La historia

A name from the Târnava

Mediaș stands in the middle of the country the Saxons called Weinland, the land of wine, and which Johannes Honterus marks as such on his map of Transylvania printed in Basel in 1532. Vine growing was here an occupation older than any statistic: Hans Acker's study of “800 years of vine culture in the Carpathian arc” places it among the oldest in the region. In this landscape the Ambrosi family appears as an old family of wine growers of the Târnava area, whose household moved at some point to Mediaș. For the earliest generations we have neither portraits nor deeds; we have only the formula the family brochure preserves: “an old family of wine growers from Târnava, later based in Mediaș”.

Michael Ambrosi sen. was born in 1862. In 1875, at thirteen, he lost his father, and school ended where many village schools ended then: at the age when a boy could hold a tool. He went on to no institute and no academy; he did not leave for Vienna and did not cross the border. He stayed at home, with the vineyards, the arable land and the pastures the family held, which became, in the brochure's word, his school. Anyone who wants to understand where his later technical authority came from — the memorandum, the commission, the courses given before growers — has to begin here: not from a diploma, but from dozens of harvests and from the years in which he learned what a root does in spring.

The vineyards he worked were the old vineyards of the valley, as his son was to describe them in a 1909 article: plots planted centuries before, renewed always by layers (Ableger), with roots very near the surface, in irregular rows, with varieties mixed together. In such vineyards every task was done by eye and by season, not by plan. This was not a lack of intelligence but an agriculture of reproduction: the vine was multiplied from the neighbouring vine, and the variety was kept by habit rather than by selection. In those years nobody in the valley had seen phylloxera; the plague had been reported in France in 1863, but it reached the Târnava only in 1889.

In 1875, when the thirteen-year-old left school, nothing showed what was to follow: no nursery, no catalogue, no wagon of vines. Only a family name and a piece of land that had to be worked. A century later the same name would be spoken in connection with the replanting of Europe, and a great-grandson, Hans Ambrosi, would write more than sixty books about wine. The chain between those two moments runs through four generations — Michael sen. (1862–1933), Michael jun. (1880–1940), Alfred (1895–1974) and Hans (1925–2012) — and through a few documents that survived by accident: a leaflet, a catalogue, a letter, a label. The next chapter begins at the moment when this land was threatened with disappearance.

Phylloxera and the Viticulture Commission

Phylloxera appeared in France in 1863. It reached Transylvania in 1889, and the first attested outbreaks were in the Târnava area itself. At the end of the 1800s Transylvania cultivated roughly 10,650 hectares of vines, of which 6,760 lay in the Târnava zone and between 920 and 1,520 in the other three wine districts. These were not abstract figures: the wine production and trade of the valley lived from them, and their loss meant the loss of an economy. His son was to write in 1909 what actually happened: in the 1890s phylloxera did its worst, and together with downy mildew (peronospora), to which too little attention was then paid, it managed to destroy practically every vineyard in the Kokel and Mureș districts, where the noblest wines of Transylvania grew.

The authorities' answers were, by the same account, severe but uncertain: forced clearing of vineyards was imposed, at great cost and with small result, because where one focus was extinguished others appeared. Chemical treatment of the soil followed, with carbon disulphide injected at 24–28 grams per square metre; it worked only on light, dry soils, and in the old vineyards, with roots at the surface and rows irregular, it was almost impossible to apply evenly. Michael Ambrosi sen. understood, after several visits of enquiry and study, that the answer could not come from local compromises. He therefore submitted a memorandum to the Council of the Saxon Agricultural Association, with the direct proposal that a Viticulture Commission be founded to forestall and reduce the effects of phylloxera.

The commission was founded, and Michael Ambrosi was named its president from 1889. In 1892 Friedrich Caspari returned from his studies near Vienna — at the viticulture school of Klosterneuburg — and was appointed state commissioner for combating phylloxera. The two began a close collaboration that lasted ten years and consisted, in the brochure's phrase, of “numerous courses and sittings”: lectures for growers, commission meetings, technical decisions taken together. One came from the institution, the other from the Viennese school and from the authority of the state; together they covered precisely the years in which Transylvania moved from tearing out its vineyards to grafting them.

The division of spheres between the two becomes visible at the beginning of the 1900s. Caspari devoted his effort to western Europe — Transylvania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Russia — and a little to Wallachia, as director of Prince Știrbey's nurseries at Drăgășani, with a nursery also at Joita, near Bucharest. Ambrosi concentrated on Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia and the Baltic countries, through all the nurseries and plantations he held, without neglecting the west either, through the nurseries at Aiud. Later he was to add South Africa. In 1901 he became a member of the Association's Council, representing the Saxon growers until the end of his life.

