No winemaker speaks of Prohibition without turning as purple as one of his own grapes. Before Jan. 1, 1920, California was making 40,000,000 gallons of wine a year and California wines were being drunk in London. Wine had been made in California missions since 1769 but it began to be taken seriously only when Hungarian Count Agostin Haraszthy imported cuttings of about 500 kinds of European grapes in the 1860s.
In the 1920s grape-growers ripped out the first-class European vines—the Pinot and Senillon and Riesling, which bore less than two tons of grapes to an acre—and replaced them with indifferent vines which bore up to ten. Reason: Prohibition’s amateur vintners bought grapes by quantity, not quality. The wine business continued turning out just about enough wine for the ecclesiastical trade, but the grape business prospered. California shipped about 16,000 carloads of grapes in 1918; by 1927 it shipped 73,000 carloads.
In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt began promising the country light wines & beer, California wine-men formed a Grape-Growers League (now the Wine Institute) and hired a tiny, hard-working Scotsman, Harry Arthur Caddow, as secretary-manager to help repair the damage of the Prohibition years. Today California makes 97% of U. S. wine and the Wine Institute represents the producers of 75% of California’s wine. Little Harry Caddow, still the Wine Institute’s secretary-manager, has a hard job getting his temperamental French, Italian, German, Swiss, Hungarian, Armenian and Scottish members to hang together. Biggest Institute wineries are Italian Swiss Colony with a storage capacity of about 13,000,000 gallons, Fruit Industries Ltd., a growers’ co-operative with a storage capacity of 19,500,000 gallons, and Roma Wine Co., Inc. which is now expanding to 20,000,000 gallons. Last week his polyglot members had something to rejoice in together. They had just completed this year’s crushing of grapes, 700,000 tons of them—out of the greatest grape crop in California’s history, 2,409,000 tons, including raisin and table grapes—and the Wine Institute had just reported to its members that the U. S. will this year drink 63,000,000 gallons of California wine—two quarts for every man, woman, gaffer & gammon in the country.
This vast gallonage obviously cannot be consumed by any small group of connoisseurs. It must have a mass market. This fact does not lessen pungent little Harry Caddow’s contempt for those who still disdain California for French wine. He does not like to think about cosmopolites who know the best French vintage years and can afford to buy chateau-bottled wines. Recently he exclaimed: “It makes the skin roll up your back like a window shade.”
In California, he says, the weather is always equally good so the vintage years are always the same. When he is accused of plagiarizing French wine names he claims indignantly that Burgundy is as much a descriptive word as whiskey. He also enjoys pointing out that when the disease Phylloxera virtually wiped out European vineyards between 1870 and 1880, the only thing that saved them was grafting European grape vines on the root stock of the wild vine of California.
Not even Mr. Caddow, however, would maintain that a cheap young run-of-the-wine-press California claret is the equal of Château Mouton Rothschild 1929. What he does think and many sound wine critics concede is that in its class California wine does not have to bow to the snobbish claims of foreign wine. And even connoisseurs are no longer so outraged as they were once when they heard cheap foreign wines selling at $1 or so a bottle compared with California wine selling for $1 or so a gallon. In short much of the vin ordinaire of California is fully as good as the vin ordinaire of France. And nine-tenths of the wine drunk in any country is vin ordinaire.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
- Meet the 2025 Women of the Year
- Why Do More Young Adults Have Cancer?
- Colman Domingo Leads With Radical Love
- 11 New Books to Read in Februar
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- Cecily Strong on Goober the Clown
- Column: The Rise of America’s Broligarchy
Contact us at letters@time.com