While the weather was never good for Annie where we were up North, it was good for wine.  There were such plentiful regions there with Vineyards across Ohio and the wineries around the finger lakes were just hours away, producing good enough wine to compete in Europe. It took a bit of convincing from Annie and her Doctor to get me to move here, but on my brother’s good advice, I decided I meant venture to grow grapes here year-round and experiment with getting an industry moving down here.

The property we bought is good enough, and the industry down here is in a perfect state to acquire workers and land. A new Yankee is more trusted post war than a former slave owner.  It seems that we have ventured here at just the right moment for this experiment; our funny friend Julius is more than eager to help with the land and it seems her has friends about who would work for us too.  The first step will be in finding the right varieties of grapes to grow so that the wines don’t come out oddly—the first Europeans in the America’s called it Vineland for the bounty of grapes but found their flavors unsatisfactory once fermented. Yet when the colonists came it was often part of their charters to explore wine-making possibilities with American and European varieties of the fruit. It seems the European varieties have faired the best in American production, and I am thinking that as the Northern US Vineyards have success with German varieties I will explore southern French ones, as the warmer seasons may affect the grapes better, and if I am indeed going to start a new industry I should part from the established Northern grape tradition. I think it would suit me to experiment with setting the men out to plant numerous seed varieties and implement more than one harvesting and fermenting strategy to begin narrowing down my crop and style of wine for future seasons. It will be such a game of trial and error, but hopefully a fun one for Annie and Me and friends to be in this new place pioneering new things. My dear Annie says we should give failed brews out to Julius and his friends as favors out of good will for their hard work—she’s so good hearted and funny! In fact I’m sure Julius will want none, and come planting season run to us with a story about some “conjuh” “goofin’” up the vines, as he often does with such things.

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