From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America

4 Transforming Wine in American Culture

Wine [is]the most praised, most admired, most civilized of all beverages, the favorite accompaniment of fine food in the most respected sectors of our society. And American wines have become the finest in the world and are becoming even finer with each passing year. . . . The wine revolution hasn't ended, as some people would have you think. It has only begun. LEON D. ADAMS, "What's Going on Here Anyhow?" Wine consumption increased each year after Repeal, although not dramatically . Forty-two percent of Americans told pollsters in 1939 that they abstained from alcoholic beverages altogether.1 Among wine drinkers, dessert wines (fortified and sweet), also known as "proof per penny wines," outsold table wines approximately three to one.2 The wine importer and connoisseur Frank Schoonmaker regarded this consumption ratio as "abnormal and unhealthy and . . . temporary. At all events, it is a proportion which exists nowhere else in the wine-growing world."3 As Schoonmaker predicted, all that changed over the next twenty years as an authentic wine culture emerged and expanded in America. New wine drinkers, many of them college-educated, middle- to upper-middle-class Americans, tried new products, includingflavoredwines, roses, generic jug wines, and varietal wines, which were sold in supermarkets, specialty wine shops, and traditional liquor stores.4 Ernest and Julio Gallo led the way, helping to create a wine market and a wine industry virtually from scratch. Drinking wine gradually became socially acceptable and, as states and loFOUR Transforming Wine in American Culture 1 3 7 calities voted increasingly wet, legally acceptable as well. No longer was alcoholism viewed asa sin, but asa disease that does not afflict casual drinkers. As the American palate and American tastes evolved, table wines grew in popularity. By 1968, the consumption of table wines overtook that of dessert wines. From the founding of Robert Mondavi Winery in 1966 to the famous Paris tasting a decade later, the sales of domestic table wines advanced at a double-digit rate. American wines gained an international reputation for quality, and American taste for wine became more sophisticated. This wine revolution, as Leon Adams called it, did not drive the drys away, but it greatly diminished their clout. The wine industry for the first time mounted an organized effort, led by the Wine Institute, to expand wine sales, decrease taxes, and oppose trade barriers.5 This concerted campaign at state and federal levels helped to defeat the proposed legislative ban on the advertising of alcoholic beverages during the 19405 and 1950s.6 The drys also sought, unsuccessfully, to prohibit alcoholic beverage sales at military bases during World War II.7 They made no headway, even after it was reported that Japanese saloonkeepers in Hawaii had plied U.S. troops with liquor the night before the Pearl Harbor invasion.8 Despite the waning influence of old-style prohibitionists, the domestic wine industry faced new challenges. Legislators and regulators, who had been preoccupied after Repeal with avoiding the evils and excesses of Prohibition , had to address new issues that would be critical to the success of American wines. As tablewines became more popular and increasinglywere sold on the basis of their grape varieties (varietalwines) and appellation of origin (indicating where the grapes are grown), wine labeling laws had to be modernized to accurately reflect the authenticity of these new American wines. In designing an American appellation system, the government was loath to adopt the Old World systems, which involved extensive controls over all facets of grape growing and winemaking; and vintners and growers disliked those foreign models because they felt they would hamper their spirit of innovation. America needed its own appellation system and its own wine lexicon. Aswine consumption expanded, so did concerns about health effects and how best to advise consumers about the benefits and risks of wine drinking . Over the years, a variety of groups attacked wine as a public health hazard and sought ways to depress alcohol consumption. The decade of the 19805 witnessed Nancy Reagan's "Just SayNo" campaign, Strom Thurmond 's incessant pleas for a government warning on all alcoholic beverages , and a concerted movement to increase the minimum drinking age. 138 T R A N S F O R M I N G W I N E Members of the wine industry no longer could afford to take a back seat to distillers and brewers and would have to join the health debate directly...