Clarissa Birdseye braved a cross-country wagon trip and the Rogue River Wars. She was no match, however, for a stubborn horse named Prince. Thanks to Prince, a rare wine is made by Del Rio Vineyards in Gold Hill.

On a fine day in 1860, Clarissa was ready to head home from a visit to Jacksonville,. Unfortunately, her horse was reluctant to make the ride back to the Birdseye home just outside the town of Rogue River. While she struggled with Prince, Clarissa noticed someone was watching her efforts.

Standing at the edge of his vineyard property, Granville Sears had some advice for the troubled rider. According to an excerpt from “Clarissa — Her Family and Her Home,” by Effie and Nita Birdseye, after ripping a grapevine from the ground, Sears said, “Here, use this for a persuader.”

With the switch’s encouragement, Prince made good time back to the Birdseye house. Once home, friends and family encouraged Clarissa to plant the vine and offered numerous ideas to make it grow.

A large hole was dug behind the house, to which Clarissa added the suggested fuels, including old shoes, a dirty dishrag, and manure. Something worked because today that thick, gnarled vine is as tall as a single-story house.

We shouldn’t be too surprised, as Clarissa was a skilled gardener who surrounded her home with plants that she would bring from as far away as George Washington’s Mount Vernon garden in Virginia. Her rose bushes bloomed for over 100 years, so why not a grapevine?

Clarissa and David Birdseye were East Coasters who made the arduous cross-country wagon trek to the Rogue River Valley. They married in 1852 and staked out a 320-acre donation land claim. A sturdy cabin made with pine logs was built, and the Birdseyes crossed the threshold of their new home in October 1856.

The house still stands on Birdseye Ranch, although a fire did severe damage in 1990. The owner at the time, Ted Birdseye, restored the family home by blasting away nearly two inches of charred wood from the walls and using 1850s-era construction techniques to repair the damage.

In the spring of 2016, Ted Birdseye sold the 215-acre property to Jolee and Rob Wallace of Del Rio Vineyards. While the Wallaces cleared most of the land to plant 162 acres of pinot noir vines, the Birdseye house, its grounds and Clarissa’s grapevine were spared.

However, nature didn’t spare the grapevine, as a tree fell on top of it in 2017. To replace the vine’s crushed trellis, wood posts were deployed for support.

The grapes from this 164-year-old vine, which started growing as the Civil War started up, were recently picked by a Del Rio Vineyards crew standing in the bed of a pickup truck. So what kind of wine is Del Rio making from these historic grapes?

While Granville Sears was growing several grape varieties in the 1860s, the Wallaces were confident that Clarissa’s vine produced the mission grape, a variety of Vitis vinifera introduced from the Castilla- La Mancha region of Spain to Mexico in the 1500s.

The grape was a staple of the California missions established by Spanish Franciscans in the late 1700s, hence its name. The mission grape is also known as listán prieto, criolla chica and pais in other parts of the world.

Wallace’s suspicions were confirmed in 2018, when University of California, Davis scientists analyzed cuttings from the Birdseye vine. “We paid $345 to find out what we already knew,” Jolee Wallace said.

I first heard about the Birdseye mission vine back in 2016, when enough grapes were harvested for Del Rio’s head winemaker, Jean-Michel Jussiaume, to make a whopping 9 bottles of rosé. Those bottles disappeared quickly at a special wine dinner event hosted by the winery in August 2017.

Jussiaume plans to use this year’s crop of mission grapes to make a white, or light-colored gris, wine with a lower alcohol percentage by volume to replicate the style of wine that might have been made in the 1860s. He also reports that he will likely be able to make an entire five cases worth of mission wine this year.

So perhaps one day soon, you might get the opportunity to sip this bit of history.

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., daily, 52 N. River Road , Gold Hill, delriovineyards.com or taste@delriovineyards.com.