Vineyards of Spanish America: one black grape, and the law that tried to stop it
Spain planted essentially one black grape in the Americas - Listan Prieto, called Criolla Chica in South America and Mission in California - and it carried American wine for three centuries. Acosta in 1590 measured the boom by the tithes of Peru, five or six times what they had been twenty years before. The Crown's own law concedes that planting vines in the Indies was forbidden, that Peru planted anyway, and settles for two per cent of the fruit.
Why this wins its question: Ask about wine in colonial Spanish America and the answer on offer is that missionaries planted vines for the Mass, which is true and explains almost nothing. This object binds four things no popular account carries together: a 1590 eyewitness who states which regions the vine failed in and prices the product against Spanish imports, the tithe multiple of five or six in twenty years as the contemporary measure of the boom, the law of the Indies that admits vine planting was prohibited, that Peru did it anyway, and that the Crown settled for two per cent of the fruit rather than prosecute for usurped land, and the labour title that had to forbid paying vineyard wages in wine, chicha, honey and yerba. Then it names the plant: genotyping identifies Listan Prieto, the Criolla Chica of South America and the Mission of California, as the single cultivar that carried American wine for a century, and measures what it did to two wild American species - thirty per cent of sampled V. californica vines already hybrids. Achievement, protectionist cost, coerced labour and ecological consequence, each bound to its own source.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
A Jesuit who had lived in Peru mapped the wine frontier in print in 1590. Book IV, chapter 32 of Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias, "De Vuas, y Viñas, y Oliuas, y Moreras, y Cañas de Açucar" (fol. 272 of the Seville first edition), opens by ranking the vine first among the plants brought from Spain that "traen a su dueño dinero", and then states where it did and did not work: "En las Islas, y Tierrafirme no se da vino ni vuas: en la nueua España ay parras, y lleuan vuas, pero no se haze vino", the cause being the July and August rains that keep the fruit from ripening. Wine for those provinces "lleuan de España, o delas Canarias", "saluo el Piru y Chile, donde ay viñas, y se haze vino y muy bueno". The transfer succeeded in two regions and failed in the rest, and the man reporting it says so.
The same page gives the scale of the boom in a figure a church accountant could check: "Han crecido tanto las viñas, que por su causa los diezmos de las Iglesias son oy cinco y seys tanto, de lo que eran hora veynte años" (fol. 273). He names the best valleys - Victor near Arequipa, Ica in the district of Lima, Caracato in that of Chuquiabo - and describes coastal vineyards watered by hand from acequias because rain never falls on the llanos, and the hollows of Villacuri where vines bear "en grande abundancia" among dead sand with neither rain nor irrigation. Confidence is held at 0.85 because the tithe multiple is his own report of somebody else's accounts.
Colonial wine was an interior trade with prices to match. Acosta records that the wine went to Potosi, to Cuzco "y a diuersas partes", that it "es grande grangeria" because a botija or arroba sold at five or six ducats where wine shipped from Spain in the fleets fetched ten or twelve, and that Chilean wine was made "como en España, porque es el mismo temple" but spoiled when carried up to Peru. The American product undercut the imported one by half in its own market, which is the commercial fact behind everything the Crown later legislated.
Two pages later the same author draws the limit of the business himself: "La grangeria del vino no es pequeña, pero no sale de su prouincia" (fol. 274), set against silk, which "se haze en nueua España, sale para otros Reynos como el Piru", and sugar, of which "no solo se gasta en Indias, sino tambien se trae a España harta quantidad". Wine was the one American crop of this group that stayed home - it never became an export, and the reason is in the next claim.
The prohibition and its abandonment are printed in the same law. Recopilacion de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, libro IIII, titulo XVII, ley xviij (fol. 60 of tomo II of the 1791 impression), margined to the Instruccion de Vireyes of 1595, to Philip III at Aranda on 14 August 1620 and to Philip IV in 1628 and 1631, opens: "POR las Instrucciones de Vireyes, y otras Cedulas, y provisiones nuestras esta prohibido plantar viñas en las Indias Occidentales, y ordenado a los Vireyes, que no den licencias para que de nuevo se planten, ni reparen las que se fueren acabando". It then concedes that "los vecinos, y moradores del Peru han plantado muchas", that the Crown could prosecute them "por el delito de haber contravenido a nuestras ordenes, y haber usurpado las tierras donde las han puesto", and that instead, "por usar de benignidad y clemencia", every owner is to pay "cada año a razon de dos por ciento de todo el fruto". A ban that ends as a tax is a ban that lost, and the land usurpation is admitted by the Crown, not alleged against it.
Who worked the vines is legislated in the same compilation, and the law that protects also insults. Libro VI carries a whole title, XIII, "Del servicio en chacras, viñas, olivares, obrages, ingenios, perlas, tambos, requas, carreterias, casas, ganados, y bogas". Its first law (Philip III, Aranjuez, 26 May 1609) continues the mitas and repartimientos on the ground that if the Indians "les quedase libertad, rehusarian el trabajo, y beneficio de estos ministerios, por su natural inclinacion a vida ociosa, y descansada", while in the same sentence requiring that they not live "oprimidos con nota, y ocupacion de esclavos" and prohibiting the drafts that serve "las grangerias, y comodidades particulares de los Españoles" (fol. 299).
Two laws further into that title the vineyards are named twice more, and both times the remedy records the abuse. The law margined to the ordinance of 1601 and to 26 May 1609 orders that Indians not be distributed for the coca harvest "ni para la cultura de viñas, y olivares, por los grandes inconvenientes que se han experimentado de estos repartimientos"; the next, ley vij, that "A Los Indios que trabajaren en la labor, y ministerio de las viñas, y en otro qualquiera, no se pague el jornal en vino, chicha, miel, ni yerba del Paraguay", anything so paid to be forfeit, twenty pesos on any Spaniard who tries it, "porque nuestra voluntad es, que la satisfaccion sea en dinero" (fol. 301). Truck payment in the estate's own wine had to be forbidden, which means it was being done.
Modern genotyping identifies the vine itself, and it is one vine. A survey of wild grape populations in California reports that Vitis vinifera "came initially to southern California with Spanish missionaries starting in 1769", that "for ~100 years, the introduction was limited to a single cultivar, 'Listan Prieto'", of Spanish origin, that this cultivar had "a long history of cultivation in South America under the name 'Criolla Chica'", and that in California it became known "simply as 'Mission'". The wine Acosta priced in Peru and the wine of the California missions are, varietally, the same plant propagated by cuttings across two hundred years and eight thousand kilometres.
The cost of that single cultivar is measurable in the wild flora it met. The same study found that "thirty percent of 119 V. californica vines were hybrids"; of the sixteen F1 hybrids whose domesticated parent could be identified, 'Mission' was the parent of eight; and backcrosses were found too, "showing introgression into subsequent generations", with similar results in a small sample of V. girdiana. A prolonged introduction of one genetic individual - spread further by the 1849 Gold Rush - is still moving into the genomes of two native American species. Confidence 0.85: the sampling is regional and the authors present the girdiana result as preliminary.