The commission of 1889 did not stop phylloxera — nobody could, at that date. It stopped the confusion: it gave the valley an interlocutor, a procedure and ten years of shared experience. In the family archive the year 1889 appears twice: once as the date of the threat and once as the date of the institution created in reply. It is a coincidence of the calendar that the family preserved, and this history preserves it in turn.

The second pioneer

His schools are recorded with the precision of a register: the Agricultural School in Mediaș between 1894 and 1897, then the Dairy School at Sárvár in Hungary between 1897 and 1898, and, in 1903, graduation from the higher viticulture school at Budafok. It looks an unusual route for a future wine grower — why dairy, why Budafok? — but it has the logic of its age: in Mediaș one learned the basics of agriculture, in Sárvár the processing of a product, a skill of cellar and laboratory, and in Budafok, the wine centre of Budapest, viticulture on a large scale. Between these schools Michael jun. also taught at the agricultural apprenticeship school in Mediaș — a post that explains why his first book is, before anything else, a manual.

In 1902 he took the initiative of buying a property at Aiud which was to become the famous nursery “Ambrosi, Fischer & Co.”. The firm's name settled in 1905, and from 1912 Michael jun. ran it. The 1936–37 catalogue preserves everything a buyer needed to know: the seat at Aiud, Alba county, membership of the General Association of Nurserymen of Romania, the CEC account no. 43.026 and the telephone Aiud 22. There too stand, in order, nine conditions of sale: earlier catalogues are cancelled; orders cannot be withdrawn; the authenticity of varieties is guaranteed, with the wrongly supplied variety replaced, but no compensation beyond the value of the plants on the invoice; payment is made with an advance of one third of the price, the rest by cash on delivery; packing and loading into the wagon cost 5–10% of the invoice, with a minimum of 60 lei; complaints are received within eight days; disputes are tried at Aiud or Alba Iulia. The last condition adds a detail that says everything about the firm: “in more than 35 years of our firm's existence our clients have never once had reason to bring their complaints before the public courts”.

In 1906 he published “Der praktische Weinbauer”, the book that was to have three editions: 1906, 1911 and 1925. In 1913 the Romanian edition appeared at Craiova — “Podgoreanul priceput. Călăuză practică pentru cultura rațională a viței de vie potrivit cu natura terenurilor și cu condițiunile climaterice din România”, at the Institutul de Arte Grafice “Samitca”, at 2.50 lei. The title page presents the author as “Associate and Director of the Nurseries of Prince B. Știrbey at Buftea”. The manual explains grafting, rootstock and planting for those who worked in the vineyard, not in the lecture hall, and the three German editions show that it was no book of circumstance: demand held for nineteen years.

The Romanian connection does not begin with the book, however. From 1904 he collaborated with Prince Știrbey, because he had been exporting heavily to Romania in the years before; for him he laid out a tree plantation at Buftea of 10 hectares, which reached 50 hectares by 1909, and looked after 30 hectares of apricots and plums. In 1907 he became associate and director of the Știrbey nurseries. In the same period he made study visits in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and established contact with winemakers, extending the export area of the Transylvanian nurseries towards the same market in which Caspari was exporting.

His end is recorded in two ways, in the family brochure itself: the heading gives the years 1880–1940, while the text says that he moved to Sibiu in 1937 and “closed his eyes” shortly after turning sixty-one, which would mean 1941. This history keeps the years of the heading and signals the difference, without hiding it under a round date. “The second pioneer” is no courtesy title: the father created the institution and imposed grafting as a public answer; the son built the firm, the book and the export network that carried grafting into thousands of vineyards.

The nurseries

The largest of the nurseries was not at Aiud but at Buftea, near Bucharest, within Prince Știrbey's complex. There the vine area held 40 hectares of rootstock vineyard and 12 hectares of grafted-vine school, and irrigation supplied roughly three million litres of water a day. Eight to ten million vines were produced each year, used in the school itself, sold in the country or exported to the Baltic countries. In spring, during grafting and deliveries, some 800–1000 people worked daily, the great majority local; the Buftea staff had been trained at Aiud. This was no garden of cuttings but a seasonal factory of vines, whose whole flow turned around a single operation: the union of an American rootstock with a European scion.

