Word: vinifera
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scores of awards later, the bright newcomers from Washington are just beginning to attract a national following. The state is the second biggest U.S. producer (after California) of Vitis vinifera grapes, the classic European wine varieties. It has the climate, soil and available land to become a wine region of world repute. Says Robert Finigan, editor-publisher of the newsletter Private Guide to Wines: "Washington is now where California was ten years...
That is quite an achievement, considering the troubles that the immigrant Vitis vinifera* has had surviving in North America. The European vine did not fare well in chilly Northeastern climes. In fact, making a potable domestic wine was quite possibly the only undertaking in which Thomas Jefferson ever admitted defeat. The most grievous blow of all was the Prohibition era, in which the wine industry died on the vine. It has not been helped since by many Americans' two-fisted addiction to beer and hard liquor or aversion to alcohol in any form (dry and blue laws...
...leading species, origanally cultivated in the Mediterranean basin, that is responsible for all the world's great wines. Even in Europe, however, vinifera vines are grafted on the hardy rootstock of native American Vitis labrusca and Vitis rotundifolia...