Book Excerpt: A Brief History of Napa Valley, Part II

SURVIVING PROHIBITION & THE RECOVERY YEARS, 1920–1959

In the American imagination, the 1920s were a boozy, riotous era when flapper girls and gangsters commingled in underground speakeasies. While the extent of this licentiousness is likely exaggerated, one thing is certain: all that wickedness was born of Prohibition, a legislative attempt to promote sobriety and lawfulness. Ironically, liquor consumption actually increased during the “dry years,” and many illicit fortunes were made in its trade. The same cannot be said for the wine industry, however: Prohibition was a nearly fatal blow. Those few wineries that survived, like Beaulieu Vineyards and Beringer, did so mainly through religious or medicinal contracts, the only legal channels for wine production at the time.

Grape growers fared slightly better than winemakers. A provision in the Amendment allowed every household to produce 200 gallons of fruit juice a year; while the wording was clear that the juice must be “non-intoxicating,” this small allowance effectively served as a license for home winemaking. Growers were able to save their vineyards by selling fresh grapes, or grape concentrate, to home winemakers all over the country. However, the often arduous journey via railcar proved problematic for most grape types, and vineyard compositions shifted to favor heartier, thicker-skinned varieties that could better survive such a trip. These “shipper varieties” were almost always red, though Muscat of Alexandria was a popular white. Growers hastily grafted over or replanted to these varieties, often interplanting the different grapes within the same plots. These jumbled plantings became known as “mixed blacks,” and the scattered sites that remain today are among the oldest producing vineyards in California. By 1926, the vineyard breakdown for Napa Valley was 40 percent Alicante Bouschet, 30 percent Petite Sirah, 16 percent Zinfandel, 13 percent  Carignane, and 1 percent  everything else. Almost all of the premium varieties favored in the 1890s had disappeared.

When Prohibition was repealed in December 1933, the wineries of Napa Valley were in serious disrepair, the vineyards were planted to pedestrian varieties, and America was in the throes of the Great Depression. Nonetheless, many moved to capitalize on the newly liberated market for wine—old wineries coughed back to life, releasing what little inventory they had managed to retain, and newcomers scrambled, fast-forwarding through many of the steps necessary for the creation of fine wine. The result was a disaster. Much of the wine that hit the market following Repeal was made of inferior grape types and crafted with antiquated, faulty equipment. The best was merely poor in quality, the worst completely biologically unstable; all of it did little to endear a thirsty country to its national product.

Quality advocacy became the buzzwords of the day. Esteemed wine critic Frank Schoonmaker began campaigning for regional and varietal information to be advertised on labels. UC Davis started taking on a more proactive, advisory role within the winemaking community, largely through the work of professors A. J. Winkler and Maynard Amerine. Even the government stepped in, establishing some basic standards for table wine production, such as the restriction of chaptalization, and the setting of upper limits on volatile acidity and lower limits on total acidity. Equally important were the efforts of a frustrated Georges de Latour, owner of Beaulieu Vineyards, who through his connections to the clergy was uniquely poised to profit after Repeal, only to see all his wine rejected as unsuitable. De Latour knew he needed a proper winemaker, preferably with a background in chemistry, and set off to France to find one. He returned in 1938 with the Russian Andre Tchelistcheff, a man who would prove crucial to the future of American wine.

But beyond the immediate quality concerns lurked another, perhaps greater stumbling block to Napa’s return to glory. It can be argued that the biggest victim of Prohibition was the American palate. In the 1920s, American cooking underwent a serious transformation: kitchens shrank, canned food was the latest craze, and the rise of soda pop after World War I had given America a sweet tooth. By the time of Repeal, wine had long been eradicated from the dining table, and those that had continued to drink it during the dry years were now accustomed to the crude, homemade brew of their neighbors. Fortified and sweet wines were the new preferred styles, often sold under purloined European monikers. The wineries of California released a slew of sherries, ports and other “stickies”; more than one winery even offered a “Château d’Yquem.”

The restoration of Napa Valley to a center of quality table wine production was a long, slow process, tackled by a stalwart few. The majority of activity in the 1930s surrounded the reopening of closed wineries, such as Inglenook, Beringer, and Larkmead, along with the arrival of some very important newcomers. Louis M. Martini moved his winemaking operations to St. Helena in 1932 (just prior to Repeal), and the Mondavi family purchased the Sunny St. Helena winery in 1937. The 1940s also saw a handful of key players enter the arena. Freemark Abbey, Lee Stewart’s Souverain, Stony Hill, and Mayacamas were all freshly founded this decade, and old edifices breathed new life with the Mondavi family’s 1943 purchase of Charles Krug and the Trinchero family’s 1946 purchase of the old Sutter Home estate.