The following article is from our January 2007 issue.

In Missouri, A Phoenix Named Hermann Devastated by the Prohibition, a wine-growing German town in the Midwest is again thriving - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

In 1837, freedom-loving settlers from Germany created a "New Fatherland" on the banks of the Missouri River, which resembles the Rhine. They built a little town and named it Hermann, after a first-century Germanic chieftain. Soon literature, poetry and music flourished. Within decades, wines from the hills surrounding Hermann won world acclaim. Rootstocks from these vineyards are even credited with having saved the Old World's viticulture from destruction by the Phylloxera plague in the 1870s. A rollicking place from the start, Hermann was devastated by the Prohibition. These days, its wine flows amply once again: Hermann
(pop. 2,800) is experiencing a renaissance.

There is something eminently European about the way people act in Hermann, the marvelously unspoiled German town on the Missouri River. For example, they walk into inns such as the Hermannshof, head for the bar, grab a bottle of local wine and some glasses, and stop at another counter for bread, sausage and cheese. Then they sit down at a table in the shady garden and drink heartily, listening to 200-car freight trains hoot melancholically on their way from St. Louis to Kansas City and destinations beyond. This is the German way - the way it's done in Hermann, whose rise, fall and Phoenix-like resurgence were all intricately linked to the most glorious of beverages, wine.

Hermann is a quirky place with a knack for turning misfortunes into blessings. It would be little more than a pretty spot in a pristine setting, were it not for the fact that the arid soil condition on its stunning hillsides lent itself primarily to one crop - grapes. "La vigne doit souffrir pour que le vin soit bon," say the French - the vine must suffer for its wine to be good. It suffers efficaciously as its roots burrow deeper and deeper into the ground in search of nutrients and moisture; only then will it gain strength and produce the most magnificent fruit.

This insight was no secret to the German lawyers, teachers, doctors, writers, craftsmen, traders and ministers who moved into the wilderness west of the Mississippi in the 1830s and 1840s, all fired up by the ideals of the French Revolution and subsequent revolts in their own homeland. They came to build a better Germany nursing "the comforting hope that the German will still be endowed with all those virtues through which our people stand out among all other nations in the world, like a rugged, venerable oak among the trees of the forest," as one document of that period stated melodramatically.

They were sure Hermann would soon become a sparkling metropolis with a distinctly Germanic flavor, sort of like Hamburg. That didn't happen. Still, they built something remarkable thanks to the sublime quality of Hermann's wines, which in the second half of the 19th century garnered medals at international trade fairs in Paris, Philadelphia and other cities, especially the Norton reds made from a rich and sturdy grape variety native to America. Soon Missouri, with Hermann at its heart, became America's second most important wine-growing state after New York (in those days, California was still way behind).

German-speaking Hermann was a bawdy town filled with dozens of taverns, breweries, and with wine cellars in virtually every one of its sturdy stone houses. Though tiny, it had a theater, choral societies, bands, and highbrow newspapers in German and English. Hermann was the cradle and base of riverboats that shipped its red and white nectar down the Missouri and Mississippi all the way to New Orleans, while trains carried it to points west.

This was also a time of international triumph for the minute New Fatherland, for it pioneered the rescue of the Old World from Phylloxera, the seemingly insuperable pest that attacked the roots of European vines and threatened to wipe them out. In the 1870s, Charles Riley, Missouri's state entomologist, who discovered the cure - grafting European cuttings onto Phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks, which prompted Hermann-area vintners to ship 17 boxcar loads of roots across the Atlantic.

The history of their wine is never far from people's minds in Hermann, a history both glorious and terrible. Talk to Patty Held-Uthlaut as she guides you around the vaulted cellars of Stone Hill Winery, which her family acquired in 1965. With 150 acres in Hermann and neighboring communities, Stone Hill is now the largest such estate here; back at the beginning of the 20th century it was in fact the second largest in the world. Though still a young woman, Held-Uthlaut will describe the greatest calamity that ever befell Hermann as if it had happened yesterday - the Prohibition that ended the town's prosperity for decades.

