🍇 Dracut Amber

Dracut Amber is a red-berried table grape belonging to the North American species Vitis labrusca. According to its VIVC passport, it was raised by the private grower Asa Clement; one parent is given as the wild grape Vitis labrusca, while the other is unknown. Another name for the variety is Early Amber. The berries contain seeds.

In his monograph “The Grapes of New York” (1908), Ulysses Hedrick explains that Clement, of Dracut, Massachusetts, planted seed of a native reddish labrusca that grew near a Catawba vine around 1855 and called the seedling Amber. Jacob W. Manning later introduced it as Dracut Amber. Clement assumed Catawba was the male parent, but Hedrick calls this a conjecture, and a doubtful one, because in its characters the variety is a typical northern labrusca. In 1883 it was added to the catalogue of the American Pomological Society. It was dropped, probably inadvertently, in 1897 and restored in 1899.

Why it matters to you. Hedrick says plainly that the fruit has no particular merit: thick skin, coarse pulp, seeds and a rank foxy taste; the berries keep poorly and soon shrivel, and the variety is of no value for market or wine. Yet the vine is vigorous, very hardy and productive (though somewhat prone to leafhoppers) and ripens earlier than Concord, which makes it valuable for home gardens at the northern limit of grape growing. Breeders find it interesting as a red northern labrusca; Lutie and Vergennes descend from it.