Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  CWA’s size had allowed it to improve the overall quality of wine in California by blending it to a standard level in its central cellars in San Francisco. Once it had made sure of its product, CWA started to aggressively market its Calwa brand, whose trademark seal featured a young Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, and a California bear standing on the prow of a ship.

  The losses from the fire were staggering. Morgan estimated that 10 million gallons of the company’s wine had spilled or burned. The fire was so intense that it obliterated casks and melted glass.

  “To give an idea of the heat to which these bottles were subjected, it can be stated that they were packed in rows in racks, and that of the first five rows, all were melted into a solid mass of glass,” a reporter wrote in the “Calamity Edition” of the Pacific Wine and Spirits Review. “Only one of five retained corks; the rest blew with the sudden expansion of the liquid.”155

  Morgan soon heard that some of the company’s other properties had been seriously damaged. The huge brick I. Turk Winery in Santa Rosa was a total loss, like most of the brick buildings in that city. The Brun & Chaix winery in Oakville was also seriously damaged.156

  One of Percy Morgan’s biggest regrets was the destruction of thousands of bottles of wine the company had been storing for ten or more years. The notion of aging California wine was new, and Morgan had intended to show those on the East Coast that California wines, like French wines, could develop with time. That dream now had to be deferred.

  But as in most disasters, new opportunities emerged. The wine in the basement of CWA’s headquarters on Third and Bryant had spilled out of its casks. But a plugged sewer line had prevented the wine from flowing into the street and the concrete cellar inadvertently turned into a 2-million-gallon wine vat. After the flames had passed and the twisted timbers had cooled, one of CWA’s men came up with a way to save that wine. Louis Wetmore, who was in charge of the company’s George West & Son winery in Stockton, rented barges from around the bay and had them towed by steamer to San Francisco. Workmen cut a hole into the side of the wine house, and Wetmore somehow convinced members of the busy fire department to pump the wine through 2,000 feet of pipe laid down on Bryant Street toward barges on the bay. The barges were then towed to the El Pinal winery in Stockton and other river cities, where the scorched wine was turned into brandy. CWA rescued about 1.5 to 2 million gallons of wine this way.157

  The CWA was also able to save 35,000 bottles from one of its cellars. Despite the fact the wine was exposed to high heat, the company decided that the wine was still sound. The CWA offered it as a souvenir of the conflagration. “These wines by reason of tremendous superheating and slow cooling have developed marvelous qualities,” claimed Morgan in an advertisement that was reprinted in the newspapers. “In richness of bouquet and body and color, they are probably the finest wines ever produced in California. Of course this is a very expensive way to produce fine wines, and the Association will certainly not endeavor to repeat their success in this way. However the wines will be cased and specially labeled and sold throughout the United States as souvenirs of the great conflagration.”

  * * *

  The earthquake forced the wine houses to rethink their operations. For the previous twenty-five years, ever since the grape-planting boom of the 1880s, the center of the wine business had been in San Francisco. Wine was made in outlying areas and shipped to the city to be blended and stored. San Francisco’s temperate weather, with its cool summer fogs, made it an ideal place to age wine, particularly since temperatures in Napa and Sonoma counties often hit 90 or 100 degrees in the summer. The country wine cellars also had to be emptied regularly to make room for the next vintage.158 The earthquake revealed the downside to that centralization.

  Morgan had been frustrated for years by the way the California Wine Association was physically organized. Since the company had started when seven wine houses merged, it had had numerous buildings scattered around San Francisco. Each of them had been allotted a specific function: one held sweet wines, one was used for aging, one for blending, one for storage, and so on. Morgan had long talked about consolidating those facilities as a way to cut costs and increase efficiency. The earthquake gave him that chance.

