Back to the Garden
Replanting Bishop Lamy’s original grapes
On a chilly afternoon last November, Richard Verruni, the managing director of Bishop’s Lodge, dug a hole in the dirt behind the resort’s main building and ceremoniously inserted the cuttings from a grapevine. It wasn’t just any grapevine; it was the first planting in what will one day become the Bishop’s Lodge vineyard. But it also symbolized a homecoming—the roundabout return of a legendary vine believed to have been planted on the property more than 120 years ago by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy.
As famous as he was for his ecclesiastical accomplishments, the bishop was also a dedicated horticulturist known for his gardens, both in downtown Santa Fe and at Villa Pintoresca, his weekend retreat in Little Tesuque Canyon. Lamy owned the rural property from the 1860s until his death, in 1888. Though it then changed hands several times, in 1918 it opened as a resort hotel named, appropriately enough, the Bishop’s Lodge. Now called the Bishop’s Lodge Resort and Spa, the property is still shaded with peach, pear, apple, and apricot trees the Bishop planted during his years there.
Grapes once grew there too. But the vines were destroyed in 1969, when the resort’s management cleared some land to make room for additional lodging facilities. When the property was sold to new hoteliers in 1998, the vines had been all but forgotten, and a little piece of horticultural history appeared doomed to wither away.
Enter Los Alamos-based wine historian Tom Hill. In 2006, Hill was doing research for a magazine article about Jacona Valley Vineyards, a small winery 20 miles north of Santa Fe, whose 2004 Estate Pinot Noir had just won a silver medal at the Southwest Wine Competition. Hill was interviewing vintner Trey Naylor at Jacona when Naylor pointed out a gnarled old vine. It had been planted, Naylor explained, by the property’s previous owner, Elmer Townsley. At that point, Hill realized that they were looking at a plant of considerable historic interest.
Having been active in northern New Mexico’s viticulture scene for years, Hill remembered meeting Elmer Townsley in the early 1970s, at gatherings of the New Mexico Vine and Wine Society. He also remembered hearing that Townsley had spent hours digging up one of the grapevines at Bishop’s Lodge before the plants were destroyed by construction workers.
“I thought he was crazy as a loon to do something like that,” Hill recalls. “If you want to propagate a vine, you can just take some cuttings. But Elmer went out there with a trailer and dug a huge vine out of the ground! Vines that old can have root systems that go down 30 feet or more.”
Townsley died in 1989, and until Hill visited Naylor at Jacona, he never knew what had become of that rescued vine. “When I took a look at it, it immediately leapt into my mind—because of the size of the trunk—that this must be a Lamy original,” Hill says. “I’ve seen plenty of 80- to 140-year-old vineyards in California, and none of them have vines with a trunk of that size.”
Hill and cowriter Susan Clough published their story, “Jacona Valley Vineyards and Its Bishop Lamy Heritage,” in Edible Santa Fe’s Winter 2006 issue. Three years later, when Bishop’s Lodge public relations director Lynn Strauss came across it, she and Verruni hatched a plan to bring a cutting from “the mother vine” back to Bishop’s Lodge.
No one can be certain, of course, that the vines growing at Bishop’s Lodge until 1969 were actually planted by Bishop Lamy. But historians know that after a visit to his native France in the 1860s, Lamy returned to New Mexico with a bunch of plant cuttings. There is also evidence that those cuttings included grapevines.
“I was so excited that we found Tom Hill and then Jacona,” says Verruni. “We wanted to replant the vines so we could relive Lamy’s legacy.” And someday soon, he can toast it with a glass of wine pressed from the bishop’s own grapes.