Why so much care for the root? Because, as Michael jun. wrote in 1909, on the correct choice of rootstock depended first of all the success and durability of the plantation. Riparia portalis suited only fertile, deep soils, neither wet nor excessively dry, and tolerated no more than about 12% lime: above that threshold the vines yellowed with chlorosis and died. Rupestris monticola suited only light, dry soils in high, warm positions; in heavy soils the wood did not ripen. Solonis withstood moisture and lime up to 25%, but did not unite well with local varieties and, by the newer research, did not fully resist phylloxera. The article's conclusion is a lesson in comparative agriculture: there is no universal rootstock, only one suited to each soil.

The article then describes the crosses that changed the rules: Riparia × Rupestris 101, tolerant of up to 38% lime, “destined to displace Rupestris monticola”; Solonis × Riparia, for wet, binding soils; Berlandieri × Riparia 157, which grew even on soils close to pure limestone, with more than 50% carbonate. Lime was measured with Bernard's calcimeter; the soil was trenched to 60–80 cm with spade and mattock, since explosives were almost unknown here; planting was done at least 120 cm apart.

The technique of grafting is described in detail. In green grafting the American rootstock was planted two years beforehand, and in the third year, towards mid-May, grafted by simple copulation at 60–80 cm; the rootstock's shoots were broken off repeatedly so that the noble scion should receive all its strength. The most demanding was “moss grafting”: vines grafted by English copulation were kept in boxes lined with moss at 20–24°C and constant humidity until the callus appeared; they then went out to the school, planted by Richter's method, in rows 120–140 cm apart. At lifting they were sorted into two classes: the first, with a shoot of at least 30 cm and good roots, sold at 180–400 crowns a thousand; the second, with poor roots and incomplete union, at 60–100 crowns. The article says plainly why: only a complete union between rootstock and scion yields durable vines.

Thirty years later, the 1936–37 catalogue shows the same firm in another world. At Aiud the grafted-vine nursery had been “much reduced” under the new viticulture law, but Berlandieri × Riparia was used “almost exclusively” as rootstock; the new greenhouse, though small, allowed the multiplication of plants otherwise hard to import. Prices were given in lei, per thousand pieces, and “Berlandieri × Riparia Tel. Sel. Ambrosi” appeared as a product of their own, at 1,800 lei the thousand rooted vines and 3,000 lei the thousand grafted. In the preface the editors write something that sounds like an echo of the 1909 article: the future belongs to the Berlandieri × Riparia crosses. A nursery does not sell vines alone, but a technical decision taken a year in advance and a guarantee of variety, and whoever gets it wrong pays with three years of vineyard. That is why the history of these nurseries reads as infrastructure: an apprentice school at Aiud, wagons towards the Baltic, thousands of hectares depending on a well-chosen root.

Fetească Regală

After 1919, when he took over his father's vineyards at Mediaș-Gräfenberg, Michael jun. began at Gräfenberg a programme of clone selection for three varieties: Mädchentraube (Feteasca), Königsast and Italian Riesling. Clone selection meant, in the practice of the day, choosing mother vines for yield, health and typicality and multiplying them separately, year after year, until the offspring proved stable. It was patient work with no immediate visible result, in a vineyard that had only just been replanted after phylloxera. From the same period date the clone selections of Rip. × Berlandieri rootstocks sold under the name “Selecția Ambrosi”.

The 1936–37 catalogue preserves the trace of that work, and also a distinction we no longer make. At number 8 stands “Fetească (Mădchentraube, Leányka)”, described as “an old speciality of Transylvania which there, besides a fairly good crop, produces the finest wines”; at number 24 stands “Fetească regală”, “a variety preferred for its extraordinarily abundant production, giving at the same time a very good table wine”, ripening in periods III–IV and grafted on Berlandieri × Riparia 5 C. Two entries, two varieties, in the same catalogue, almost fifty years after phylloxera entered the valley. For the buyer of 1936 the difference mattered: one was the old variety of Transylvania, the other the variety that filled the barrels.

When does the name “Fetească Regală” appear? The family brochure gives two answers, both cautious. On page 5: Ambrosi “named the variety Fetească Regală at Mediaș around 1920”. On page 9: “This is probably the period in which Feteasca Regală also appears”, so that Michael jun. becomes the name's “godfather”. This history keeps that caution: there is no baptismal act of the variety, only a practice of selection at Gräfenberg and a name that imposed itself in the firm's catalogues. In German the variety is known as Königliche Mädchentraube; in Hungarian, as Királyleányka — “the king's daughter”, a name-relative of the Romanian “feteasca”.