  Morgan wanted to build a showcase, a facility that would demonstrate that the California Wine Association was the most successful wine company in the world. Morgan never used the word monopoly to describe the corporation he had built, even though others did. He preferred “community of interests,” a phrase coined by the banker J. P. Morgan (no relation). Congress had passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890 to break up trusts that dominated certain industries. Even though the California Wine Association was “vertically integrated,” meaning it controlled winemaking from the field to the grape to the making of wine to distribution, no regulator ever sought its dismantling. Morgan may have gobbled up as many wine concerns as he could buy, but he was strategic. He didn’t push wine prices so high that consumers or merchants became outraged.

  The CWA also had allowed its various divisions to operate under their own names, giving the illusion that there were many separate wine businesses in the state. That also may have deflected federal scrutiny.

  Morgan decided to consolidate all the CWA’s operations in one facility. In late 1906, CWA began construction of Winehaven, which would become the world’s largest wine depot in the world and would strip away any pretense that the CWA wasn’t the mighty muscle of wine. Winehaven crushed more grapes, blended more wine, and shipped more casks than any entity before it. Its dominance lasted until Prohibition. One historian called Winehaven a “city-state,” because hundreds of workers lived on the grounds, either in the Winehaven Hotel or in small bungalows scattered around the property. The manager had his own two-story house on a hill with a magnificent view of San Francisco Bay. There was a school for workers’ children, a social hall, and a fire station.

  Morgan built Winehaven on forty-seven acres on a promontory called Point Molate, which sat at the eastern edge of the bay about four miles from the city of Richmond in Contra Costa County. It was ideally located for sea and rail travel, being next to deep water and numerous rail lines. The company noted this attribute in its slogan, “Where rail and water meet for the worldwide distribution of California wines.”

  Having just gone through the catastrophe, the directors of the CWA wanted to build a structure that could withstand another major earthquake. The company constructed a brick building that resembled a medieval castle with crenellated parapets and corner towers. Its wine cellar was lined with concrete and could hold 10 million gallons of wine. There were bottling shops, cooperages, a sherry house, and laboratory. A pier that stretched 1,800 feet into the bay allowed casks to be loaded directly onto waiting ships. The rail lines that ran though the property connected directly with the transcontinental railroads.159

  Construction on Winehaven began just months after the earthquake, but the plant wasn’t fully operational until 1908. That year, the company produced 675,000 gallons of wine on site. So much fruit was brought in from the San Joaquin Valley that the railroads had to add two additional freight trains a week.160 Immigrants started to arrive directly from Italy to work at Winehaven.

  When it was completed, Winehaven not only became a critical part of the state’s economy, but a popular tourist attraction as well. The CWA had a steamer and it would invite dignitaries on board for a cruise along the bay. They would pull up to the long dock at Winehaven and disembark for a tour and a gourmet lunch overlooking the facilities.

  The California Wine Association operated Winehaven for eleven years before the threat of Prohibition prompted the company to shutter the facility in 1919. The company managed to sell about 50 million gallons of wine (the equivalent of seventy-five Olympic size swimming pools) before the sale of wine became illegal, but was left with millions of unsold gallons when the Volstead Act became law on January 16, 1920.

  Winehaven remained vacant for more than twenty ye
ars. In June 1942, seven months after the U.S.’s entry into World War II, the U.S. Navy seized the property and evicted the Santa Cruz Oil Company, which had purchased the property a few months earlier. The Navy mostly left the Winehaven buildings alone, but installed massive 2.2-million-gallon concrete fuel tanks on the hill to hold aviation and bunker fuel for the Pacific Fleet.161

  * * *

  As I was driving the narrow and winding road to Winehaven in the winter of 2010, it occurred to me that its hidden setting was an apt reflection of its hidden history. Even though I had driven past the freeway exit leading to Winehaven hundreds of times on my way to the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge crossing San Francisco Bay, and had even spotted the cluster of brick buildings on my return trips, I never knew what the complex was. I am not alone in this. Winehaven has been off limits to most visitors since 1942 when the Navy seized the property for the war effort. Even after the city of Richmond acquired the land in 2003, access was limited.

