A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present

4. Making and Selling Wine in the ’30s

4 MAKING AND SELLING WINE IN THE ’30S HOW WINE WAS MADE In 1933, before Repeal had come to pass but when its coming was already certain, Lou Stralla, having heard that the wine business might be a good thing, decided that he would give it a try, even though he knew nothing about wine or winemaking.1 Stralla took a simple and direct path: he approached the wealthy J.K. Mo‹tt, who owned the historic Charles Krug winery, then lying idle outside St. Helena in the Napa Valley, and asked Mo‹tt to lease it to him. To Stralla’s surprise, Mo‹tt agreed to do so. Stralla now found himself, as the result of his audacity, with a winery but without any idea of what to do with it; he had to find help, for he was in a position rather like that of the girl in the fairy tale who must somehow learn to spin gold out of straw, and learn quickly. As in the fairy tale, help was forthcoming: first, the winemaker at Beaulieu Vineyards, on the other side of St. Helena, told Stralla that one Rufus J. Buttimer, who had been the winemaker at the Ewer and Atkinson Winery in Rutherford before Prohibition, might be coaxed out of retirement. Buttimer agreed to do what he could, and he, in turn, recruited Jack Heitz, whose family used to be in the wine business. Then old Joe Cheli, who used to work at Krug and still lived across the road, got interested in what was going on at the old place and gave them a hand. And so it went. Together they cleaned things up, and after the grapes had come in they found that they had made 400,000 gallons of red and white table wine, Cheli making the white and Buttimer the red. “I’ll tell you,” Stralla said to an interviewer years afterward, “it was an amazing thing to me. . . . I knew nothing 77 about wine at all, and here we had 400,000 gallons of good wine. I couldn’t quite understand what happened.”2 Such improvisations, mixing the ignorance of complete newcomers with the remembered experience of the old-timers, must have been common enough in the revived scene of winemaking in America. Stralla had the advantage of setting up in a region where the memory of winemaking was still strong. Others would not have had the same luck. So how, we may ask, was wine made in and around 1934? And how and in what forms did it reach its market? The answers to these questions will obviously vary according to the winemaker and all the details of his situation, but some reliable general answers can be given. In view of the methods and materials generally in use, California wine just after Repeal and for perhaps too many years afterward was typically either peasant wine, made in a rough-and-ready way by a small proprietor, or industrial wine, made without any concern beyond cheapness and volume. There were exceptions to these rules, but they were very exceptional. As W.V. Cruess put it in 1934, the most common method of winemaking in California then was the “‘let alone method’” in which “nature takes its course, often with disastrous results to the quality of the wine.”3 As the figures for the annual crush show, wine might be made of any sort of grape— table grape, raisin grape, or wine grape—and was not likely to originate in any very distinguished variety, there being hardly any distinguished varieties available. The tendency was to go for high sugars, so that the grapes were picked when they were very ripe. The wines were, as a result, often deficient in acid and high in pH and therefore “flat.” One of the first objects of the people at the University of California, Davis, was to persuade California winegrowers to pick at an earlier stage of ripeness, and to help in this aim they managed to secure a slight increase in the minimum total acid allowed by California wine standards. The matter of picking at a proper stage of ripeness, which seems in retrospect so simple a question, was in fact one of the main points of contention in post-Repeal California . In a letter written in 1940, Maynard Amerine indulged an eloquence on the subject that he could not allow himself in his o‹cial publications. He wrote, There is an appalling lack...