PROHIBITION: Old Vine-Glo in New Bottles

Old Vine-Glo in New Bottles

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How can a prosecutor prove intent to violate the Prohibition Amendment? Dancing on a legal pinhead for the past four years have been the manufacturers of fermentable grape concentrates. Federal agents have been able to count them, but not until last month were they able to threaten them.

Wearied of ambiguities. Federal Judge Merrill E. Otis ruled in his Kansas City, Mo. court that Ukiah Grape Products Co.. although its juices were unfermented when sold to a customer, incriminated itself in fact because its agents not only assured purchasers that “the product would come up to the standard of any pre-War wine.” but went around to the customer’s house to “service” or bottle the inevitably intoxicating after-product. Judge Otis went backward from result to cause to prove intent.

In its sumptuous Washington offices. Fruit Industries, Ltd., potent California grape-growers cooperative which has borrowed more than $2,500,000 from the Federal Farm Board, pondered the Ukiah decision last week and took warning. Fruit Industries, said Managing Director Donald D. Conn, will no longer sell or “service” Vine-Glo grape concentrate. Instead the company’s other concentrates—Virginia Dare, Wine-Haven, Guasti—will be sold unserviced “for soft drinks as usual. “If anyone still wants to let Virginia Dare, Wine-Haven or Guasti sit 60 days and ferment like Vine-Glo into wine, Fruit Industries will not and does not want to know anything about it.