Native American and Colonial Use of Vitis Labrusca

Long before Vitis labrusca appeared in any botanical catalog, Indigenous peoples across eastern North America had already worked out most of what there was to know about it. This page traces the documented uses of labrusca-type grapes among Native American nations and early European colonists — how the plant was eaten, fermented, processed, and woven into material culture across roughly three centuries of parallel and overlapping history. The record matters because it explains why labrusca varieties became the backbone of American viticulture rather than a curiosity, and why Vitis labrusca's broader story diverges so sharply from the European wine tradition.

Definition and scope

Vitis labrusca is a species of wild grape native to the northeastern and north-central United States, ranging from Maine through the Appalachians and into the Great Lakes basin. The "scope" of Indigenous and colonial use is not a narrow subject. Archaeological evidence — including grape seeds, dried skins, and carbonized remains — documents grape consumption at sites across the Eastern Woodlands going back well beyond European contact. Ethnobotanical records compiled by researchers including Daniel Moerman in his Native American Ethnobotany database (University of Michigan-Dearborn) catalog labrusca-type grape use among at least 30 distinct Native American nations, covering food, medicine, and fiber applications.

The colonial period typically runs from the early 1600s through the late 1700s. During those roughly 180 years, European settlers encountered labrusca grapes in full wild abundance and tried — repeatedly, and with spectacular failure — to replace them with imported Vitis vinifera vines. That failure is part of this story too.

How it works

Native American use of Vitis labrusca was systematic, not opportunistic. The labrusca grape's disease resistance and cold hardiness made it reliably available across seasons when other food sources were less predictable.

Documented uses fall into four categories:

Fresh consumption — Ripe clusters eaten directly, typically in late summer and early autumn. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and Lenape nations are among those with documented fresh-eating traditions recorded in Jesuit Relations and later ethnographic surveys.
Dried and stored — Grapes dried into a raisin-like product, then incorporated into pemmican-style travel foods or reconstituted in winter. The drying process concentrated the characteristic labrusca flavor compounds, including methyl anthranilate, which produces the grape's signature "foxy" aroma.
Medicinal application — Unripe fruit, leaves, and sap applied topically for inflammation and skin complaints. Moerman's database lists leaf preparations used by the Ojibwe, among others, for dermatological conditions.
Fiber and structural use — The woody vines themselves used for binding, basket weaving, and rough cordage. Mature Vitis labrusca stems can exceed 10 meters in length, making them practically useful beyond the fruit.

Fermentation — actual wine production — is less clearly documented in pre-contact Indigenous practice, though wild fermentation of stored grape juice certainly occurred incidentally. The distinction between intentional winemaking and incidental fermentation is one archaeobotanists are careful about.

Common scenarios

When English and Dutch settlers arrived in the mid-Atlantic region in the early 1600s, they found labrusca grapes growing in such density that early accounts — including those in John Josselyn's New England's Rarities Discovered (1672) — described grape-covered forest margins as almost theatrical in abundance. The settlers ate the grapes, occasionally made rough table wines, and then made the predictable mistake of assuming that European vinifera would do better.

The Virginia Company's instructions to early Jamestown colonists explicitly included grape cultivation as an economic priority. At least 5 separate shipments of vinifera cuttings arrived in Virginia between 1619 and 1650; all failed, succumbing to phylloxera, downy mildew, and winter conditions that labrusca grapes shrug off without difficulty.

Simultaneously, Indigenous nations continued demonstrating — in practice if not in formal instruction — that the native grape was the viable option. Trade between Native communities and colonists involved dried grape products, and English observers noted Indigenous grape-drying and storage techniques in journals from Massachusetts Bay and New Netherlands settlements.

The Catawba nation of the Carolinas gives its name to what became one of the first commercially successful American grape varieties, Catawba, developed in the early 19th century from stock associated with the region the Catawba people occupied. The naming itself is a form of ethnobotanical record.

Decision boundaries

The clearest way to understand this history is through contrast: Indigenous use was primarily nutritional and material, with fermentation secondary; colonial use prioritized fermentation but kept failing at it until colonists abandoned vinifera entirely and accepted labrusca on its own terms.

That shift happened gradually across the 1700s. By the time Alexander Hamilton's 1790 Report on Manufactures mentioned domestic wine production, the grapes being used in serious American winemaking attempts were predominantly native species, not vinifera imports. The Concord grape, developed by Ephraim Wales Bull in Concord, Massachusetts in 1849, represents the culmination of this trajectory — a fully domesticated labrusca variety bred from wild stock that Indigenous peoples had harvested for generations.

The labrusca and American wine industry origins are inseparable from this long period of parallel use. What reads as a straightforward agricultural history is actually a story of one knowledge system failing, and eventually having to acknowledge the validity of another. The grapes were never the problem. The assumptions were.

Native American and Colonial Use of Vitis Labrusca

Definition and scope

How it works

Common scenarios

Decision boundaries

References

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