Less visible, but just as important, is the other name the firm put on the market: “Selecția Ambrosi” for Rip. × Berlandieri rootstocks. In the 1936 catalogue this selection stands beside Berlandieri × Riparia Teleki 8 B, Kober 5 BB and 5 C, at comparable prices — a sign that it was not a commercial flourish but a competing product, valued in the same market. A nursery that names its own rootstock and its own grape variety no longer sells planting material alone: it sells a selection, that is, a technical judgement repeated over years, at the risk of being contradicted by the harvest.

Today Fetească Regală covers approximately 12,661 hectares in Romania and is the most planted vine variety in the country. That is an unusual longevity for a name given by a private firm in the interwar years, and it is not explained by an advertising campaign — no such thing existed — but by the fact that the variety proved productive and reliable in very different vineyards. The family lost the nurseries, the depots and part of its archive; the name of the variety remained, because the names of varieties are written in catalogues, then in law and, at last, in the vineyard.

Gräfenberg and Mediaș

The Gräfenberg estate appears, in the brochure's photograph (“A view of the Gräfenberg estate at Mediaș”), as a vineyard landscape cut into straight rows, with farm buildings at its edge. Here Michael jun. took over his father's vineyards in 1919; in 1924 he moved to Mediaș. The recorded areas are 20 hectares at Mediaș, planted with vines and American hybrid rootstocks, and 70 hectares at Crăciunel. The last figure has a fate of its own: after nationalisation that land became the basis of today's Viticulture and Oenology Research Station at Blaj. A family vineyard thus became research infrastructure — a continuity nobody had planned.

The second inheritance was not land but logistics. Ambrosi held the Transylvanian wine depots at Mediaș, a position owed to railway access, then the principal means of transport. A wagon of grafted vines left for the Baltic countries, a wagon of wine left Mediaș for the cellars of the west, and both passed through the same stations. The depot made the town a node, not merely a place of production, and for a firm selling both vines and wine the node mattered more than the vineyard.

The surviving documents show this commercial side better than any text. An interwar envelope carries the letterhead “Viile și Pivnițele Ambrosi, Mediaș”; labels such as “Ambrosi Imperial” and “Ambrosi Privat” circulated in the market; a letterhead of 1912 and a postcard of 1916 place the firm in the life of the town. Advertisements in the press — Revista economică, Sibiu, 1901; Bunul econom, Orăștie, 1905; Gazeta Transilvaniei, Brașov, 1906 — show a house that bought advertising space regularly. An “Ambrosi expert's report” and an interwar catalogue show that the firm certified its goods, while a postcard from Crăciunel, kept in Mrs Binder Rosemarie's archive, shows that the Crăciunel estate had its ordinary daily life. These were not gestures of vanity: they were selling instruments for a product that had to reach the buyer before it spoiled.

In 1933 Michael Ambrosi jun. became mayor of Mediaș. It is the same year in which his father died, Michael sen. (1862–1933): a year that closes a generation and opens a public office. The family sources do not say what the mayoralty looked like — the brochure records it in a few words — but they say what the name meant in the town: a firm exporting vines to the Baltic countries, a nursery at Aiud, the wine depots of Transylvania and a mayor from the same family. In 1937 he moved to Sibiu, where his life ended.

Gräfenberg and Mediaș are, in the end, not two places but two functions of the same business: the vineyard that produces and the town that dispatches. A visitor who climbs among the vines today sees the landscape; one who reads the catalogues sees the network. The family's history needs both, because neither alone explains why the name Ambrosi came to mean something in several countries.

Recognition and exile

In 1925 Michael jun. delivered a paper at Koblenz, in Germany, on “the rejuvenation of vineyards”. His thesis was simple and, for a German audience, uncomfortable: the grafted-vine vineyards of Transylvania gave a larger crop and a better quality. In 1929 came the papers at the international agricultural congress in Bucharest. Between the two dates the firm at Aiud printed its catalogues, and the cellar at Mediaș sold its wine under its own labels: two faces of the same technical authority, one printed, the other poured into glass.

King Carol II conferred on him two distinctions: the “Grade of Knight of the Crown of Romania” and the order “Services to Agriculture”. The brochure notes in brackets that the title is a translation from the German, which says something about the language in which the documents reached the descendants. Then came the years of maturity — 1933, mayor of Mediaș; 1937, the move to Sibiu — and then the end, recorded by the sources in two ways: the heading gives the years 1880–1940, while the text says that he “closed his eyes” shortly after turning sixty-one, which would mean 1941. This history uses the years of the heading and leaves the difference visible, because a biography built from documents must also show the places where the documents contradict each other.

