A sparkling and sweet wine with traditional tart Catawba flavors.

The Long Story
Named for a river in South Carolina where the grapes were first discovered, Catawba is a cross of Semillon blanc and wild American grapes. 

Catawba grapes and their wines have a very rich history in America. This is thanks to the many years of effort by Nicolas Longworth, a self-made millionaire, who settled as a young man in Cincinnati, the “Queen of the West” in the early 1800s. He had vineyards along the shores of the Ohio River and made Catawba wine and also a secondary fermentation/methode champenoise Sparkling Catawba, which became his claim to fame by the mid-1800s. He made and sold the original first AMERICAN sparkling wine/champagne throughout the US and even in Europe.

Ode to Catawba by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
……….
But Catawba wine
has a taste more divine,
More dulcet, delicious and dreamy.
……….
And this Song of the Vine,
This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver
To the Queen of the West,
In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River.
  
Mr. Longfellow wrote this poem in honor of  America’s very first sparkling wine, a Catawba méthode champenoise, made by Nicolas Longworth in the mid-1800s from grapes grown on the banks of the Ohio River near Cincinnati. 

Why the name "The Queen's Catawba"? In his poem, Longfellow refers to Cincinnati in as the “Queen of the West”. Mr. Longworth sold his Sparkling Catawba wine in the US as well as Europe, where Queen Victoria tasted it and awarded it a prize/medal. And lastly, Buffalo has also been known as the Queen City of the Great Lakes.