assistance of
experienced workmen from Epernay and Aywith various success,
and often the majority the wine had to be emptied from the
bottles and distilled into brandy. Haraszthy borrowed large
sums of money to expand the vineyards and cellars of BVVS.
The Massachusetts editor Samuel Bowles visited in 1865 and
was not impressed. It did not, he said, seem "well managed"
nor, "do we find the wines very inviting .... I have drank,
indeed, much better California wine in Springfield than out
here." In short, the Buena Vista venture was not paying
dividends, and Haraszthy, the central figure, quickly came
under fire from stockholders.
His use of
layering as a planting technique, while resulting in quicker
propagation of vines, also exposed the plants to soil
diseases. By the middle of the 1860s, the vines at Buena
Vista were growing brown and weak. Haraszthy’s critics
believed this was due to his layering, but it was the result
of the first infestation of the phylloxera ever known in
California which quickly spread throughout the California
and even crossed the Atlantic to France where it caused
devastation. With production lagging, profits from Buena
Vista wine were inadequate to pay the Society’s debt. There
was a scandal in 1864 about an attempt to defraud by
distilling "brandy" from molasses brought in from the
Sandwich Islands. In 1866 or 67, Haraszthy resigned his
position and was replaced with Isidor Landsberger who tore
out the layered vines. Haraszthy left Buena Vista for
another vineyard in Sonoma owned by his wife, and while
living there filed bankruptcy.
Landsberger, an original trustee of BVVS, severed ties when
Ralston and investors took control of BVVS. In late 1865 he
also organized the firm of I Landsberger and Co. which
operated out of a complex of brick buildings on Jackson
Street in San Francisco. He was the senior partner and
Arpad Haraszthy was the principal wine and champagne maker.
They discovered the causes of the problems, and for ten
years constantly improved quality owing to the increased use
of foreign grapes, which yielded a vin brut with a delicate
bouquet and flavor approaching in character to the finer
champagnes. Sonoma valley vineyards now produced the
lightest wines California, “some 211 of the white varieties
indicating merely 15° of proof spirit, and the red ones no
more than 17½°.” The operation was based on the French and
German model, purchasing wine of a certain quality and
standard from the growers, and then preparing it for the
market , a practice in the wine-growing districts of France
and Germany. Landsberger was making a name in sparkling
California wines, ranked with some of the best European
vintages, and cheaper to produce costing half of imported
wines. Strange to say, notwithstanding all these
recommendations the chief market for Californian wines is
not the State of California. They are readily purchased in
Chicago and New York, while in San Francisco they are not
half so popular as the more expensive, but not better wines
which have been brought from Europe, and which are sold at a
high price.
Bibliography:
Vizetelly,
Henry, Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines,
Project Gutenberg ebook, March 24, 2007 [EBook #20889]
Pinney,
Thomas, A History of Wine in America, From the Beginnings To
Prohibition, University of California Press, Berkeley · Los
Angeles · Oxford, © 1989 The Regents of the University of
California
Rae,
William Fraser, Westward by Rail: A Journey to San Francisco
and back and a Visit to the Mormons,
Bernhard Tauchnitz
Publisher, Leipzig,1874.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agoston_Haraszthy, accessed
June 2, 2009.
From Wine Files.org keyword
search on "Landsberger" --Isidor, (1824 -1904)
30 Records, beginning 1867-11-09
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