Grapes and Grapevines of California

"Grapes and Grape Vines of California" was originally published in San Francisco in 1877 by Edward Bosqui and Company. This book has been considered a masterpiece for over one hundred years, not only because it was the first book published about California grapes and vines, but also because it was one of the most beautiful books printed in the nineteenth century, reproducing with incomparable fidelity the dazzling colors of grapes, the most beautiful of all fruits.

Today only nine complete and undamaged copies of that first edition are known to exist. Because of the great demand by connoisseurs who had heard of the book but had never seen it, it is here reprinted reproducing the color illustrations as closely as possible to the originals.

The watercolors, done by Hannah Millard, were commissioned by the California State vinicultural Society in 1875, to illustrate the varieties of grapes grown in California as the time. Miss Millard produced ten paintings, drawn in the vineyards at vintage time, brilliantly colored and perfect in every detail. Indispensable in identifying individual varieties, they are also of historical importance because soon after were drawn, a blight of phylloxera destroyed vines throughout California, altering the course of viniculture in the state.

Now, ten decades later, the book has been reprinted to delight wine lovers and those who treasure beautiful things. As Kevin Starr writes in his introduction to this new edition, "'Grapes and Grape Vines of California' is an enduring book because it was made to be beautiful -- and because it was made to serve a great enterprise, that of wine in California. ...[It] deserves this new lease on life. It is a bibliographic treasure, most fundamentally, a testimony to the bookmaker's art. But is so many other things as well: the premier product of a premier printer, Edward Bosqui; a surviving artifact of old San Francisco, where men and women took the time to do things well; and in this translation to Pacific shores of the immemorial arts of viniculture and wine making, California took one step further in the direction of her assured destiny as a special American place."