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 The Last Word on Wine
Review / Thomas Pinney
A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present
By Thomas Pinney, professor emeritus of English
University of California Press/ 548 pages/ $45
FERMENTATION IS ONE OF NATURE’S spontaneous chemical reactions, and, if one leaves most fruits alone, they will, in some fashion, ferment of their own accord. The making of wine, however, constitutes an ancient attempt to intervene in this process, and the results of making and drinking wine have always been strikingly varied. Consider, for example, that the city of Troy was ultimately an easy prey for the Greeks, buried as it was in a wine-induced stupor. On his way back from Troy, Odysseus carried a bag of wine whose fragrance was beyond words, even if it were to be cut by adding 20 parts water. This singular potable was to prove the undoing of the Cyclops Polyphemos, as he learned too late the perils of drinking such stuff neat, which no civilized Greek would have done. The Greeks of the historical period continued to dilute their wine (more on the order of three to one), especially for their end-of-the-meal drinking and thinking party, whose name, symposium, has lost its drinking associations in modern times; pity. Guests at Trimalchio’s banquet in the first century C.E. simpered over the pleasures of a century-old Falernian wine, one guest becoming so sodden that he mangled his Latin grammar. Pliny the Younger observed disapprovingly a man serving his ordinary, good and great wines to guests according to their social status. There has been, then, a great deal of wine consumed with both pleasure and cost over the centuries, but most of it was undrinkable by modern standards. In a seemingly endless search for that drinkability, we’re still intervening in nature’s natural process more than 9,000 years after we first started to do so.
 In the final chapter of A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present, Professor Emeritus of English Thomas Pinney notes that by the end of the 20th century, “the standards of winemaking were so high and so reliable that ‘bad wine’ in the old sense had virtually disappeared.” Consequently, he adds, “there is every reason to think that sound inexpensive wine has never before been as abundant and reliable as it is now.” Abundance, of course, is easily measured, but reliability involves matters of taste, which, the old saw reminds us, non est disputandum. Nothing daunted, however, this always fascinating book, chronicles the events, people and turns of fate that have brought about both abundance and changes of taste in America’s wines following the stultifying years of Prohibition and the Great Repeal.
The author’s first volume, A History of Wine in America: From the Beginning to Prohibition (University of California Press, 1989), draws largely upon exiguous evidence to chronicle the several failed attempts to establish a flourishing wine industry in this country. The present volume continues the tale, and turns out to be, ultimately, a success story, relying upon evidence so superabundant, at least relatively speaking, that even Pinney acknowledges the “risk of carrying the narrative beyond the limit of tedium.” His account, happily, never approaches that state, and even his frequent and unavoidable reliance on substantial statistical evidence can be enthralling … but, be it duly noted, not to everyone. In his introduction, Pinney freely grants that this book has been written for “those that take an interest in the subject.” A book this rich, with its ca. 370 pages of text and over 1,400 footnotes (many of them offering information important enough to have been included in the text) is designed only for those one might term the “philes,” as in Hellenophiles, Francophiles, or, for our purposes, oenophiles. While others may be puzzled by what they will surely regard as arcane references, oenophiles are already familiar with, say, the Charmat or transfer process, or fermentations that are stuck, secondary or malolactic. One should remember too, that an oenophilic level of interest— close to evangelistic zealotry, really—is not shared by most Americans. Further, even the majority of those who do revel in wine spend little time reading or caring about the history of winemaking, but prefer only to know something about the glass of wine immediately before them, or the one they intend to be drinking shortly. That surely is their loss, for when Pinney makes his “modest claim to have provided a great deal of information that is not generally known,” he understates the magnitude of his contribution. Even for a reviewer who has been happily drinking wine for more than half a century, and teaching about it for almost that long, there appears something new, surprising and, above all, enlightening on virtually every page of this remarkable History.
This is not, however, a book about wine as somebody’s sensory experience, however much the author’s gustatory preferences may occasionally peer through the cracks in an historian’s professional detachment. Rather, this is the story of the American wine industry, as first it suffered, and then recovered slowly from the Volstead Act and its repeal, slowly at first, and then with a rush beginning in the late 1960s. So packed with detailed entrees is the table the author sets before the reader, that a reviewer can only offer a general, even impressionistic notion of the whole, some points of singular interest, and what one hopes will prove to be apposite commentary.
The general narrative, as one might expect, runs chronologically, from Prohibition in 1920 to about 2002 or 2003. California claims pride of place in this narrative, as one might expect, given that the vast majority of wine made in America comes and has always come from that state, at least since Prohibition.
Whatever the many vicissitudes of the wine industry in pre- Prohibition years, the general misconception that endures is that Prohibition essentially put a stop to wine production in this country, and that the entire enterprise had to be restarted from scratch following Repeal. The true picture, however, is far more complex, as Pinney demonstrates with the admirable detail that characterizes his whole narrative. While many wineries certainly closed and vanished forever, and many others simply lay moribund, there were some 17 million gallons of wine in storage, and a great many vineyards still alive and producing. The loopholes in the Volstead Act and the ambiguous language of the accompanying legislation left a truly startling list of ostensibly legal uses to which all of that juice could be put: sacramental wines, of course, but also various “wine products,” such as wine concentrates, sauces, jellies and a wonderful variety of tonics and kindred nostrums. The old joke about one’s drinking “purely for medicinal purposes” has its clear roots in Prohibition’s vinous loopholes.
