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Today’s track: Cantaloupe Island — Herbie Hancock

Good Morning,

Every grapevine in California came from us. And we gave France its vines too.

I went digging on this one. It's not quite true. But the real story is better, it's got a University of Kentucky grad as the hero, and it's the best real estate lesson I've run into in a while. So grab your coffee and let's go.

In 1796, a Swiss winemaker's son named Jean-Jacques Dufour landed in America with one goal: grow wine here. He spent about two years scouting the country for the right dirt and the right weather, and he picked Kentucky.

He didn't have the money, so he raised it. In January 1798 he ran an ad in the Kentucky Gazette selling 200 shares at $50 apiece. That's how the Kentucky Vineyard Society got funded. It was basically a crowdfunded startup, 225 years before Kickstarter. Henry Clay bought in and served as the group's lawyer.

They bought more than 600 acres on the Kentucky River in Jessamine County, near Nicholasville, and Dufour named the place First Vineyard. In 1799 he planted around 35 different grape varieties on terraces cut into the hillside. The first wine got poured in 1803 at a tavern in Lexington, and casks went to President Thomas Jefferson so he could taste what Kentucky was up to.

Then it failed. Disease got into the vines, and a hard freeze in 1809 finished the job. The Dufour brothers packed up and moved up the Ohio River to Vevay, Indiana, where they finally made it work. That spot became the first commercially successful winery in the country. Dufour even wrote the how-to book for American grape growers in 1826.

And the land in Nicholasville? It sat for about two hundred years. Then new owners dug through old deeds and surveys (one done by Daniel Boone), proved it was the original site, found Dufour's terraces, replanted them, and reopened First Vineyard in 2012.

The first use of a piece of land is never the last word on it.

After Dufour, people planted grapes up and down the Ohio Valley. By the second half of the 1800s, Kentucky was the third-largest grape and wine producer in the country.

Now, here's where I have to correct the bar story. We were third, not first.

First place was right across the river from us. In Cincinnati, a lawyer named Nicholas Longworth planted a grape called Catawba, and in 1842 a batch accidentally fermented twice and turned into the first commercially successful American sparkling wine. By 1859 Ohio was making more than 570,000 gallons a year, roughly twice what California made. Missouri ran second before Prohibition. Kentucky was third.

So picture it: the biggest wine region in America was our neighborhood. Cincinnati, Louisville, Vevay, the Bluegrass. That's where the country's wine came from.

What about California? California wasn't waiting on us. Spanish missionaries brought grapevines up from Mexico, and those vines had come over from Spain in the 1500s. Father Junípero Serra founded the first California mission in San Diego in 1769, and the first California harvest happened in 1782, more than a decade before Dufour ever got off the boat. California was Spanish land, then Mexican land, and became a state in 1850.

So where's Kentucky in the France story? This is where it gets good.

There's a tiny bug called phylloxera (you say it fill-OX-er-uh). It's like a little aphid, it lives in the dirt, and it eats grapevine roots. It's native to America. Our wild grapes grew up alongside it for thousands of years, so they shrug it off. European grapes had never met it and had zero defense.

In the mid-1800s, people started shipping American vines to Europe for experiments, and the bug rode along. It showed up in France in 1863 and started killing vineyards by the square mile. France offered a 300,000-franc reward for anyone who could stop it. Nobody could. To this day, nothing kills it.

The fix wasn't a spray. It was a graft.

Grafting means you take the top of one plant and attach it to the roots of another so they grow together as one. The French kept their famous grapes on top (Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay) and put them on American roots that the bug couldn't hurt.

That's the part of the bar story that's true. France really did have to come to America to save its vineyards. It just needed our roots, not our grapes.

Missouri sent cuttings first, and a lot of them died, because France's chalky, limestone soil didn't agree with them.

Enter Thomas Volney Munson.

Munson grew up on an Illinois farm, came to Lexington with his brother, and in 1870 graduated from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, the school that became UK. His was the second degree that school ever handed out. His brother William got the first. Munson worked as a nurseryman in Lexington, then moved to Denison, Texas, in 1876 and became the country's top expert on wild American grapes.

When France sent its scientist Pierre Viala to find roots that could handle chalky soil, Munson pointed him to a wild grape growing in the Texas limestone hills. In 1888 Munson organized crews who collected 15 wagonloads of cuttings, and they shipped to France to become the roots under French vineyards. France knighted him for it. He was only the second American to get that agricultural honor. The first was Thomas Edison…who also has a rich history here in Kentucky as well, but we’ll leave that for another day. It’ll be lit!

California got hit too. The bug showed up near Sonoma in 1873, and growers there replanted onto American roots the same way. It happened again in the late 1980s and 1990s, when a popular rootstock failed and growers had to replant thousands of acres in Napa and Sonoma.

Today, more than 90% of the world's grapevines grow grafted, mostly on American roots.

So here's the honest version of the bar story. France and California aren't growing Kentucky vines. But a huge share of the world's wine stands on American roots, and the guy who found the right ones learned his trade in Lexington.

One more thing, because of course it's real estate. Munson and his brother ran a company called Munson Realty in Texas from 1883 to 1915, and Munson eventually sold most of his nursery ground as residential lots, keeping 100 acres for himself. Grape guy. Land guy. Same guy.

Disease, the Civil War, and then Prohibition wiped Kentucky's wine business out. Farmers tore out vineyards and planted tobacco, which paid better anyway. Even after Prohibition ended in 1933, Kentucky didn't let wineries operate again until 1976. As recently as the 1990s, you could count Kentucky's wineries on one hand.

