Arpad Haraszthy
Arpad Haraszthy was a pioneer California winemaker best known as the creator of Eclipse champagne, the first commercially successful sparkling wine produced in the state. He was the first president of the California State Board of Viticultural Commissioners, one of the founding members and first officers of San Francisco's world-famous Bohemian Club, and a frequent and articulate writer on wine, winemaking, and viticulture. He has been criticized by some modern wine historians for his claims that his father, Agoston Haraszthy, imported the first Zinfandel grape vines to California in the early 1850s. Zinfandel later became famous as California's best grape for the production of red table wine. Arpad Haraszthy's claims about his father's importations of Zinfandel have neither been proved nor disproved, and they remain a subject of controversy.
Birth
Arpad Haraszthy was born in 1840 in Futtak, Hungary,, the third son of the pioneer Hungarian-American winemaker Agoston Haraszthy and his wife, Eleonóra Dedinszky Haraszthy. He belonged to the Mokcsai branch of the Haraszthy family, a Hungarian noble family that traced its roots to Ung County in northeastern Hungary, now part of Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. The pronunciation of the family name in Hungarian is . In American English, it is pronounced / ˈhærəsti/. Haraszthy's maternal grandfather was Ferencz Dedinszky, the superintendent of the 34,000-acre Futtak estate on the banks of the Danube River about eight miles west of Újvidék.To Wisconsin
With his father and other family members, Haraszthy came to Wisconsin in 1842, where his father had founded a village on the banks of the Wisconsin River about twenty-five miles northwest of Madison. First called Széptáj, later Haraszthy, the village was finally named Sauk City.To California
The Haraszthys remained in Wisconsin until 1849, when Agoston led them and a company of emigrants across the plains to California. With other members of his family, Haraszthy traveled in a covered wagon train via the Santa Fe Trail and arrived in San Diego, California, in December, 1849. Agoston Haraszthy settled the family on the San Diego Plaza and became prominent in the civic and commercial life of the town.To New York and New Jersey
After Agoston Haraszthy was elected to the California State Legislature in September, 1851, Arpad Haraszthy joined his mother, his younger brother Bela, and his sisters Ida and Otelia, on an ocean voyage to New York. They traveled by ship from San Diego to Panama, crossed the Isthmus to the Caribbean coast, then boarded another ship for New York City, where they arrived in 1852. Haraszthy attended school in New York while his mother established a home in nearby Plainfield, New Jersey. In New Jersey the family became good friends with an exiled Hungarian patriot named Lázár Mészáros, former secretary of war in the Hungarian government of Lajos Kossuth. An avid horticulturalist, Mészáros established a nursery at his farm in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, near the Haraszthy home. In New Jersey, Haraszthy became acquainted with the grape vines in Mészáros's nursery, cuttings of which Mészáros was then sending by ship to Agoston Haraszthy in California. Haraszthy later claimed that Mészáros helped his father obtain cuttings of Zinfandel.Return to California
After finishing his studies in New York, Haraszthy traveled through the United States, then returned to California by steamship. There he visited his father's vineyard properties at Crystal Springs, south of San Francisco, and in Sonoma, north of the city. Agoston Haraszthy was then in the process of transferring vines and vine cuttings from Crystal Springs to his new Sonoma property, which he called Buena Vista. After two months in California, Haraszthy returned to the East Coast, then set out across the Atlantic to France.French champagne studies
Reaching Paris in the latter part of 1857, Haraszthy enrolled in the École Polytechnique, France's most prestigious engineering school. Two years later, he went north to Épernay in Champagne, where he studied Champagne-making in the house of De Venoge. He was in Paris in late 1861, when his father, mother, and sister Ida arrived there to begin a vine-gathering tour of Europe. Haraszthy traveled with his father through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, helping him gather vines which were sent back to San Francisco. After Agoston Haraszthy returned to San Francisco at the end of 1861, he had more than 100,000 vine cuttings representing more than 300 European grape varieties. In New York, Harper & Brothers published his book about his European tour, called Grape Culture, Vines, and Wine-Making. When Haraszthy's Champagne studies were complete, he returned to California in the fall of 1862.In Sonoma
Haraszthy began to make wine at his father's new Buena Vista property in Sonoma, California, in the fall of 1862. As cellarmaster of Buena Vista, he produced both still and sparkling wines. His first sparkling wines were failures, but later efforts were successful. On June 1, 1863, Haraszthy married Jovita Vallejo, daughter of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the founder of Sonoma, and his brother Attila Haraszthy married Natalia Vallejo, Jovita's sister.This double-wedding united two of the leading winemaking families in Sonoma, for Vallejo was himself a prominent winemaker in the town. Agoston Haraszthy incorporated the Buena Vista property under the name of the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society in 1863. Toward the end of 1864, Haraszthy resigned from Buena Vista and formed a partnership with Pietro Giovanari, overseer of Vallejo's vineyards. The two men produced wine on their own account and for other vineyard owners under the name of Haraszthy and Giovanari.
In San Francisco
In 1866, Haraszthy moved to San Francisco, where he joined Isidor Landsberger, one of the trustees of the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society, in forming a new firm called I. Landsberger. Soon Haraszthy became a partner in the company, which was renamed I. Landsberger & Co. Under his direction, the partnership made and sold still and sparkling wines from cellars located in San Francisco. Following the traditional French champagne methods he had learned in Épernay, France, Haraszthy produced bottle-fermented sparkling wines. Beginning in 1867, the wine was sold under the name of Sparkling California. In 1875, Landsberger & Co. introduced the sparkling wine called Eclipse Extra Dry. This was a superior, semi-dry, bottle-fermented sparkling wine made in accordance with the French champagne method. Eclipse was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In the following years, its reputation spread to the East Coast and eventually to Mexico, England, Japan, and the South Pacific. The wine won medals at expositions in California, New York, England, France, and other countries. Cases were purchased by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Robert Louis Stevenson.In 1880, Landsberger withdrew from his partnership with Haraszthy and was succeeded by Henry Epstein. Epstein and Haraszthy operated the business under the name of Arpad Haraszthy & Co. until 1894, when the newly formed California Wine Association took over some of its operations. After first agreeing and later declining to join the California Wine Association, Haraszthy continued the production of his sparkling wine under his own name until about 1899.