This provocative book analyzes the pre-Prohibition history of American grape growing and winemaking in the context of imperialist expansion. It does not break new ground; other books—particularly Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989) and Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (New York, 2000)— cover much the same territory. Instead, it shifts focus away from the story of wine per se to an account of wine as one example in a larger, more complex story of national identity. Unfortunately, Hannickel subverts her project by treating interpretations of that identity as unquestioned facts, and by inventing facts to fit her interpretations. Her argument becomes increasingly predictable; it is as much about her own political views as about wine.
Those views see American history as a record of imperialist conquest disguised by rhetoric upholding various myths of nature’s beneficence in a new...