Notes
CALIFORNIA: GROWING PAINS AND GROWING UP I 369 when the shadow of Prohibition was already moving rapidly over the country, California seized on the opportunity provided by the newly opened Panama Canal to promote its climate, its industries, and its future through the great PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco; it was also a dramatic way for San Francisco to show the world how it had risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of 1906. California's wine men, now pretty well seasoned in the business of international exhibitions, were ready to make the most of their chance to show their best on their own ground. This sort of thing, though impressive, was not new. What was uniquely outstanding was the gathering of the International Congress of Viticulture at the Panama-PacificExposition, a gesture of recognition and honor to the California wine industry. The congress had been authorized two years earlier by the Permanent International ViticulturalCommission in the last days of uneasy European peace. When the time came, of course, Europe had been almost a whole year at war, a war of a destructiveness never imagined before. The consequence was that the Californians , once again, saw their hopes for effective international publicity disappear: Europeans had other things to occupy themselves with in July 1915. As the afflictedProsper Gervais, secretary of the Permanent ViticulturalCommission, wrote to the Americans, "My son, my only son, is dead on the plains of Flanders. I cannot come."88 The dark note of war and death that such poignant excuses created was intensified by the less brutal, but still oppressive, influence of the prohibition movement , an obsessive topic throughout the congress. And, adding to the other causes that damped the enthusiasm and spirit of the occasion, the federal government had just laid a new tax on brandy, jumpingthe rate from 3 cents a gallon to 55 cents: the producers of fortified wines in California loudly proclaimed their imminent ruin, and so added another shade of gloom to an atmosphere already dark enough. Still, the affair was notable for its scope and for the evidence it gave of the achievements made not just by the California winegrowers but by those of the country generally. If the European representatives, who were the most active members of the Permanent ViticulturalCommission, could not come, at least the rest of the United States could. The presiding officer was from Virginia; delegates came from thirteen states, and officials from experiment stations in a half dozen states as well as from the U.S. Department of Agriculture read papers to the congress . They showed quite impressively the state of knowledge to which the subjects of viticulture and enology had been carried in this country: there were papers on the technical topics of pruning, breeding, fertilizing, and other matters, as well as reports on grape diseases and grape pests, on the contributions of engineering to winemaking, and on advances in fermentation science. To all this were added a series of reports on the history and status of grape growing in the East, in California , and in developing regions such as Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Utah. The programs were in the charge of the distinguished viticulturist and administrator U. P. Hedrick of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station and clearly reflected his interest in the subject of winegrowing throughout the country. His own 37°THEDEVELOPMENTOFCALIFORNIA contribution to the congress described the work of the New York station in growing vinifera varieties in the East, two generations before the possibility of doing so again became a topic of current interest. Though the delegates were sadly restricted in their numbers and in the variety of countries they represented, they were given the full honors of the state's hospitality . After they were shown the rival attraction of the San Diego Exposition, they were banqueted in Los Angeles, and then transported to the Stern Winery in Riverside and the Italian Vineyard Company's establishment at Guasti—there, in the company's "immense plant," they were given lunch in "the huge storage cellars." En route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, they stopped in Fresno, "where they were shown not only the important sweet wine plants, but also the raisin grape vineyards and the big packing houses": there would have been nothing like these things where they came from. Following the sessions of the congress proper, the delegates were taken on a further excursion to the great plant of the CWA at Winehaven , on San Francisco Bay, and then had...
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