For all his ebullient flackery, Horatio Stoll could not claim sole credit for the California wine industry’s notable victories. The successive defeat of four separate ballot initiatives that would have established statewide Prohibition could also be credited to the heavily Italian and Irish population of San Francisco, until 1920 the state’s largest city. The industry’s place in California’s culture was no small factor, either. Winemaking may not have been fully appreciated elsewhere in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century (broadly speaking, only immigrants and the wealthy drank wine), but some ninety thousand acres of California soil planted in wine grapes, and an annual crop valued at seventy-five million dollars, made it central to the state’s economy.
This posture of strength blinded the winemakers to what was coming across the Sierras from Washington. Even as late as the winter of 1918, with ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment well under way and rolling downhill, the prominent Sonoma County winemaker Sam Sebastiani could remain convinced that national Prohibition was a dead letter. Returning from a trip to New York, Sebastiani confidently told the Sonoma Index-Tribune about a “consensus of opinion” that had formed in the East: “After the war, the future of wine will be even more wonderful.” The cause for this jolly consensus, Sebastiani said, was the anticipated return to American shores of more than a million wine lovers. At that moment these potential customers were enduring the trenches of the Western Front, but Sebastiani was convinced that a few months in France would also lead them to discover the wonders of wine—“by observation,” the Index-Tribune hastened to add.
When Horatio Stoll published the first issue of California Grape Grower in December 1919, just one month before the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act were scheduled to bring California’s wine trade to its knees, he was betting his future on an industry that did not appear to have one. On a fact-finding tour of the state’s wine regions four months earlier, Stoll had found the growers every bit as clueless as Sebastiani. Everywhere he traveled the vines were heavy with fruit and the disposition of the growers was as sunny as the California skies. He had been “amazed” to find the industry “making absolutely no preparations for the disposal of their crop,” Stoll wrote in his premier issue. “Lulled into a sense of false security . . . ,” Stoll explained, “the grape growers announced they were going to make wine, because the ban would surely be lifted before the crop was ready to be harvested.” They somehow believed that sixty years of agitation, culminating in the capitulation of both Congress and the state legislatures, would magically unravel in less than two months.
That was about as likely as Sam Sebastiani’s addled vision. But not too many years later a grape grower writing in a popular magazine suggested that if they had only known, his associates in the California wine industry would have spent those fifty years “donat[ing] large sums to the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.” Growers who had ripped out their vines and replaced them with prunes or apricots or apples soon regretted following what had appeared to be a prudent path. It turned out that the last pre-Prohibition harvest, in 1919, was accompanied, wrote Stoll, by “the unexpected demand for fresh wine grapes from Eastern cities and buyers . . . offering from $25 to $30 per ton. Before the season was over, $65 per ton was gladly paid.”
“Unexpected” was understatement. Over the previous decade California wine grapes had brought as little as $9.50 per ton, and never more than $30. But after that glorious fall of 1919, the unexpected became the norm. In 1921 the price reached $82, then $105, and at one giddy moment in 1924 it spiked to a shocking $375. Defying the laws of economic gravity, volume increased as well. At the same time that the California growers were filling boxcars with their harvest, grape imports from Argentina and Chile jumped from 18,000 pounds in all of 1921 to nearly half a million in just the first four months of 1922. And all those buyers weren’t paying those startling new prices because they intended to make grape juice.
THE ENGINE THAT drove the California Grape Rush of the 1920s was the fruit juice clause of the Volstead Act. This was the language Wayne Wheeler inserted into the act ostensibly to allow farmers’ wives to “conserve their fruit,” but really to mollify rural voters who wanted their hard cider. The clause gave small-scale apple growers a tiny bonanza of their own: “On pleasant autumn days,” a University of Kansas official wrote, “the highroads in the apple districts are dotted every mile or two with little ‘stands’ where home-made cider is offered for sale to the thirsty wayfarer.”
But if it was wine you were after, you didn’t need to do any wayfaring, at least not if you lived anywhere with a large population of southern or eastern European immigrants. Though it hadn’t been spelled out in the Volstead Act, regulations soon established that the head of a household was allowed to produce two hundred gallons a year of fermented fruit juice for his family’s use. As this worked out to nearly three bottles a day, only a very large family—or an exceedingly bibulous small one—was likely to consume this much on its own. For any self-respecting bootlegger, there wasn’t enough money to be made peddling wine; a quart of industrial gin at 50 proof packed as much of an alcoholic punch as six bottles of the typical homemade wine, and it was a lot easier to transport. But to the home vintner in Boston or Baltimore, in Helena or Hibbing, red wine took on the color of money.
“Grapes are so valuable this year that they are being stolen,” the St. Helena Star told its readers during the Napa Valley’s first Prohibition harvest, in 1920. The next year a state agriculture official announced that the acreage in grapes was “increasing by leaps and bounds since the enactment of the Federal Prohibition Law.” The year after that, vineyard land that had sold for $100 an acre in 1919 was bringing more than $500. As expensive as this was, if you wanted to buy land in the California wine country, all you had to do was pledge next year’s crop as collateral. For someone like Conrad Viano, an Italian immigrant who fell in love with a forty-year-old vineyard in Contra Costa County that reminded him of his native Piemonte, there was nothing to it: he took out a mortgage to buy the land and had it virtually paid off with the proceeds from his first harvest.
Those growers who had ripped out their vines and planted fruit trees rushed to get back into grapes—after a fashion. Where Semillon and zinfandel and other respectable varietals had once reigned, the new king was a ragamuffin called alicante bouschet. In the town of Escalon, ten miles north of Modesto, Joseph Gallo jump-started his grape-growing business by planting ten of his twenty acres in alicante; his teenaged sons Ernest and Julio stenciled the family symbol, a rooster, onto the shipping crates. In the Livermore Valley, where everyone but the Wente brothers seemed to have uprooted their grapes in favor of prunes and apricots and apples, old vineyards burst into new life, their vines thick with alicante. From Sonoma to Fresno, established vineyardists grafted their cabernets and Rieslings onto this unappealing subspecies—“a grape so deplorable,” wrote the epicurean journalist/novelist Idwal Jones, “it ranks somewhat below the gooseberry.”
Alicante made truly lousy wine, but the alchemy of Prohibition turned its deficiencies into money. Its large clusters produced a bountiful crop. Its thick, tough skin enabled it to survive the indignities of shipping. Better still, alicante’s uncommonly dark red flesh produced something that not only looked like decent wine but managed to maintain that deception after two or three pressings, or god knows how many dilutions. During the 1921 harvest, Horatio Stoll reported, “buyers by the hundreds are wiring for Alicantes, for everywhere the Italian is willing to pay from 50¢ to $1.00 more” for a box of this outcast grape than for any other varietal. After his magazine had been blessed with ten alicante-endowed years of prosperity, Stoll explained the phenomenon in 1929 with one telling set of numbers: on the standard scale used to measure color in grapes, anything that scored over 150 had “more than three times the color usually necessary for wine or juice.” Zinfandel scored a pale 38, cabernet sauvignon a respectable 86. Alicante we
ighed in at a bruising 204.
For the home winemaker wishing to supplement his income by selling some of his two hundred allotted gallons (or an additional several hundred unallotted gallons) to his neighbors, alicante was more than worth its outlandishly inflated price. In 1926 an American Federation of Labor official told a Senate committee that not only did 90 percent of workingmen make some sort of alcoholic beverage at home, “they even make wine out of parsnips.” Relative to parsnips (or dandelions, elderberries, chokecherries, or other unprepossessing candidates), alicante was a premier cru. Add some sugar to it during the fermentation process, and a ton of alicante could produce five or six hundred gallons of something that may not have tasted much like wine but at least looked like it, and definitely acted like it. For the Slovenian coal miners of Bearcreek, Montana, this fecundity meant that the annual boxcar of grapes that arrived from California would yield nearly ten thousand gallons of wine (if you could call it that), “second wine” (made from the sugar-supplemented dregs), and distilled moonshine (made from the dregs of the dregs). Thirsty people will believe almost anything; the Bearcreek miners thought they were getting zinfandel.*
By the time the growers had retooled their operations to meet the clamorous demand, a robust, elaborate, and entirely legal distribution system had developed. You could find the command center—the San Francisco railyards at Front Street and Broadway—by following what Sunset magazine described as “the sour fumes of wine” enveloping the place. No wonder. Over here, several odd-looking trucks with crushing machines and eight-hundred-gallon tanks mounted on their beds are pulled up next to freight cars; they’re in competition with the operators in the abandoned warehouses nearby, where signs read “Grapes Crushed While You Wait.” Over there, a man explains his business: he mashes to order, and once the grapes have been turned into juice it’s out of his hands. “What happens to it after you take it away ain’t our business,” he tells an interviewer from Sunset. Some of the crushers deliver. Wine industry historian Leon Adams, who was a newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the 1920s, said, “One would select his grapes from trucks or from freight cars and then have the truck with the crusher go alongside, pour the grapes into the crusher, and the crusher truck would then go to the individual’s home address and through the pipe send the [juice] down into the cellar or wherever the wine was going to be fermented. This was quite a San Francisco institution.”
But all that was strictly for the local market. The big-time operators could be found elsewhere in the freight yard, bidding against each other for the contents of single carloads, or a whole train’s worth, bound for points east. In a matter of minutes a shipment could be sold and resold and sold once again before it left the yard, its destination changing with each transaction. In 1919 some 9,300 carloads of grapes left California for New York alone; by 1928 the number had more than tripled. Another 40,000 carloads headed for other eastern markets. In one frustrating season, Napa growers were unable to ship much of their crop because the railroads were already running at capacity; the county horticultural commissioner said “it would have taken three times the number of refrigerated cars available” to get their grapes to market. Looking, as newspapers will, for a vivid way to illustrate the deluge, the Fresno Republican did some musing, some measuring, and some multiplication, and calculated that the 1,265 stacked-to-the-brim freight cars that left California on a single glorious day during the 1925 harvest carried 8,635,365,375 grapes—more or less. During the harvest, wrote a reporter for Business Week describing the rail traffic, “all minor commodities must stand aside”—the grapes were too valuable.
On the other side of the country, the Pennsylvania Railroad expanded its Jersey City freight terminal strictly to accommodate the thousands upon thousands of grape-laden boxcars. Here another round of trackside auctions ensued, local distributors taking the handoff from the shippers and in turn selling their goods to the next link in this vast supply chain: to the retailers in city produce markets, like the seven-block-long Paddy’s Market on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue, whose stalls were a wall of purple every October; to those described by California Grape Grower as “the army of pushcart vendors who cover every part of the metropolis when grapes are arriving in great quantities”; or to the “block buyers,” designated purchasers who negotiated directly on behalf of the residents of their particular city block. Versions of the same system existed in Boston and Philadelphia, in Syracuse and Erie, in Paterson and Altoona and Canton—in the hundreds of cities and towns where immigrant populations were large and sympathy for Volsteadism small. In 1926 the chief investigator for the Prohibition Bureau described what he called the “twilight zone” of Prohibition: in tenement neighborhoods, he wrote, “you will see grapes everywhere—on pushcarts, in groceries, in fruit and produce stores, on carts and wagons and trucks . . . Wine grapes in crates, by the truckload, and by the carload.” Like the spent ammunition left behind on a deserted battlefield, telltale evidence would linger long after the grapes had disappeared. You could tell you were in a wine-consuming neighborhood, a California grower said, “by the large quantities of grape pomace or waste in the streets.”
How large? In 1917, when wine was legal, Americans consumed 70 million gallons—imported, domestic, and homemade. By 1925 Americans were drinking 150 million gallons of just the homemade stuff, all of it also legal in its own peculiar way. Back when Congress was debating Richmond Hobson’s constitutional amendment in 1913, Representative Richard Bartholdt of St. Louis, a leading wet, said the measure would turn “every house in the country . . . into a distillery.” A more appropriate word would have been “winery,” but he was on the right track.
THE ALICANTE BOOM could not last. Easy money got too easy, and before long overplanting outstripped even the ravening demand. Growers tried the usual tactics employed by cartels. By 1926 members of the California Vineyardists’ Association had agreed to let half their grapes die on the vine. The next year the association urged its members to cut back on shipping. Some growers attempted to fix prices. But even as prices dropped to forty dollars a ton, the growers had little to complain about. Some even argued against any liberalization of the Volstead Act that would have allowed the manufacture and sale of light wines. The growers had learned to love the grape-shipping business too well. In Fresno, a member of a winemaking family remembered, you could tell who the growers were by their silk shirts and Cadillacs.
It was different for the growers’ former customers, the California vintners. As rewarding as alicante was for the growers, it was worse than an insult to the vintners. If you were in the wine business, you could only look on sourly as the craft you had mastered was ceded to unschooled immigrants adding sugar to grape residue in basement washtubs. Long-established winemakers went into the canning business. The University of California’s celebrated department of viticulture and enology closed its doors. Someone had a harebrained notion to build a “floating winery” aboard a ship that would load up with grapes on the San Francisco docks, then take to the sea. The winemaking would begin at the three-mile limit, the product aging nicely as the ship chugged across the Pacific toward the Japanese market. (“What is there to stop a fleet of wineries, staining with purple most all the seven seas?” asked a wishful writer for the San Francisco Examiner.) Boat-borne winemaking was only slightly less likely than the notion pushed by the California Grape Grower, which made the case for production of such items as grape butter, grape catsup, and that perennial favorite, grape fudge.
In one notable instance, though, a grower and a winemaker, working in concert, found a way not merely to make it across the dry river of Prohibition but, with the protection of the law, to turn it into a fountain of cash. The Wente brothers, in the Livermore Valley, never ripped out their vines; they never had to negotiate with brokers or shippers; and alicante grafts never threatened their fine Semillon grapes or the famous “Wente clone” that became parent to 80 percent of all California chardonnays. The Wentes were blessed by an arrangeme
nt they had made to sell their entire output to Georges de Latour, a winemaker in Rutherford, eighty miles to the north. Once, when he was late with some money he owed them, de Latour put one of the brothers at ease. “I will tell you something, Mr. Wente,” de Latour said. “My business is with the church. They are slow paying—but they are good.”
Judging by the wealth he would accumulate, “good” was an understatement. Georges Marie Joseph de Latour had arrived in California from his native Périgord in the early 1890s. Trained as a chemist, he first made his living not in wine but in one of its lowlier by-products, tartaric acid, a scummy substance derived from grape skins that could be refined into cream of tartar, which was the active element in baking powder and a useful substance in various other culinary endeavors; you could even clean pots with it. He soon married, and with his wife bought four acres of Napa Valley wheat fields and orchards in 1900. For a time he continued to drive around the Northern California wine country in a horse-drawn wagon, collecting discarded grape skins from growers who were happy to be rid of them.
Thirty years later the wagon was long in his past; de Latour now traveled in a Cadillac Custom Imperial touring car. He owned two fine houses, one atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco and the other deep in the four-hundred-plus acres of vines he owned in and around Rutherford. He had a debutante daughter and a box at the opera, and was acknowledged in the newspapers as the head of “one of the best known families in San Francisco.” The de Latours dressed for dinner every night, the urbane Georges in a tuxedo, his regal wife Fernande always putting an accute accent on her elegant wardrobe with one of her famously stylish hats. They supported themselves not on inherited wealth but on the dividends they extracted from the family business, Beaulieu Vineyards. By the early 1930s, after more than a decade of Prohibition, these dividends exceeded a hundred thousand dollars a year, or more than a million dollars at 2009 values. Yet the de Latours still were able to invest the equivalent of many additional millions in land, in buildings, and in the grapes he bought from the Wentes and other growers. These were grapes that he, almost alone among Napa Valley winemakers, could turn into legal, salable, and eminently respectable wine.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 24