Wines of Eastern North America

Eastern American wine expert Cattell has gathered history, horticulture, wine evaluation, and more into an easily navigated reference. The first half of the book traces the history of winemaking in Eastern North America, from the settling of the first Europeans in the 16th century to the present. Cattell writes of successes and failures in importing old-world grape varieties, developing hybrids with wild and well-known grape varietals, and growing the commercial wine industry. Generous use of photos and maps illustrate the spread of the field from New York to the continental divide. The second part includes seven appendixes, copious notes, a bibliography, and an index. The appendixes cover the origins of Eastern wine grapes, descriptions of Eastern wine types, and early wine history, among other topics.

(Library Journal)

Hudson Cattell is the only person who could have written this book, for it rests on an intimate and detailed knowledge of the eastern American wine industry that he alone can have acquired. One may say, in fact, that he has been writing the book for the last thirty-eight years.... Cattell was in touch with everything that was going on in those expansive years from the 1970s; he knew everyone worth knowing and inteviewed most of them; he visited the whole territory and wrote about what he found there, obscure enterprises as well as the bigger and more splendid ones.... If you wanted to know what had been done and was doing on the eastern wine scene, you asked Hudson Cattell first. And now he has published a book that tells us, not everything he knows, but far more than anyone else has, so far, provided us. We should thank Hudson Cattell for what he has given us, a book that anyone with an interest in American wine should have.

- Thomas Pinney (Wayward Tendrils Quarterly)