A Toast to Eclipse

The sparkling wines of California rival the best French Champagnes today, but their place at our tables came about through careful craftsmanship that began more than a century ago. The predecessor of today’s California bubbly was Eclipse Champagne, the first commercially successful California sparkling wine, produced by Arpad Haraszthy in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In A Toast to Eclipse, Brian McGinty offers a definitive history of the wine, exploring California’s winemaking past and two of the people who put the state’s varietal wines on the map: Arpad and his father Agoston Haraszthy, the legendary “father of California viticulture.” Inspired by his father’s dream of making California one of the world’s great viticultural regions, Arpad Haraszthy (1840–1900) pursued that goal at a time when the best grapes for making California wine had yet to be discovered, when the best locations for vineyards had not yet been established, and when the public could hardly believe that