Then, too, there was a sudden and unanticipated interest in home winemaking, particularly outside of California. Although this state of affairs led to growing numbers of actual vineyards and production of grape juice, most of the effort was directed by those with the size and capital to do so, and relied principally on grapes that could stand long hours in a cross-country railway tank car, rather than the allegedly more palatable but touchier varietals that might produce table wines of consequence. Prevalent among the tank car grapes were Alicante Bouschet, a grape that adds color and little else to wine, and Carignane, of which it has been said that it is distinguished only by its disadvantages. Throughout his narrative, Pinney points out the relatively grim state of the wines produced with such grapes whose virtues lay in their aforementioned hardiness, or the ease and quantity with which they could be produced, particularly in climates that are not kind to more honored vinifera such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. Still, one supposes that those who drank their homemade wines during Prohibition must have liked them. They certainly weren’t to be compared with the better-known French wines of the time, the author observes, but does that really matter? The Trojans, the Greeks, the Romans and even Polyphemos, clearly enjoyed their wines, strange as those beverages would have seemed to more modern palates. Consider, then, what the author refers to as the “baleful Concord,” which is still the mostly widely planted grape in the U.S. And yet, there are those among us whose earliest and entirely pleasant childhood experience of wines came from the Kosher varieties made from the Concord—call it the Seder phenomenon, if you will—but the road to an abiding fondness for wine can, like any love affair, have less than lustrous beginnings.
Prohibition’s repeal, then, found a wine industry of sorts still existing, but in an America given mostly to spirits rather than to wine, and, in wine itself, to quantity rather than quality, to sweet and fortified (Port, Muscatel and Sherry) rather than dry wines, to table and raisin grapes rather than true vinifera, and to large, still-surviving wineries such as Gallo. These preferences were destined to continue for many years thereafter and, in the end, had a great deal to do with the large number of lackluster wines produced in America. These relatively dismal bottlings, in turn, must have played at least a partial role in the American public’s general indifference to the European notion of wine as a daily accompaniment to food. After all, the Port wasn’t really Port, the Sherry wasn’t really Sherry, and the Muscatel was made from raisin grapes. If the public prefers these kinds of wines, why bother to make anything else? For many years, despite, for example, what Pinney suggests was Gallo’s continuing allegiance to “good” wine, it was still the winery’s position that the wine it made should be geared to what the public wanted rather to some other general perception of, say, French excellence.
It’s interesting to note that when Gallo turned its attention finally to the production of markedly finer wines, it was faced, and continues to be faced, with the enormous marketing problem of how to overcome the more plebeian jug and pop wine (cf. Thunderbird and Ripple) image it had carefully constructed for years. In any case, the American preference for fortified wines over dry table wines was to continue until 1967. Even though researchers at the University of California, Davis knew much about what would seem to be very basic issues, e.g., what grapes to grow and where, temperature controlled fermentation and the cleanliness of the entire process, many winemakers were unable to afford the best equipment, were indifferent to the need to do so or, as Pinney suggests, simply nurtured the dirt farmer’s traditional distrust of scientific theorists. It was certainly possible to produce palatable and even fine dry wines from true vinifera, even though vinifera was virtually unknown in America outside of California. Anyone who had the pleasure of tasting, for example, the 1935 Simi Zinfandel, still hale and elegant even 50 years after its production, will have realized what possibilities in California were not, in fact, being widely realized. The generally unimpressive characteristics of American wine were destined to continue into WWII years and well beyond. This continued to be the case despite the arrival of a few wine-savvy refugees from Europe, a yearning for better local wines possibly spurred in part by shortages of imports during the war and the entry onto the wine scene of large distillers with equally large amounts of capital to invest in better equipment and marketing. In general terms, though, the actual wine being produced in America continued to be much as it had been directly following Prohibition. That there were a few wineries and a small coterie of winemakers genuinely dedicated to the production of better dry wines certainly demonstrated that all that was needed for a wider effort was the will to do so.
Even a Pomona student in the 1950s could buy a perfectly decent bottle or jug of Gallo’s “Hearty Burgundy” for a reasonable price. It wasn’t Burgundy, of course—that our wine laws permitted and still permit such a nonsensical fiction continues to be the embarrassment it has always been—but it was indeed as hearty as its name owing to the fact that its principal component in those days was the relatively high achiever, Petite Sirah. At the same time, however, another entirely affordable undergraduate wine that enjoyed unaccountable popularity was a paint remover called “Red Mountain,” made of some mysterious execrable juice obtained from some equally malign source. Those who frequented the Centro Basco restaurant in Chino in those days will recall with some gustatory pain the house wine named “Cherpin,” which hailed from the slag heaps of Fontana and tasted like it. In any case, that was the wine scene locally in the 1950s: some achievement, some disaster and some hope. One very much needs to read Pinney’s History for the splendid and nuanced details and color of this confused period.
