Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California

Introduction

 1  Introduction Italians have played a major role in shaping the California wine industry , as is clear by the profusion of vowel-ending names among the state’s wineries. In fact, many of the Italian American wineries that now dot the map of California’s wine regions are third-generation immigrant operations whose heritage goes back to men and women who left Italy for the Golden State at the turn of the twentieth century . Italian grape growers and winemakers have not been alone in making California wine a quintessentially immigrant industry: when they first started arriving in the 1880s, they joined already established German, French, and Scandinavian immigrant winemaking ventures. In the century that spanned from the 1880s to the 1980s, however, Italians almost single-handedly transformed the American wine market from a reserve of immigrant groups and urban Europhile elites into the mass national market it remains today. Soft Soil, Black Grapes explores why, of all the many ethnic and immigrant groups in turn-of-the-twentieth-century California, Italians were the ones who came to dominate one of the state’s most 2  Introduction important agricultural industries; why a small minority of recent immigrants (in 1900, at the peak of immigration, Italians in California numbered 14,495 out of a population of 1,485,053) had the vision and the resources to accomplish such a task. In so doing, it illuminates some of the dynamics that have shaped ethnic entrepreneurship in the United States and the relative success of different immigrant groups at different times in different economic sectors. Soft Soil, Black Grapes argues that the single most defining factor in the experience of Italian immigrant entrepreneurs and workers in California winemaking was race—something scholars on ethnic entrepreneurship have traditionally understood as an invariable attribute that predetermines human relations and the social mobility of ethnic groups. Soft Soil, Black Grapes, on the other hand, takes race as a changing, modular, and heavily contextual process that influences, in different and often unpredictable ways, everything from the social status of ethnic entrepreneurs and workers to power relations within the ethnic group to the reception of the commodities produced by ethnic businesses in the marketplace at large.1 From this perspective, Italians established such a strong presence in the California wine industry because they were able to make sense of the complicated ethnic mosaic in which they were immersed from the time of their arrival in the late nineteenth century . Within California’s articulated ethno-racial structure—which included Asians, Latinos and Latinas, other European immigrants, and whites of Anglo-Saxon heritage—a group of Northern Italians managed to actively transform their middle-ground racial status into a crucial factor for the development of an ethnic niche. From the long-standing image of wine as a foreign beverage; to Anglo winemakers’ discrimination against Italian workers; to the presence of a vast workforce of disenfranchised Asian and Mexican laborers; to Northern Italian immigrants’ own prejudicial attitude Introduction  3 toward immigrants from Southern Italy, race decisively shaped Italian winemaking in California. Even immigrant entrepreneurs’ choice to enter winemaking in the first place depended largely on racial dynamics. With the rise of the temperance movement at the turn of the twentieth century, race combined with morality and business to make wine an especially promising field for Italian immigrants in California. While entrepreneurs from other ethnic backgrounds were deterred by wine’s increasing stigma as a foreign vice in the United States, Italian winemakers, who were latecomers to the trade, turned this ghettoization to their advantage . By the time Prohibition came along, their ethnic specialization was well established and they profited from the loophole allowing for the yearly domestic production of two hundred gallons of wine per household by turning into grape growers and purveyors of a product that often verged on the illegal. Accepting the risks and drawbacks of such an informal market proved rewarding: at the time of the repeal, a few Italian wineries emerged from Prohibition as undisputed market leaders. The social and cultural capital that stemmed from the racial identity of these ethnic entrepreneurs allowed them to attract a nationwide Italian American consumer base and develop their commercial networks. Even more important, it helped them to secure the lowcost labor, expertise, and allegiance of the Italian labor migrants who tended their vineyards, crushed their grapes, and operated their wineries . In Italian wineries, ethnicity often prevailed over class: anti...