Jerry Eisterhold devotes his professional life to designing museums.

His credits include the National Museum of the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia; the North Carolina History Center on Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction at Fayetteville, North Carolina; the Boot Hill Museum at Dodge City, Kansas; the August Wilson African American Cultural Center at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Rosa Parks Museum and Children’s Annex at Montgomery, Alabama; and perhaps the most daring and dicey of his projects, The President’s House on Independence Mall at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an open-air exhibit that addresses the residence of the nation’s first Presidents and the slave quarters that also occupied the site.

Jerry Eisterhold (TerraVox photo)

Now, in the backyard of his studio just outside Kansas City, Missouri, he is developing a totally different kind of museum, one that looks to the future as well as the past.

It’s called TerraVox – or “voice of the land” – and it encompasses vineyard, winery and brand. If it were one of Eisterhold’s actual physical facilities, the sign out front could claim, “TerraVox: The Botanical Museum of Native American Grape Varieties.”

With TerraVox, Eisterhold is stretching the concept of inter-active museum exhibits into a new realm. It is a highly personal project, with no foundation or institution to help him plant and graft grapevines, harvest fruit, crush clusters, and market wines. Consider it a new spin on Missouri as the “Show-Me” state.

His audience may not only be skeptical that fine wine can emerge from Missouri but that it can be made with varieties of grape virtually no one knows short of a university-based ampelographer.

For enthusiasts of history and wine, the price of admission to his museum is the price of one of his bottles, ranging from $22 to $55.

Why is he indulging such a radical, expensive and uncertain move into the wine trade? “If I didn’t, no one would do it. It isn’t for economic reasons. I could have bought a lot of good wine with what I am spending here,” says Eisterhold in an online interview. “It’s a real-world extension of my museum work. It’s an appreciation of what can come from a specific place.”

He sees TerraVox as a living diorama to showcase genetic diversity and to prove that historic if atypical wine grapes can thrive in an ideal if unrecognized terroir.

Eisterhold grew up on a farm in Missouri’s Gasconade River Valley, about an hour’s drive southwest of Hermann, the historical heart of the state’s wine trade. He studied agronomy at the University of Missouri, but then drifted west to Kansas City to establish his eponymous design firm with a bent toward helping cultural organizations tell their stories.

Kansas City isn’t wine country, but Eisterhold’s agrarian heritage had a hold on him, as did his appreciation for wine, and in 1996 he chartered a plane to scout land about Kansas City that he hoped would be suitable for a vineyard. He didn’t have to fly far. The deep, silty soil he wanted, and the 14-acre vineyard that now rises from it, is within sight of the air-control tower of Kanas City International Airport.

TerraVox (TerraVox photo)

The story he wants to tell on his plot starts with three key words: “American heritage grapes.” Eisterhold is set upon resurrecting and replicating a family of wine grapes indigenous to the United States but now largely forgotten. These are grapes that once upon a time provided the foundation for a flourishing American wine culture, and may again, Eisterhold is hopeful. (In 1869, according to federal census figures, Missouri accounted for 47 of the country’s total wine output, compared with 27 percent for California and 13 percent for New York, noted wine writer Gerald Asher in one of his essays for Gourmet magazine several years ago.)

Eisterhold has a long way to go both to help reestablish Missouri’s winemaking credentials and to verify that the nation’s native grapes again can earn a place at the table, he is the first to acknowledge. “We’re halfway there. We are proving that we can grow grapes and make good wine, but we have to get it (the business) to be sustainable,” said Eisterhold, who is releasing about 2000 cases a year under the TerraVox label.

In Missouri, the challenge to make and market fine wine would be difficult even if he were relying on the usual suspects – Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and the like.

(TerraVox photo)

But Eisterhold has set off in Lewis-and-Clark fashion as he plunges into virtually alien territory for growing grapes and making wine. He and his winemaker, Jean-Louis Horvilleur, are creating wines with grape varieties basically unique to the United States: Ready for labels that bear such varietal-wine names as Cloeta, Herbemont, Hidalgo, Wetumka and Lenoir?

As if Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and their ilk weren’t confusing enough in their range of expression.

Nonetheless, I ordered three bottles of TerraVox wines, basing my selection on those that most intrigued me by their back stories. Keep in mind that on his 14 acres Eisterhold is growing some 60 varieties of obscure wine grapes, from which he currently lists 21 wines.

I took delivery of one each of TerraVox’s Wetumka, Albania and Lenoir, all from the 2020 vintage, each priced $27. They proved to be clean, lean, tense, dry wines captivating for their suggestions of fruits and herbs not commonly found in California varietals. They were trim and intent, with a wiriness and birr that brought to mind the industry of bee or bird going about its business as if nothing else in the world could divert it.

For the record, Wetumka is a white wine, in this instance so deeply colored it looked as if it could be oxidized, or a late-harvest wine. But the color was deceiving, with the wine coming off fresh and tart, with a faint suggestion of pineapple, dried green herbs and bales of fresh-cut hay. There was a scampering vitality to the wine, and a little foxiness common to wines of the American southeast.

Wetumka is a cross of three grape varieties – Herbemont, Gold Coin and Elvira. The story behind each is long and complex, but for purposes here let’s just say they are largely native American grapes that belong to groups of vines other than vitis vinifera, which provides varieties generally grown in California, from Albariño to Zinfandel.

The history of Herbemont, for example, can be traced to South Carolina in 1798, which is when and where French-born vintner Nicholas Herbemont found it growing wild and began to take advantage of it.

Elvira is a grape variety long cultivated in New York, while Gold Coin is a grape developed by viticulturist Thomas Volney Munson at Denison, Texas, in 1885. It is a cross of the grape varieties Norton and Martha, and was celebrated for its resistance to rot and for its ability to withstand sharp swings in temperature typical of the Midwest.