Further, the author notes that, while Prohibition itself may have vanished, “prohibitionism” had not. That is to say, the forces that engendered Prohibition in the first place were still very much alive, and both state and national lawmakers, moved to placate the surviving prohibitionist sentiment, but attracted by revenues to be gained by newly devised taxes on wine, dealt with this conundrum by enacting a new and Rube Goldbergish array of laws aimed at controlling wine production and distribution. Though lately under a variety of legal attacks, much of that array is still with us.
By the end of the 1950s there were some, but not many wineries that made good and occasionally better than good table wines, but most such wines were either middling or inconsequential. It was not that the technology to do better was missing. Oenologists at UC Davis knew what had to be done at all levels of wine growing and wine making, but, as Pinney observes, they had to struggle to catch the attention of the state and country’s winemakers. The winemakers, in turn, continued to serve the taste of the general public, which was still largely indifferent to table wines, continuing to prefer, instead, the many American fortified wines of dubious nomenclature and heritage. It really was not until the 1960s that interest in table wines of substance began to rise markedly, and, as Pinney points out, it was not until 1967 that the sales of table wines finally exceeded those of fortified wines. The mid-1960s, in fact, became that point at which the California wine industry genuinely took off. There are those of us ancient wine bibbers who still recall with unstinting admiration and pleasure the Cabernet Sauvignon of Inglenook, the first real demonstration that California was capable of producing table wines, not just of quality, but of genuine elegance. As the author carefully notes, there had been gifted winemakers in California’s past who had been able to approach that level of accomplishment, but they were mostly considered mavericks and affected the overall industry but little. In the 1960s, however, such figures as Joseph Heitz gained fame by producing small amounts of meticulously crafted Chardonnay selling at the singularly astronomic price of $9 a bottle. He was followed by many others of his dedicated ilk, beginning, thus, the long and still unabated run of “boutique” wineries. Among them, the author properly cites, are several Pomona College alumni, who continue to practice their craft nobly to this day, e.g., Patrick Campbell ’70, Don Chappellet ’53, Tony Soter ’74 and Cathy Corison ’75. (See more on alumni vintners at PCM Online.) The scientists at UC Davis, heretofore largely ignored, had at last found a widely attentive audience, and the resultant wines offered increasingly admirable evidence of that attention.
By the late-1960s and early-1970s, there begins what Pinney refers to as the increasing “glamour” of wine: architecturally attractive wineries, wine-tastings and tours, ever more detailed and attractive labels, wine-producing regions developed and decked out to be attractive tourist destinations. The author, while admitting that “no easy explanation” exists for the rapidity of the revolution, offers some interesting and persuasive notions on why at this particular moment in time, and more than three decades after Prohibition’s repeal, such a fervent change in attitude and product should have begun. Among other possibilities, he suggests that the ease of rapid jet travel fueled an interest in countries with long entrenched traditions of table wine as an essential and everyday complement to food. The efforts of Julia Child and her acolytes further encouraged a high level of interest in food and food preparation that virtually demands that complement.
From that point on, Pinney continues his fascinating account of the astonishingly swift growth of table wine production in America. Chapters on the wine industry in other parts of the country than California are worth reading. Every state in the Union now produces wine of some type, though they do not all necessarily grow the wine fruit itself. Even so, the wine produced outside of the West Coast, still constitutes but a very small proportion of America’s whole, and this is true not only of quantity but also of quality. Though the red wines of Long Island, for example, may show some surprising promise, they remain, at best, either curiosities or moderately pleasant quaffs, and continue to be very hard commercial sells, even in their home state.
Last year the United States saw the addition of more than 450 new wineries, and the total in California alone is swiftly approaching 2,000. Still, Pinney’s final remarks on wine in America are surprisingly dour, openly doubting that wine will ever be, for most Americans, anything of importance. Much of this indifference he attributes to the growing tendency in this country to make of wine what he terms an elitist enterprise, where the wealthy collect bottles by price and name, not to drink, but as both a commercial and social investment. This, he concludes, will effectively prevent wine from becoming what it ought to be: a popular, sound and affordable accompaniment to everyday dining. One might gently respond that it is those “elitist” ranks that keep winemakers ever anxious to produce wines of a quality sufficient to merit the often admittedly lavish prices they command. However, for those vintners—there are a great many of them—with aspirations to serve a less well-heeled and less investment-minded customer base, there is, no pun intended, a clear technological trickle-down effect, so that any wine buyer today is confronted with sound American table wines in such quantities as to befuddle one’s ability to choose; call it the “two-buck chuck” phenomenon, which may have appeared too late for the author to take it into account.
This reviewer, then, is more optimistic about the future of wine in America, but, as Pinney carefully notes, the last word has hardly been written on this score, and his own history of wine in America is necessarily a project firmly lodged in medias res. While Pinney’s meticulously researched and presented History may not be the last word, it’s certainly the last word thus far, and anyone seeking to continue the story will find the attempt to emulate this book a genuinely hardy undertaking.
Stephen Glass ’57, the McCarthy Professor of Classics and Classical Archaeology at Pitzer College, has been a judge in California wine competitions and has taught classes in wine for more than 40 years. |
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