Eric Norton
Marymount University
Eric Norton is an assistant professor of Literature and Languages at Marymount University in Arlington, VA, where he teaches American literature, literary theory, and composition. His research focuses on the long nineteenth-century, with particular interests in politics, race, gender, and social reform and activism. His article on Sophia Little's temperance novel The Reveille; or, Our Music at Dawn recently appeared in Studies in the Novel.
Eric Norton Marymount University “Antebellum Viniculture and Wine Drinking in Cozzens’ Wine Press” Cozzens’ Wine-Press, a “vinous, vivacious monthly,” was edited and published by Frederick Cozzens from 1854-60.... [ view full abstract ]
Eric Norton
Marymount University
“Antebellum Viniculture and Wine Drinking in Cozzens’ Wine Press”
Cozzens’ Wine-Press, a “vinous, vivacious monthly,” was edited and published by Frederick Cozzens from 1854-60. It is both a vehicle for advertising Cozzens’ upscale shop in Chambers Street in Manhattan (selling “wines, brandies, segars, and fine groceries”) and a wide-ranging renegotiation of the meanings of wine production and consumption in the antebellum United States. The magazine parses out the pleasures and pitfalls of famous European vintages, providing histories, tasting notes, and prices of a variety of mostly French and Spanish wines. But Cozzens also highlights a burgeoning US wine industry, selling Nicholas Longworth’s famous sparkling Catawba in his shop, for example, and publishing articles praising uniquely American wines, grapes, cultivation practices, and regions. These tandem purposes implicitly argue how a more intimate knowledge and enjoyment of the great vintages and great producers of Europe might help to establish natively American institutions of viniculture and leisure consumption. Describing regional territories (mainly Ohio and New York) as either prime or not for wine production implies a way of thinking about land, about climate, about agriculture as not primarily quantitative but qualitative, imagined as economic factors that refine culture, taste, transatlantic exchanges, and class aspirations. The practices of viniculture and wine consumption, often identified with Europe’s cultural histories and imagined as opposed to more typically American drinks like beer and liquor, in Cozzens’ pages instead frame metaphorically a set of national identifications. Describing the austerity of vine growth (stressing the plant with littler water and strategically poor soil leads to grapes that make better wine), redefining territorial regions (in the years just before the Civil War) according to their climate for viniculture, and arguing for the global relevance of native cultivars as the basis for a uniquely American wine culture, all of these elements in the Wine Press work to structure integral narrative strands within class, gender, national, and racial identifications.