Munson is more or less the patron saint of TerraVox. A university-educated horticulturist, Munson worked in Kentucky and Nebraska before settling in Denison in 1876. Initially, he was in the realty business, but eventually returned to his horticultural passion, with a growing emphasis on wine grapes.

By the time he died in 1913, Munson had developed more than 300 varieties of grape, largely by crossing and hybridizing grapes from native American species like vitis aestivalis, vitis riparia and vitis cinerea rather than from vitis vinifera, which accounts for the vast majority of today’s wine grapes in the United States.

His research and development were so instrumental in helping the French wine industry restore vineyards following a devastating attack of phylloxera in the late 19^th century that the French government dispatched to Denison a delegation of diplomats to confer on Munson the French Legion of Honor Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, just one of several European and American honors with which he was showered during his career.

In 1909, Munson wrote and published the seminal book “Foundations of American Grape Culture,” still a valued reference tapped by anyone who wants to dive deeply into early American viticulture.

Along the bluffs overlooking the Red River at Denison, as well as throughout much of the rest of the country, Munson spent most of his professional life scouting for wild grapes, selecting specimens and then patiently crossing and hybridizing them to come up with varieties that he found commercially viable.

To Munson, the ideal vine would be vigorous, hardy, and resistant to drought, hard winters, grasshoppers, phylloxera, downy mildew and all sorts of other environmental challenges. Their grapes, he wrote, should yield “a pleasing characteristic flavor” and be “rich in sugar and agreeably sprightly in acidity.”

By the end of his exploration, he calculated that out of 75,000 grape seedlings with which he worked, fewer than 100 varieties were worth recommending to farmers. It customarily took him about eight years of breeding for a variety “to fully display its true permanent character.”

Today, the Denison campus of Grayson College includes the Thomas Volney Munson Memorial Vineyard for the cultivation and preservation of grape varieties he developed.

That’s where Eisterhold got many of the cuttings to develop his vineyard. His challenge now is to whittle the field to those varieties that flourish best in both his Kansas City terroir and the marketplace. “We can’t survive doing three cases each of 60 different grape varieties,” Eisterhold says.

In addition to Wetumka, he feels that several other offbeat grape varieties are showing so much potential in the character and quality of the wines they yield that he is about to double the size of his vineyard. He is especially keen on the varieties Herbemont, Hildago, Cloeta, Volney, Albania and Lorinco.

The Albania I ordered is a cross of the grape varieties Norton, Herbemont and Ten Dollar Prize. Herbemont we’ve discussed. Norton is the grape variety and varietal wine most closely identified with Missouri; indeed, it is Missouri’s officially designated state grape. Eisterhold has planted about a third of his vineyard to Norton, using the grape not only for varietal wines but as a benchmark by which to measure the prospects of the other are varieties he tends.

Ten Dollar Prize has its own colorful back story. In 1882, Munson offered a $10 reward to anyone who brought him the most impressive section of wild vine climbing on a post-oak tree. (Post oak is a species of North American white oak celebrated for the railroad ties, stair risers, barn siding and fence posts it provided.)

Munson assembled five grape and wine judges who proceeded to taste repeatedly grapes from the 20 to 30 vines that were brought him on the assigned day in August. A vine of an unnamed wild grape found a mile southeast of Denison was judged the best on the basis of its health, vigor and grapes, whose pulp he recorded as “meaty but tender,” just the traits he was looking for in fruit with the potential to yield a fine wine. He paid the $10, took possession of the sample, christened it Ten Dollar Prize and then used it to help produce numerous hybrids in his vineyard.

The TerraVox Albania is a white wine with a deep, bright honey sheen, a floral aroma, and a faint peachiness in flavor. It is a dry wine, with a sharp-edged acidity and a suggestion of slate in feel. It has the lean build and stern delivery that put me in mind of several styles of Italian white wine. (Incidentally, the wine’s label spells Albania backwards, a concession to federal authorities concerned that consumers might otherwise think the wine was from Albania.)

A cluster of Lenoir. (TerraVox photo)

To this palate, the most intriguing of the three TerraVox wines was the Lenoir, a native American grape whose origins have been traced to the 1830s in South Carolina. It’s a red wine with a bright ruby hue, an aroma that weaves from cherry to tarragon, and a berry flavor that swings through patches of raspberries and strawberries. It is dry, with finely honed acidity, supportive but not disruptive tannins, and surprising force for a wine with such a lean build.

All three wines are low in alcohol, the Wetumka with 7.7 percent, the Albania with 9 percent, and the Lenoir with 9.4 percent.

I didn’t order the TerraVox Norton, the wine with which the winery is most closely identified, because I already was familiar with its stature and its nature. More than one vintage has been judged best of its class at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Here is what I had to say of the 2016 TerraVox Norton, best of its class in 2020, and still available at $55 per bottle: “A perfectly proportioned wine, with dark lyrical fruit, a willowy build and reserved tannins. Don’t be intimidated by its dense and brilliant color; behind that curtain is a wine of exceptional elegance and endurance.”

TerraVox wines generally are made in small lots, and distribution doesn’t much get beyond Kansas City. The are available online direct from TerraVox, however, for a flat $10 shipping fee.

Prohibition, challenging weather and the comparative ease of growing traditional grape varieties in California all contributed to the decline of the wine trade in Missouri, but as in other far-flung enclaves about the country, it is on a rebound. Missouri now has around 130 wineries, with TerraVox staking out its own distinctive corner as a veritable museum devoted to rare and endangered but potentially once again celebrated American grape varieties.

To learn where copies of my book “The Signature Wines of Superior California: 50 Wines that Define the Sierra Foothills, the Delta, Yolo and Lodi” can be found, please visit my website SignatureWines.us.