Jacquez

At the beginning of the 19th century, the French-born vine breeder Nicholas Herbemont (1771-1839) received seedlings of a vine from Isaac Lenoir, who lived in Horatio (Sumpter County, South Carolina). Herbemont selected these in his vineyard in Columbia (South Carolina) and initially named them Lenoir (incidentally, Lenoir had discovered the parentage-like Herbemont named after him a few years earlier). In 1828, he gave several cuttings in a cigar box (hence Cigar Box Grape) to the lawyer Nicholas Longworth (1783-1863) in Cincinnati (Ohio), who later became one of the first large-scale US wine producers. From there, a cutting was brought to Natchez (Mississippi), where it was cultivated by a Spaniard named Jacques. It was therefore now marketed as Black Spanish or Jacquez.

Thomas Volney, mentioned above, worked intensively on clarifying the origin of the Jacquez. He also originated the often-circulated statement that a cutting in a cigar tin travelled from the Portuguese island of Madeira to the USA. This false assumption of origin can probably be traced back to Herbemont's habit of giving his grape varieties the names of well-known European growing regions, such as Burgundy, Bordeaux and Madeira, based on their characteristics. The reverse is much more likely. That the variety was brought to the island of Madeira by settlers returning to their homeland from the USA.

In France, the variety was seen as an alternative in the fight against phylloxera, although it later turned out that it was only moderately resistant to this pest. For this reason, it was cultivated in the late 1860s by Léopold Laliman (1817-1897) under the name Jaquet. It was even authorised in Châteauneuf-du-Pape until 1935. After the phylloxera catastrophe, it was also cultivated on a large scale in Portugal and was included in the red Madeira produced in large quantities until the 1980s (when it was banned by the EU). In France, commercial cultivation was banned as early as 1934, as the wine was falsely accused of being harmful to health due to its high methanol content. However, the values are within the permitted limit.

In the département of Ardèche, the wine "Cuvée des vignes d'antan" is blended from several hybrid varieties. The corresponding vineyards, mainly of Jacquez (which does not appear in any statistics in terms of quantity), cover almost 80 hectares of vineyards here. The local association "Mémoire de la vigne" endeavours to maintain this old cultural asset. The wine is excluded from commercialisation due to the EU ban on hybrids. However, the Slow Food association has included it as a "passenger" in the "Ark of Flavour". This means that it is one of the foods that should be protected and preserved from being jeopardised by industrial agriculture and the food industry.

The medium to late ripening vine is susceptible to black rot and powdery mildew, but is resistant to powdery mildew and pierce disease. The latter makes it interesting for cultivation in the south of the USA. For this reason, it used to be cultivated in large quantities in the Gulf States, especially in Texas, under the names Lenoir or Black Spanish and was the basis for mass wine. Recently, however, only 88 hectares have been recorded. In Brazil, 1,274 hectares are planted with it. Here it is mainly used for jelly, grape juice and sweet red wines. In Mexico, it is present on 80 hectares and in Australia on just under one hectare. In 2016, a total of 1,443 hectares of vines were reported with a strong downward trend (Kym AndersonAnderson Kym).

Images: Ursula Brühl, Doris Schneider, Julius Kühn Institute (JKI)