Settler Vines: Rethinking the History of Wine Production

Sometime in 1866, a Spaniard named Josep Soler (1840–1906) arrived in Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand. Born in Constantí in the Camp de Tarragona winemaking region south of Barcelona, Soler came from a winemaking family and was a winemaker himself before leaving Spain. He planted his first New Zealand vineyard shortly after arriving in Whanganui, and his business life was one of uninterrupted success. In 1880, the New Zealand Herald proclaimed him its “New Zealander of the Year” for “his founding role in a great industry.” Soler’s is a classic immigrant success story, but there is another, intimately connected yet hidden history that lies behind it. Soler arrived in New Zealand at a crucial moment in the colony’s history: the final years of the New Zealand Wars. Vincent O’Malley, the wars’ preeminent historian, has described them as “a prolonged and complex series of conflicts.… [f]ought between the Crown and different groups of Māori” between 1845 and 1872 that would determine the place of the Māori in the burgeoning settler colony. Whanganui, where Soler settled, was one of the battlegrounds, and while much of the fighting there had ended before he arrived, he was living there when the fighting from June 1868 to March 1869 known as Titokowaru’s war put the town itself under threat. Soler initially engaged with local Māori for his wine business, travelling up the Whanganui River to purchase grapes from them to mix with his own grapes to make his wine. This soon stopped as he found the journey much less useful. In the last years of his life, Soler acquired 200 acres of formerly Māori land along the Whanganui River taken as part of the process of dispossession since the end of the New Zealand Wars. The story of Joseph Soler is one example of Nēpi Mahuika’s observation that “all New Zealand history is relevant to Māori and … Māori are relevant in all New Zealand histories.” Soler’s relevance goes far beyond New Zealand, however; although his activities were a tiny part of the explosive geographic expansion of wine production that took place during his lifetime, they illuminate the connection between that expansion and such large historical processes as mass migration, settlement, and Indigenous dispossession around the world, a connection that historians are still only beginning to explore, as we discuss below. Winemaking has a 9,000-year-long history. For the bulk of that time, its geographical range was small, limited to the Mediterranean and a few other European countries. This changed after the Spanish conquests in the Americas as growing grapes and making wine became synonymous with European empire. Only a few years after conquering Mexico and Peru, Spaniards were producing wine there, and Spanish winemaking reached what is now the United States in the seventeenth century. The first governor of the Dutch East India Company’s Cape Colony planted wine grapes just three years after the colony had been established. However, it was only as part of the intense process of globalization that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth that commercial wine production spread much further. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did production outside Europe attain significant levels. While Europe still produced around 90 percent of the world’s wine in 1914, and France, Italy, and Spain were by far the largest producing countries, Argentina had reached seventh place, Chile ninth, and the United States tenth. By the turn of the twentieth century, people in settler societies began to produce the lion’s share of wine for domestic consumption. Protectionist tariffs (in places such as the United …