Over a span of roughly forty years, from 1860 to the turn of the century, two émigrés from America first destroyed and then saved the great wines of Europe. The villain was phylloxera, the tiny yellow aphid that for so long had prevented Americans from growing vinifera grapes back home. The savior was American Vitis laBruce rootstock.
A GENERATION AGO, THE United States was little more than an afterthought in the world of wine. America certainly had a long history of grape growing and winemaking, but that history hardly mattered. Nor did the wine itself much matter. Large producers, led by E & J Gallo, made gallons of innocuous jug wine, but only a handful of small, largely unknown American wineries produced anything resembling fine wine from Europe. Then, seemingly overnight, American wine took a huge leap in both quality and prestige. The country that had been an afterthought suddenly became an obsession. All at once the world discovered American wine, and all at once America discovered that it had the potential to make wines that could compete with the world’s best. This is the story of those two discoveries— first the story of why it took so long for the United States to produce truly great wine and then the story of how America was able to rise so quickly to its current position of prominence, if not preeminence, in the world of wine.
A fascinating complement to the sweep of Moses’s Panorama can be found in the work of Alan Wolfson, who for nearly twenty years has been building painstaking miniatures that reveal the humble underpinnings of those skyscrapers —a seedy world of bars and hot dog joints, X-rated movies and strip shows. Wolfson, out in California making models for movies, felt the tug of his native Brooklyn, and eventually built from memory a tiny subway station. Thus launched, he has gone on creating New York environments at a pace of about a half-dozen a year, putting gumdrop-sized half-empty cartons of Chinese food on a desk in a private detective agency, pasting minute pinups to the wall of a desolate Times Square hotel room, managing, with a combination of reporting and imagination, to imbue every one of his cityscapes with the sad poetry of the familiar.
The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Beiden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as “a perfect fac -simile of New-York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, tree, and every other object in the city.” This “ GREAT WORK OF ART ,” Beiden said, distilled “over 200,000 Buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings” and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with oil paintings of “the leading business establishments and places of note in the city.” Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
THERE ARE FEW REMINDERS THAT TWO WORLD’S FAIRS were held in New York’s Flushing Meadow. The Unisphere—the 140-foot steel globe encircled by the orbits of the first satellites—is still there, and a granite monument marks the spot where two time capsules were buried—one in 1938 and the other in 1963 —to be opened in the year 6939. Elsewhere more than thirty years of neglect have taken their toll. The futuristic New York State Building is slowly turning into a rusty hulk; the rockets that blasted America into space are falling apart; the Amphitheater, home of Billy Rose’s Aquacade, was recently torn down.
ONE PLEASURE IN A rather uncomfortable rereading of my book on Gerald Ford and the events of 1974 and 1975 was a kind of “Where Were They Then.” A few examples: One of President Ford’s early problems was getting Nixon’s men out of the White House. The most tenacious of them was a junior speechwriter who for nine long weeks ignored requests and demands to leave. He was Father John McLaughlin, a Jesuit priest, who is now among the greatest of television’s political stars. “He’s the smartest guy in Congress, but he insists on voting his conscience instead of party,” said Ford in rejecting John Anderson of Illinois as his successor as House Republican leader. Six years later Anderson rejected the party and ran for President as an independent. “No politicians know anything about economics,” a Republican congressman told me in an interview, emphasizing the first word of that sentence. That was Barber Conable, named president of the World Bank in 1986.
WHEN COMMERCE SECRETARY RON Brown was killed in a plane crash in Dubrovnik, Croatia, last April, I took the occasion to write a column about the way public officials are now treated in the world’s greatest democracy, saying, “The press, talk shows, the politicians themselves and their consultants, the guys around the corner—we have all raised trash talk to the American dialogue.”
In the fall of 1959 I was working at an IBM engineering and manufacturing plant in San Jose, California, one of the few well-established technology enterprises in northern California at the time. One day word came that Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the U.S.S.R., would arrive within the next several days. To just about every American then, he represented all that was wrong in the world, and his in-your-face style of confrontation ensured that people had strong opinions about him.
It is unlikely a similar visit could occur today. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi are the best current comparisons, and it’s not hard to imagine what would occur if either one of them came to this country and tried to go to Disneyland.
In preparation for Khrushchev’s arrival, IBM supervisors advised everyone holding negative views about the visit to stay home. Diplomatically, all the bomb-shelter signs—and there were a lot of them—were removed. According to most press accounts, there were four or five security people, both uniformed and plainclothes, for every IBMer. One friend said to me, “That’s about right.”