Then tobacco started fading. In 1998, the tobacco companies settled with the states, and Kentucky put a big chunk of its money into a fund to help farmers grow something new. In 2004 the federal tobacco program ended, and a lot of farmers walked away from tobacco for good. UK sent experts out to help them turn tobacco fields into vineyards.

Kentucky had about 40 acres of wine grapes in commercial vineyards in 1998. It's around 600 now. UK counts 76 wineries in the state. And a 2025 study from WineAmerica, the national winery trade group, puts the wine business's total footprint in Kentucky (growing, making, selling, and the tourism around it) at nearly 12,000 jobs and about $2.3 billion.

Same dirt. New crop.

And Louisville sits right in the middle of it. The federal government draws official wine regions called American Viticultural Areas, or AVAs. Think of it like the government saying "Napa Valley is a real place with its own growing conditions." In 1983 it created the Ohio River Valley AVA, about 26,000 square miles across Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. It's the second-largest wine region in the country, and we're inside it.

Want to see what that looks like in real life? Drive across the bridge to Starlight, Indiana. In 1843 a German immigrant named Simon Huber bought an 80-acre farm there. Six generations later, cousins Ted and Greg Huber run almost 700 acres: the oldest and largest estate vineyard in Indiana, a winery, a distillery, U-pick fruit, Christmas trees, a farm market, a cafe, and event space for up to 2,000 people. One year they reported 580,000 visitors and 85 weddings.

That's not a farm. That's a clinic on land use.

Think about everything Kentucky has been. Frontier vineyards. Hemp. Tobacco. Bourbon. Horses. A river town that got rich because boats had to stop at a waterfall, then built a canal (I told you that one in Right Twice), then became home to the UPS worldwide air hub.

Every time one thing faded, the ground didn't go anywhere. Somebody grafted something new onto old roots. And every time, the people who saw the next use first made the money.

That's the whole game in real estate. Here's how I'd use it.

1. Know the roots, then pick the graft. Appraisers have a phrase called "highest and best use." It just means: what's the most valuable thing this property can be? To answer it, ask four questions. Is it legal (what does zoning allow)? Is it physically possible (lot size, slope, the building's bones)? Does it make financial sense? And of the options that pass all three, which one earns the most? Most people look at a property and see what it is. Ask what it could be.

2. When an old use dies, the value moves. Tobacco barns. Churches with more land than members. Strip centers emptied out by online shopping. Old warehouses near downtown. The seller usually sees the use that died. The buyer who wins sees the next one. The dirt is the rootstock. The use is the graft.

3. Stack your uses like the Hubers. They didn't pick one thing. They layered. You can too, on a smaller scale. A duplex where you live in one side and rent the other. A house with a basement apartment. A lot with room for a second building. A warehouse with a storage business in the back. Before you plan anything, check zoning. In Louisville, that's Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, and I'm happy to help you figure out who to ask.

4. Grafts take time. A new vineyard takes years before it makes good wine. Rezonings, renovations, and filling up a building with tenants all take time too. Budget time the same way you budget money, and you won't get spooked halfway through.

5. Pick strong rootstock. The French didn't pick the flashiest roots. They picked the ones that could survive their soil for a hundred years. Louisville is rootstock. It's not flashy. It's steady, it's affordable compared to most of the country, and it sits on a river, a highway crossroads, and one of the busiest air cargo hubs in the world. If you're investing here from out of state, that's exactly what you want under your money.

Kentucky gave America its first commercial vineyard. A UK grad helped save French wine. We've been the bourbon capital, the horse capital, and the place where packages from all over the world change planes at 3 a.m.

I don't think we're done adding. I think the next thing is already sitting on some piece of ground around here, waiting for somebody to see it. Lately it has felt like group homes have been the ticket, but then I have inspired conversations with other clients and they let me in on their special games. There is PLENTY of opportunity out there, you just have to take action and think differently.

If you've got a property where the old use has run its course, a building, a farm, a church lot, a strip center, a house that doesn't fit anymore, reply to this email or text me. Let's figure out the graft together. And if you're looking to buy the next one before everybody else sees it, same thing. That's what I love doing.

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📊 Yesterday's poll, "Do you know how your roof is insured?": "No clue, checking today" took it at 56%. Another 33% said they checked and have replacement cost, 11% have actual cash value (the prorated kind), and 0% said "I rent, not my problem." More than half of you didn't know, and that's exactly why I wrote it. The 11% on prorated coverage are the ones who'd get the surprise check after a storm, so if that's you, call your agent and ask what it costs to switch. If you were in the "no clue" group, today's the day to pull out that dec page. Reply ROOF and I'll send you the exact questions to ask.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

🏆 Some of the best deals on the MLS right now are properties whose old use ran out and nobody's seen the next one yet. Every morning I rank the five best deals in Louisville and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you. Reply "FIVE."

Rooted,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

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PS: Want your own little piece of Kentucky wine country? There are three properties on the MLS right now, an easy drive from Louisville, with grapes already growing. A 5-acre estate in Simpsonville with a three-quarter-acre vineyard, 485 vines, that's already made award-winning wine. A farm in Campbellsburg, out in Henry County, with tillable acreage, multiple barns, and an established grapevine. And a 13-acre historic equestrian estate outside Shelbyville with a gazebo covered in grapevines. See all three here. Reply or text me if you want to go walk one.