Isabella

Isabella is a black-berried American grape with a foxy taste. DNA markers recorded in VIVC show that it is a cross of the wild American species Vitis labrusca and Meslier Petit, a European grape. It spread through Europe as a vine untouched by oidium, and the Gironde tested that promise early. J. Roy-Chevrier, writing in Pierre Viala and Victor Vermorel’s Ampélographie (1901 to 1910), reports that in 1863 the Gironde agricultural society grafted vinifera onto Isabelle to see whether its immunity would pass to the graft. It did not, he writes, but certain Médoc owners planted Isabelle all the same and made wine from its own grapes.

The turn is in its scent. Roy-Chevrier had tasted an Isabelle from Bellet, in the Alpes-Maritimes, that after 10 years in bottle passed for a small Bordeaux. He wrote that this likeness of bouquet, which made Isabelle wine “the caricature of Médoc wine” («la caricature du vin du Médoc»), had struck the growers of the Gironde: “And several of them had interplanted a few ares of Isabelle among their vines to give blending varieties the aroma of Cabernet-Sauvignon” («Et plusieurs d’entre eux avaient intercalé dans leurs vignes quelques ares d'Isabelle pour donner a des cépages d’assortiment |’arome du Cabernet-Sauvignon.»).

Phylloxera put those rows in plain sight. M. de Malafosse recounted that, as the insect spread and before grafting began, the rows of Sainte-Hélène, the Southwest’s name for Isabelle, stood out green amid the gray and yellowing decline of the vinifera. Prosper Gervais, quoted in the same work, records that the Vialla rootstock was a hybrid of Isabelle and Clinton raised by M. Laliman at La Tourate, near Bordeaux. Isabelle’s own resistance was weak, Roy-Chevrier judged, yet M. Froidefond found it still holding out in 1886 at the champ de la Souys in the Gironde.

Oldest record in my library: “Isabelle”, 1833, in Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines (a grape of Boston); “Isabelle, an American grape”, 1840, in the 1840 edition of James Busby’s Journal (for New South Wales); in the Gironde, the agricultural society’s grafting trials of 1863, as J. Roy-Chevrier reported in Pierre Viala and Victor Vermorel’s Ampélographie, vol. 5, 1904