  But when a developer made plans to transform the old wine complex into an Indian gambling casino, people started to pay attention. That, in fact, is why I was navigating my car over the rutted and narrow road that bright winter day. I was writing about the controversy over the casino.

  The road led up and around a ridge, and then dropped to parallel the shoreline. A cyclone fence, rusted and bent in parts, separated most of the road from the property. Off in the distance the bright blue of the bay sparkled in the sun.

  I pulled my car into the parking area outside Building 123, a Navy Quonset hut then being used as a security checkpoint. Up ahead, I could see a redbrick building with crenellated towers and a group of other warehouse structures. I was to meet Don Gosney, a former steamfitter and union leader turned photographer, who knew more about Winehaven than anyone else in Richmond. He had been appointed to a Navy board established to examine possible reuses for the old fuel depot. By Gosney’s estimates, he had read from 70,000 to 80,000 pages on Winehaven. He not only knew details about the California Wine Association, but about contamination left by the Navy.

  Gosney had agreed to lead me on a tour of the shuttered property. As he led me around various buildings and detailed how they had been used over the past century, his love of history was apparent. So was his concern about the fate of the buildings. Richmond was divided over the casino. Some thought the proposed gambling palace and 500-room Marriot Hotel was a travesty. Richmond is largely poor and African American and Latino, and casino opponents expressed concern that poor people would be lured into needlessly spending their money. Others, including Gosney, believed that the casino would create jobs and revenue for the city; in fact the developer promised to pay Richmond $12 million in annual fees. As we walked, he convincingly explained that it would take Las Vegas–style money to restore the buildings at Winehaven.

  They had a dilapidated air. One brick building had been condemned. Peeking through the windows I could see that part of the roof had fallen in. The doors and windows of the twenty-nine bungalows built for married workers were covered with plywood. Squatters had slept in the wine-master’s house, perched on a hill with a commanding view of the bay. There was a sleeping bag laid out in one tiny closet, with magazines and old drug paraphernalia heaped nearby.

  There were times when I felt I was walking through a time warp. The old nuclear fallout shelter set up by the Navy still stood, tucked away in a main building. Rusting cans of tinned drinking water dated 1953 were stacked along one wall, along with folding cots that doubled as stretchers. Five-gallon cardboard sanitation kits stuffed with toilet paper, tampons, deodorant—and a portable toilet seat that could be placed on top to make a commode—sat in another area.

  But there was beauty, too, in the old buildings. The brick wine warehouse’s rounded towers and crenellated parapets seemed to be straight out of the medieval era. I kept wondering when knights in chain-link armor would pour boiling oil on us below. Huge, red iron beams supported the brick walls and ceiling of the building, and they looked like they would withstand the strongest of earthquakes. The bottom floor, the place where wine was stored, had walls of concrete, including the stairs leading down into the cellar.

  I was struck by the size of the place. In the twenty-first century, wineries often market their wine through the story of their founders. It usually involves tales of a couple taking a risk by buying a winery and making it a success through hard work and determination. The key is that these wineries are presented as small, family-owned operations. And in fact, individuals own most of the wineries in Sonoma and Napa County. Of course the corporate wineries, with their millions of gallons of production, overshadow the small places. But in the first decade of the twentieth century, bigness was a virtue. Size conveyed strength and prosperity and hope for a bright future. The California Wine Association had been all about size and dominance.

  Now Winehaven, once the world’s largest winery, was decaying on the edge of the bay. It was a discard, a place that held relevance long ago, now relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history.

  What a blow Prohibition must have been to the California Wine Association. Here it was, the biggest wine concern in the world, a company that had tamed and transformed the California wine industry. Suddenly it was out of business.