This happened when on Jan. 16, 1920, the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution became the law of the land. It forbade the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating beverages. Immediately, federal agents burst into Hermann's wineries, at Stony Hill, they smashed the 12 huge vats that were filled with wine, destroying even the beautifully carved images of the 12 apostles that had adorned them.

In the weeks that followed, Hermann's quaint streets bearing the names of Goethe, Mozart and Gutenberg were doused in red liquid. "Gushes of wine flowed down the hills mingling with the beer from the breweries that were also destroyed," Held-Uthlaut relates. "As for the vintners, they received no compensation."

The loss was huge. Stone Hill alone produced 1.25 million gallons of wine per year at that time, and it was only one of 100 such estates in Missouri. One victim was the wonderful Norton that had so surprised and delighted European wine experts in the previous century as a perfect companion of red meats and game. But that was merely a secondary aspect of this tragedy. "Here in Hermann we experienced the Great Depression 10 years earlier than the rest of the nation," says 39-year-old Tim Puchta, representing the fifth generation of a Bavarian family that had started the Adam Puchta Winery early in Hermann history.

The first winery to resume business in 1965 - more than a generation after the end of Prohibition - was Stone Hill. It was Held-Uthlaut's father, Jim, who restarted it at the suggestion of a friend who had used Stone Hill's spectacular series of underground arched cellars - the largest in America - for growing mushrooms. Jim Hill was a hog farmer, no vintner. But with his family he turned the estate into a huge success story. Stone Hill now produces a wide variety of wines, both still and sparkling, including such delights as the robust red Norton and a delicate late-harvest Traminette made from a hybrid based on the German Gewürztraminer grape. In the last dozen years, these wines have earned some 3,000 awards. Next to their winery, the Helds transformed a former carriage house into a restaurant called Vintage, serving German specialties.

Hermann's past hard luck is proving a blessing in disguise in other ways as well. Because it was so poor as a result of the Prohibition, there was no money available to mess it up with urban blight. And so it is still an authentic 19th-century German town with enchanting streets lined by solid stone houses, with a Philosophers' Café, that doesn't seem to serve up much philosophy, though; with an old German schoolhouse, which is now a charming museum, and America's only privately financed courthouse donated by Charles Eitzen, one of Hermann's original settlers.

It celebrates an annual Wurstfest and Oktoberfest, and during one of those, 69-year-old Jim Dierberg, a St. Louis banker, fell in love with Hermann and decided to pump money into this little gem to make it prosper. He bought the Hermannshof winery and tavern and 13 other properties. He transformed a former Chrysler dealership into a small-town German Festhalle, a meeting and banquet facility resembling a Bavarian beerhouse with luxury suites for tourists on the upper floor.

In his BMW, he drives us about Hermann and points at an old farmhouse he had just moved into town, stone by stone, from the surrounding countryside. He shows us the beginnings of a living history farm that will preserve the culture of the 19th-century settlers. Undoing damage done to Hermann by Prohibition, he built a brewery and added a beer hall that could have been mistaken for a beer hall in Prague.

And there, over a Pilsner with a magnificent head on it, he outlines his most ambitious project - turning the Gutenberg Corridor, an arts and entertainment district he has helped finance, into a venue for musical and other festivals patterned after similar cultural events in Europe, such as the "Innsbrucker Festwochen" in Austria. And if you think such plans are delusory given Hermann's diminutive size, think again. The Vienna Boys Choir was already here.

One evening, I stood on the terrace of the Hermann Bluff Guest House overlooking the Missouri and the spectacular countryside beyond. Yes, this could be the Rhineland, except that its colors are even more vivid than those we ever saw along Germany's legendary river. But wait, why are there no ships on this body of water, no steamers, not even many barges? They were there a century ago. It is a shame because what better and safer way to travel to and from Bacchus' delights than on board a boat while the car remains safely in the garage?

Dierberg, who has spent much time in Germany, believes that on this score, America could learn something from the Old Country. The idea of reintroducing steamers to the Missouri is on his mind.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO.