In a 1959 motion picture called This Earth Is Mine, Claude Rains plays a character loosely based on de Latour—or, more accurately, Rains plays a character loosely based on Claude Rains playing Georges de Latour; he’s at best a facsimile of a facsimile. The Rains character bears no trace of the impenetrable French accent that de Latour never lost (so thick, said journalist Ernie Pyle, that “a stranger can hardly follow him”), and he spends most of Prohibition growing grapes and then regularly, determinedly, and inexplicably plowing them back into the ground. But in many other respects Rains is perfect: he’s debonair, generous, utterly devoted to making good wine, and respected by the grandest landowners and the lowliest grape pickers. No one in the Napa Valley ever had anything bad to say about Georges de Latour. He was “a very good man, capable, honest, ethical, a gentleman in every way,” rival winemaker Louis M. Martini recalled. “An elegant, patrician man, like all his family.” And, said Martini, “he knew wine.”
With such qualities, de Latour might have been a successful vintner in any circumstances, but his rise during Prohibition was a breathtaking ascent abetted by a sentence and clinched by a clause. The sentence, dating from 1912, read, “This letter will introduce Mr. George [sic] de Latour, an estimable Catholic of this Diocese, who is about to visit the Eastern States for the purpose of introducing altar wines, which he makes in Napa Valley, California.” It was addressed, companionably, “To the Reverend Clergy” and signed, persuasively, “P. W. Riordan, Archbishop of San Francisco.” And when a clause in the Volstead Act authorized the manufacture and sale of sacramental wine under the Eighteenth Amendment, it became the key to a fortune.
A devout Catholic as well as an estimable one, de Latour had not stumbled into Archbishop Riordan’s good graces by accident. Those four original acres of wheat fields and orchards were soon planted in grapes, and in 1904 de Latour incorporated as Beaulieu Vineyards. Among his first board members were two Catholic priests; one, Father D. O. Crowley, would remain by his side for two decades, guaranteeing the purity of the sacramental wines Beaulieu began producing in 1908 and maintaining a direct connection to the archbishop’s office. Soon de Latour opened a marketing office in New York. It did a decent enough business, but nothing compared to what was to come. By the time he made his deal with the Wente brothers in 1918, Prohibition’s moment had arrived, and so had Georges de Latour’s.
De Latour wasn’t the only California winemaker whose business was tied to the church. Other Catholic vineyard families—the Beringers and the Martinis in Napa, the Concannons down in Livermore—were also able to win “ecclesiastical approbation,” the formal nod from a bishop indicating to parish priests that a vintner’s wines were acceptable for Communion. But de Latour already had other assets: his New York sales office, which had a decade’s worth of satisfied accounts by the time Prohibition began; an intimate friendship with Riordan’s successor, Archbishop Edward J. Hanna (who would officiate at the wedding of de Latour’s daughter Hélène to a French nobleman); and a certain sense that altar wines might have a market far from the altar.
When he made his deal with the Wentes—he would end up purchasing the family’s entire production for the full fourteen years of Prohibition—de Latour was placing a bet on the sacramental wine business. It did not take long to start cashing in. Just before Prohibition began he hired Charles W. Fay, a political operative who had been San Francisco postmaster throughout the Wilson administration and had continued to play a prominent role in California politics during the 1920s. Soon de Latour was granted, in March 1920, the Prohibition Bureau’s permit number Cal-A-1, allowing him to make, ship, and sell sacramental wines. That same month Archbishop Hanna congratulated him on the rapid growth of his business. By 1922 de Latour had distributors in seven eastern and midwestern cities, in addition to his headquarters in San Francisco; the next year he began buying up large tracts of vineyard land and all the grapes that came with them (including a large piece acquired directly from the Diocese of Northern California). By the middle of the decade he was storing 900,000 gallons of wine in a vast new building that covered more than an acre, and shipping prodigious quantities via a rail spur running up the Napa Valley that the Southern Pacific had opened expressly to handle his business.
To many this seemed like an awful lot of Communion wine. Prohibition Bureau records indicate that occasionally wine warehoused by one of Beaulieu’s wholesalers would go missing, and although Ernest Wente was certain that de Latour played by the rules, he also believed he chose to look the other way when Beaulieu’s production fell into what Wente called “illegal channels.” It didn’t have to fall very far, for de Latour’s church business lay not only with the priests whose signatures were required by law on order forms, but implicitly with their congregations as well. When a priest took receipt of an order for, say, 120 gallons of Beaulieu (a not uncommon amount), he suddenly had an inventory of 46,000 communion sips, more or less—or, perhaps, 10,000 communion sips, with nearly a hundred gallons set aside for members of the congregation. Sometimes the wine didn’t even leave the rectory. In 1932, six cases of Beaulieu’s best were shipped to Chicago expressly for the use of Cardinal George Mundelein. “I advise priests to buy a large quantity at a time—for instance a half barrel or a barrel,” de Latour told E. C. Yellowley, the second-ranking man in the Prohibition Bureau who, over the years of their professional relationship, would become a close and valued friend. De Latour explained that bulky shipments made in-transit theft more difficult. He did not explain that they also made postdelivery allocation quite a bit easier.*
Beaulieu’s wines were put into circulation beyond the altar by the irresistible physics of the era, that form of gravity that deposited potable alcohol in the cupboards of people whose need was not particularly spiritual. But one historian who praised de Latour’s ability “to move a lot of wine without the trouble and expense of actually having to market it” wasn’t looking very closely. In the promotional materials he sent out to priests across the country, the message of the Eucharist—“Who so eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life”—seemed less central than the message of the market. “I have had many favorable comments on your wine and, personally, consider it to be of the very best produced in California,” read a testimonial from Archbishop Hanna reprinted in one of the Beaulieu brochures. Photographs of the vineyards and descriptions of the winery—“sheltered by the foothills of the Coast Range mountains”—lent sales materials an aroma more commercial than ecclesiastical. So did the product offering, which suggested a connoisseurship one doesn’t necessarily associate with the Communion rail. In 1921 de Latour was offering sauterne, Chablis, Riesling, cabernet sauvignon, Tokay, sherry, Angelica, burgundy, port, and muscatel. Before Prohibition was over he had added Madeira, Malaga, and Moselle, as well as a blend he called “Beaulieu Special.”*
But de Latour’s most brilliant marketing gesture was the construction of a guest cottage for visiting clerics and a standing invitation to any who wished to visit Beaulieu and test the wines on the spot. Other de Latour guests included political figures and Hollywood celebrities, but as pleasing as those visitors might have been, they were mere signifiers of the de Latour family’s stature; the priests who came to Rutherford materially contributed to it. The guest cottage was built deep into the vineyard, next to the family’s summer residence, a sprawling, six-bedroom wooden structure decorated inside with Louis XVI furniture and outside with verandas, gardens (one Italian, another French), a rooftop bell imported from Florence, and one of the first swimming pools in northern California. Invited to join the de Latours for dinner, how could Father Meyer of Milwaukee, or Monsignor Brody of New York, or Bishop Cantwell of Los Angeles, or any of the hundreds of other churchly guests who made the pilgrimage to Rutherford consider any other Communion wine?
If any clinching was needed, de Latour had provided the perfect environment for closing the sale: there on the veranda, shaded by a grove of sycamores, the lush rows of vines gleaming
in the distance, he had built an altar, where the visiting priests could commune with the blood of Christ under circumstances that could place even an atheist in the grip of ecstasy.
“WE STARTED OUT about 10 a.m. and after about 100 miles arrived at a Frenchman’s house,” an eighteen-year-old Englishman traveling through California in 1929 wrote in his journal. “I can’t recall his name, but he makes the wine which is used for sacramental purposes.”
Randolph Churchill had come to Beaulieu as his father’s traveling companion. During a lengthy tour of North America, Winston Churchill, who considered Prohibition “at once comic and pathetic,” had entered the constitutionally dry United States with some trepidation. But before the party crossed to Seattle from Victoria, British Columbia, Randolph had filled flasks and medicine bottles with whiskey, demonstrating the initiative that led his father to write to Randolph’s mother with button-popping pride. Invoking Zeus’s cherished cupbearer, Churchill told his wife, “Randolph acts as an unfailing Ganymede. Up to the present I have never been without what was necessary.”
Not that there was any reason to worry on the day they were luncheon guests at Beaulieu. “A moment’s halt, a momentary taste,” Churchill wrote in the de Latour guestbook. Their host, Churchill told Clementine, “had over a million gallons stored in his factory which was a goodly sight to see in this dry land.” Randolph, in his diary, was more allusive: “Christ has come to the aid of Bacchus in a most wonderful way.”
Christ was not alone on his aid mission, for de Latour produced kosher wine as well. The quantity was only a fraction of what he made for the Catholic Communion (not to mention the Lutheran, Russian Orthodox, and other denominations whose clergy also traded with Beaulieu), but it was a business worth pursuing. In 1923 de Latour had concluded an agency agreement with two Chicago men who had “a wide acquaintance among the Jewish rabbis and congregations throughout the State of Illinois,” granting them exclusive distribution rights within the state. Beaulieu wines were certified as kosher by a San Francisco rabbi whose imprimatur cost de Latour ten cents a gallon. By all the available evidence, Beaulieu’s kosher wines were truly kosher. This could not be said about the wines of Louis M. Martini, up the road in St. Helena. Martini liked to sneak into his winery on Saturdays, when his own koshering rabbi was off the premises observing the Sabbath. Then, recalled his son, Martini would secretly spike the wine with “the ingredients that made the wine palatable.”
With the exception of social worker Lillian Wald, Utah governor Simon Bamberger, Rabbi Stephen M. Wise, and those other progressives who saw Prohibition as a lever to lift the downtrodden, American Jews had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment with the near unanimity and absolute vehemence that seized American Catholics. For both groups, it wasn’t simply a matter of protecting the free practice of their respective religions. Like the Catholics, the Jews peered behind the Prohibition banner and saw the white-hooded hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and the foaming xenophobia of the nativist pastors who dominated the Methodist and Baptist churches. It was a view summarized by a speaker at the annual meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1914: the effort to place Prohibition in the Constitution, the rabbi declared, could be attributed to “the ambition of ecclesiastic tyrants.”
The CCAR, as the umbrella organization for America’s Reform rabbis, represented the most liberal, the most assimilated, and the most economically privileged branch of American Jewry, and it decided against taking a position on Prohibition during the run-up to ratification because the subject itself was “beneath the dignity of the conference.” Their Orthodox brethren, less inclined to stay on the sidelines, lobbied Andrew Volstead directly while his bill was under consideration, which helped cement the sacramental exception into the final legislation. The regulations that the Prohibition Bureau subsequently put in place covering the distribution of wine for the Jewish sacraments were in one respect narrower than they were for Catholic rites, limiting individual families to ten gallons a year. But whereas the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church provided an organized, supervised distribution process—the archbishop approved a vendor, and the priests in his diocese purchased Communion wine under his authority—the amorphous structure of American Judaism did not accommodate a formalized system. Consequently, any individual rabbi presenting a list of congregants could legally obtain the prescribed quantity and assume responsibility for distributing it.
But there were rabbis and there were rabbis, and then there were rabbis who weren’t really rabbis. Insofar as wine was concerned, men bearing this ancient and honored title occupied three distinct categories: rabbis who believed wine to be a necessary part of the sacrament, properly distributed under prevailing rules; rabbis who believed that unfermented grape juice was not only an acceptable substitute, but a politically necessary one; and rabbis (and faux rabbis) who saw the distribution of wine as an unalienable and profitable right. Particularly among the Orthodox, disapproval of the intrusions of civic authority into sacred matters was offset by the opportunity to improve their financial circumstances. Unlike their Reform counterparts, the Orthodox rabbis in the United States in the 1920s were to a large extent unassimilated, impoverished immigrants from eastern Europe. The scholar Hannah Sprecher, in her authoritative and sympathetic monograph on the Prohibition era’s wine-selling Orthodox rabbis, concludes, “The temptation to profit from wine transactions was great.” When Congregation Talmud Torah of Los Angeles made its jump from 180 members to 1,000 in the first months of Prohibition, its rabbi, Benjamin Gardner, bemoaned his membership’s clamor for “wine, wine, and more wine.” But he was being somewhat disingenuous. A Talmud Torah trustee charged Gardner not only with peddling wine to outsiders as well as members, but with running a sort of concession business on the side: apparently Gardner was doing so well he had offered cash to another synagogue for the rights to sell wine to its members.
Gardner’s story was resonant because the political climate in heavily Protestant, proudly dry Los Angeles—it was the only constituency in the country that ever elected a Prohibition Party candidate to Congress*—was notably unsympathetic to wets and wet sympathizers. The Los Angeles Times delighted in patrolling rabbinical abuses. Rabbi Gardner became “Rabbi” Gardner after his third appearance in the paper. When another “purported rabbi” named Harry Margolis was arrested for a third Volstead violation and bond was set at $5,000, the Times closed its report by informing readers that “Margolis went down into his jeans and produced $5000 cash.” The biggest splash was made by the case of the Groves brothers—a federal Prohibition agent, a former secretary of the state Democratic Party, and a third, uncredentialed brother—who, the Times said, “disposed” of half a million gallons “through ‘paper’ Jewish congregations represented by men professing to be rabbis but who in reality were bootleggers.”
In hundreds of instances, though, they were rabbis and bootleggers. A particularly credible account of the racket, “Stamping Out Wine Congregations,” appeared in the national social-work magazine Survey, written by Rabbi Rudolph I. Coffee of Oakland. There were seven Jewish families in the East Bay town of San Leandro who managed, Coffee wrote, to conduct religious services only on the high holy days. But once the town’s “poor but respected Hebrew teacher” was named the tiny congregation’s rabbi and made a commission arrangement with his suppliers—he would be paid for every gallon he moved—things changed. Soon membership swelled to 250, among them a worshiper who lived in Red Bluff, California, nearly two hundred miles to the north. Next door to San Leandro, in Alameda, same story: in this case, the rabbi of a small congregation withdrew five thousand gallons of wine in one nine-month period, thanks in large part to a membership roster lengthened with the names of the dead. It was a common practice; an investigation in 1924 by the state’s Prohibition director Samuel R. Rutter indicated that the names on some lists of “wine congregations” were “promiscuously selected from obsolete city directories.”
This practice was hardly conf
ined to California. The leading Orthodox rabbi in Omaha, Zvi Grodzinski, complained to colleagues that other local rabbis were “conducting a free-for-all and selling their sacramental wine to Jews and Gentiles alike.” The celebrated Prohibition agent Izzy Einstein busted New York rabbis operating out of tiny tenement rooms who claimed congregations in the hundreds. In Providence, Rhode Island, the Reform rabbi Samuel Gup complained that “our local Orthodox rabbis have broken the law continuously; they sell wine for profit, they sell it to anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who is willing to pay for it.” His colleague, Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf of Philadelphia, said the illegal wine selling of some of his Orthodox counterparts was “a public scandal.”
There were rabbis who pocketed the revenue collected from their customers and also took commissions from the wineries that supplied them. There were even rabbis who opened what Major Chester P. Mills, the chief federal enforcement officer in New York, forthrightly called “wine stores.” A typical one had a sign in the window reading “Kosher Wine for Sacramental Purposes” and a rabbi behind the counter signing up customers to “join” a synagogue at the same time they picked up the goods. Schapiro’s, the long-established kosher winery on New York’s Lower East Side, did a large sacramental business (and a decent under-the-table business as well) in its famously viscous and alcoholically potent “wine so thick you can cut it with a knife.” But those seeking an even greater alcoholic kick (not to mention a more appetizing experience) had plenty of other choices. There were rabbis who dealt in sacramental champagne, sacramental crème de menthe, sacramental brandy, and various other liquors utterly unconnected to any aspect of Jewish religious practice. All of them, however, were deemed legal by a federal judge in the District of Columbia who ruled “it is not the content of the beverage, but the purpose for which it will be used that determines whether or not it is a sacramental wine.” The New York Herald suggested that under such an interpretation, 100-proof rye would be perfectly acceptable at the Sabbath table.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 25