The next generation brought another kind of wine grower. Alfred Ambrosi (1895–1974) finished the Stephan Ludwig Roth high school, went to the front of the First World War as an artilleryman, was wounded and gassed, and after the war studied law at Cluj, taking his doctorate in 1921. There followed the Agricultural University of Berlin, where he deepened his knowledge of modern vine culture, and courses at the commercial university. After his studies he worked for some years with Hugo Stinnes in Hamburg, then returned to the country, for a short time, with the same employer.

In 1927 he took over his parents' estates at Crăciunel and began the family's traditional work: replanting vineyards by the most modern methods, the wines, the cellar, the export of cuttings. He quickly became known in Romania for his range of wines and for his work in the cellar, and his exports brought him international recognition — especially after the selection and multiplication of his own rootstock, “Ambrosi-special”, and after the papers he gave at international viticulture congresses. A man of authority in his community, he was active in political life too, but above all in the Evangelical Parish of Mediaș, which he served from 1942 as curator until his emigration to Germany.

Emigration does not close the chapter; it moves it. In Germany he continued his viticultural work, and the most concrete proof is the advertising for Transylvanian wine that appeared in the German press in 1967, 1971 and 1972. One of them, reproduced in the brochure, announces “Schenkt Wein aus Siebenbürgen!” — “Give Transylvanian wine!” — and recommends, as a fitting Christmas and New Year gift, his own “Dr. Ambrosi Sondermarken”: Traminer and Mädchentraube, with a reference to the price list of Dr. Stefan Spernath & Co. and his own order address, 8 München 80, Zaubzerstraße 41. Another advertisement on the same page lists “1964er Mädchentraube Spätlese” and “1964er Siebenbürger Traminer”, under the heading “Importgemeinschaft Dr. Alfred Ambrosi / Süddeutsche Importkellereien GmbH, München”. A man past seventy, in a Bavarian city, was still selling the wine of the valley he had left behind. He died in Munich in 1974.

The third life: Hans Ambrosi

His biography begins like that of any son of a Saxon family in the 1930s: the Stephan Ludwig Roth high school, then the baccalaureate at the Brukenthal high school in Sibiu, in 1942. Immediately after the examination he was called into the army and became a soldier on the Russian front. At the end of the war he was left at home in Germany but returned to Transylvania; in 1947 he left for Germany for good. He was twenty-two, with a trade to learn and a continent in front of him.

He settled at Geisenheim, in Hesse, where from 1948 he studied agronomy at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, graduating in 1951; two years later he took his doctorate at the same school. He then worked for two years at the Institute for Grafted Vines at Geisenheim, in the Rheingau, before becoming a research assistant at the Pomology Institute of the Agricultural College at Stuttgart-Hohenheim. It is the path of a man who does not choose between science and practice: he holds both, as his father and grandfather had done, only on a larger scale and with a laboratory added.

In 1954 he left for South Africa, at the moment when fifty German academics were being sought for agriculture. Between 1954 and 1964 he was head of the viticulture section of the University of Stellenbosch and at the same time consultant to producers in the Cape Province; then, until 1966, he laid the foundations of the Nietvoorbij Institute for Viticulture and Oenology at Stellenbosch. A son of the Târnava organised, at the southern end of Africa, an institution of viticultural research — a continuity of craft that crosses the hemisphere and repeats, on another scale, the family's gesture at Aiud: teaching others to graft.

In 1966 he returned to Germany as director of the country's largest vineyard, the Kloster Eberbach State Vineyards in Hesse. Under his direction the state vineyards underwent accelerated development and modernisation; he took an active part in the restoration and public opening of the monastery of Eberbach and in recovering its 850-year wine history. The Rheingau Music Festival was initiated, supported and promoted by him, and with more than 150 events a year it became the most important cultural point in the region. This is no parenthesis: a wine grower who restores a monastery and invents a festival does exactly what his family had done at Mediaș — he ties a place to a name.

In 1990 he retired and devoted himself to writing: more than sixty books about wine, which made him the most widely read German author in the field. He also worked to promote German wine abroad, through the German Wine Academy Kloster Eberbach, which he founded, and through translations of his publications; he acted as consultant in Saale-Unstrut, on the Elbe and in Romania. In 2001 he was awarded the Cultural Prize of the Transylvanian Saxons, as a mark of recognition for the work of a lifetime. In 1996 he had published an article in the Siebenbürgische Zeitung on the centenary of Erhard Binder — a small detail, which shows that the tie to the Saxon world had never been broken.