  Prohibition must have been a shock to Percy Morgan, too. Building Winehaven had exhausted him and in 1911, partly on his doctor’s orders, he had resigned from the presidency of the CWA. After his departure, he built a home in Los Altos on the San Francisco Peninsula that resembled a baronial manor. He joined the boards of Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank and Stanford University. He took his family on an extended trip to Europe.

  But on the morning of April 16, 1920, Morgan walked down the grand wood staircase of his mansion and into a sitting room right off the front door. He picked up a hunting rifle, sat down on the couch, and blasted a hole through his chest. His young son and wife rushed into the room, but there was nothing they could do. Morgan was dead. He was fifty-eight years old.

  The newspapers attributed Morgan’s suicide to his despondency over his health. He had been in a car accident two months earlier, and was worried he would never recover completely. Perhaps the accident had shaken Morgan’s confidence and willingness to face the new, prohibitionist era, then just three months old. It must have been terrible to know that you had created the world’s most successful wine company, a monopoly that restored order to the chaotic and self-destructive California wine industry, and that it had to be dissolved. A change in social attitudes had branded the CWA and other winemaking operations criminal enterprises. For a man who had spent seventeen years promoting California wine and the CWA, that shift must have been difficult to accept.

  By 2010, the year I toured Winehaven, Morgan’s most lasting legacy, he had been almost completely forgotten. There was not even a Wikipedia page for him or the California Wine Association. Maybe that was appropriate since Morgan and the CWA dealt in wine, a product that was meant to be ephemeral, to be drunk and savored, not kept forever.

  I am a history buff, the kind of person who walks down a street and doesn’t see the twenty-first-century sign for Starbucks, but thinks back about what store had been in that spot in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So I was grateful to get the chance to walk through Winehaven and contemplate the scale of the wine business up until Prohibition. I could imagine the 400 workers toiling with the huge storage casks, loading barrels onto seagoing ships or rail cars that were traveling cross country. The industrial nature of the enterprise, even though it was long dead, was impressive. I knew then that I wanted to write about the CWA some day, even though only five words about it ever made it into my New York Times story about the casino.

  * * *

  By July 1916, the vineyard at Cucamonga looked tired. Many of the Mission vines that spread out over hundreds of acres had been planted almost sixty years earlier when John Rains had expanded his vineyard. The vines were woody and gnarled, leafy in the summer months,
but bearing little fruit. As the vineyard had grown less productive, the vines had been allowed to grow whichever way they pleased. They were so tall and overgrown that a horse-drawn cultivator couldn’t even traverse the rows.162

  The vineyard looked “worn out,” Jackson Graves, the vice president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles, wrote to Isaias Hellman.163 He took care of Hellman’s business affairs. For that reason, the CWA had cancelled the lease it had held for ten years on the vineyard, which meant Hellman once again resumed control of the 580-acre property. “It looked like a place with a mortgage on it, weeds rank, and a general air of dilapidation,” wrote Graves.164

  Graves cast around for a future for the depleted vineyard. A number of wine men in the region came calling, men like Secondo Guasti, whose nearby Italian Vineyard Company would one day span 5,000 acres, making it the largest contiguous vineyard in the world. Guasti offered to rent the land for $1,500 for one year. Graves turned him down. Then Guasti offered to buy 1,100 acres for $100 an acre.165 Graves turned him down a second time. He thought the land was worth about $350 an acre.166

  “I suppose it will be necessary to take out these vines,” Graves wrote to Hellman. “There are between three and four hundred acres of them. To do it by hand will cost a little fortune.”

  It would also be extremely difficult. The roots of the Mission grapes extended deep into the ground, perhaps as far as ten feet, little voyagers in search of water. For more than a half century they had anchored themselves in the sandy dirt of Rancho Cucamonga, and they would not be easy to extract.

  Graves had heard that the trustees of Stanford University had a similar problem with the vines at Vina Ranch. The trustees needed to uproot 2,500 acres, and they purchased a special machine for the job, a tractor that pulled a “snaking apparatus,” that dug out the vines below the surface.