Concord

The Story

In 1849, a retired Massachusetts farmer named Ephraim Wales Bull planted seeds from wild Vitis labrusca vines growing near his home in Concord, Massachusetts. He evaluated over 22,000 seedlings over six years before selecting the one he believed was perfect: cold-hardy, productive, disease-resistant, early-ripening. He named it after his town, introduced it commercially in 1854, and won first prize at the Boston Horticultural Society Exhibition in 1853. What happened next was not what Bull had hoped: nurseries bought his cuttings, propagated them freely, and Bull saw little financial reward. He died a relatively poor man. His tombstone reads: "He sowed — others reaped."

Those who reaped transformed America. The Concord grape became the dominant juice grape of the United States, the backbone of Welch's grape juice (first produced in 1869 by New Jersey dentist Thomas Welch using Pasteur's pasteurization method), the flavoring behind every American grape jelly, the canonical taste of grape candy, soda, and popsicle. Concord became so culturally embedded that "grape flavor" in America is not Muscat, not Riesling — it is Concord's methyl anthranilate, a volatile ester responsible for the famous "foxy" aroma scientists now understand at the gene-expression level.

Then Prohibition arrived. Sacramental wine was legally exempt. Jewish communities, concentrated in New York, had long used Concord for kosher wine — a tradition that became an industry. Manischewitz Concord wine, sweet and intensely grapey, became a cultural institution and one of the best-selling wines in America through most of the 20th century.

The greatest surprise in Concord's story came from Japan. In 1897, an American-bred cultivar called Campbell Early (a Concord relative) was introduced to Japan. Concord itself followed. Today, labrusca varieties — Concord, Delaware, and Campbell Early — are widely grown in Nagano, Yamanashi, and Yamagata prefectures, where Japanese winemakers embrace their distinctive aromatic profile rather than apologizing for it. Nagano's Concord wines are a window into an alternate wine world where the "foxy" flavor is celebrated heritage, not defect.

Insider Story

Bull's tombstone is the most poignant business lesson in American agricultural history. He made the variety, named it, promoted it — and watched the market reward everyone but him. The nursery trade of the 19th century had no intellectual property protections; once you sold cuttings, you lost control. The modern parallel would be releasing open-source software and watching a corporation productize it. The irony is complete: the Concord grape is one of the most economically significant grape varieties ever created — underpinning a billion-dollar juice industry, a significant kosher wine market, and the entire American "grape flavor" cultural palette — and its creator died nearly broke. Meanwhile, the Welch family's fortune (Thomas Welch's son Charles commercialized it as "Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine") became one of the defining American food brands.

Technical Deep Dive

Concord is a Vitis labrusca cultivar (roughly one-third Vitis vinifera by genetic testing), with the characteristic "foxy" aroma driven primarily by methyl anthranilate (MA), produced by the enzyme anthraniloyl-CoA:methanol acyltransferase (AMAT). A 2020 study in Horticulture Research showed that homology-induced promoter indels regulate AMAT expression, explaining why V. labrusca grapes produce so much more MA than V. vinifera. In winemaking, minimizing foxiness requires: cool fermentation (65-68°F/18-20°C), limited skin contact (separate skins within 24 hours to reduce color AND foxiness), and potentially activated charcoal or membrane filtration for commercial juice. The grape has very high sugar at ripeness (Brix 16-20+) and medium-high natural acidity. Cold hardiness is exceptional — rated to approximately -20°F (-29°C), which is why it thrives in the Finger Lakes, Lake Erie, and Southwestern Michigan. Vine productivity is very high; cluster weights can reach 200-400g. Concord is extremely disease-resistant relative to vinifera.

Industry Secrets

The "foxy" stigma attached to labrusca wines is largely a European-derived bias. Methyl anthranilate is not objectively unpleasant — it reads as intensely "grapey" and familiar to most Americans who grew up drinking grape juice and eating PB&J. The wine trade's dismissal of Concord and other labrusca wines is a class/taste signaling behavior, not an objective quality judgment. In Japan, this bias never took hold: winemakers in Nagano and Yamanashi simply work with the aromatic profile. The commercial reality: Concord grape products (juice, jelly, wine) generate revenues that dwarf any single vinifera appellation wine category in the United States. Welch's alone sells hundreds of millions of dollars of Concord products annually. The entire "serious wine" world has essentially ignored one of the most commercially successful grapes on Earth.

More red grapes

• Cornalin
• Corvina
• Corvinone
• Counoise
• Courbu