Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California by Simone Cinotto (review)

Soft Soil, Black Grapes traces the history of three of California’s Italian-American wine firms—the Italian-Swiss Colony, the Italian Vineyard Company, and the E. & J. Gallo Winery—which, according to Simone Cinotto, transformed the U.S. wine industry into a modern mass-market business.

The book can be divided into destruens (Chapters 1–4) and construens (Chapters 5–10) parts. In the former, the author criticizes previous explanations for the Italian immigrants’ success in the wine trade, such as the thesis of the “transplantation” of the Old World winemaking knowhow into the “Italy-alike” Californian context. Herein, in Cinotto’s eyes, there are two weaknesses: First, the similarity between the Italian and Pacific environments was less an objective reality than a “cultural construct” deriving from nineteenth-century travel/commercial literature promoting California as the “Italy of America” (Chapter 1); second, Italians entering California’s wine trade did not “export” any modern enological knowledge from their native Italy. Neither the entrepreneurs who started the Italian-Swiss Colony in 1882 nor the founders of the Italian Vineyard Company in 1900 had experience of wine production before emigrating. Similarly lacking in experience were the two brothers who created the Gallo Winery in 1933, their family involvement in the field being almost unintentional (Chapter 2). Through comparing the Italian and the Californian winemaking industries at the turn of the nineteenth century, the author explains how the making of the arid Sonoma, San Bernardino, and Modesto counties suitable for viticulture was underpinned by “trial-and-error expertise,” together with the massive Italian immigrant labor force (Chapter 3).

Cinotto also criticizes the tendency to ascribe the wineries’ success to the founders’ Piedmontese origin, with northern Italians being traditionally better educated and more imbued with a cooperative spirit than their southern co-nationals (Chapter 4). He introduces the book’s construens section by abandoning such northern versus southern stereotypes for the more scientific notions of “social” and “cultural capital” (Chapter 5). Thus, he explains how Piedmontese winemakers used their Old World background based on “family” and “ethnicity” to overcome their position as latecomers in the local wine business. Their “self-segregation” (p. 183) into a network strictly centered around the Piedmontese immigrant community was used to provide capital and a cheap labor force, as well as becoming a marketing tool to boost the three companies’ public image (Chapter 6). Such an isolated way of doing business was balanced, according to Cinotto, by Piedmontese entrepreneurs’ openness to the “dictates” of U.S. capitalism. They embraced the “mass market” ideology, applying methods of industrial production to their own winemaking: technological innovation, advertising, and even political lobbying (Chapter 8).

Soft Soil, Black Grapes’s main thesis, however, is that “race” was the “single most defining factor in the experience of the Italian immigrant entrepreneurs and workers in California winemaking” (p. 2). Following the “whiteness studies”’ approach, the author explains how racial dynamics affected both the Italians’ entrance into and their success in wine business (Chapters 7, 9, 10). On one hand, Italians’ “borderline” racial status pushed them into a field, such as winemaking, which the author defines an “in-between job”—an occupation that the U.S. racialized labor market of the late nineteenth century reserved for southern and eastern European immigrants whose “whiteness” was disputed. Winemaking not only was a low-paid agricultural employment, but it was also a trade condemned by the “temperance movement,” which labeled wine a “foreign” beverage brought into the country by “undesirable” Mediterranean Catholic immigrants. On the other hand, according to Cinotto, such marginalization of Italians proved their fortune. With their industry having been given such a bad reputation, they profited from the lack of competition as former northern European winemakers progressively moved out. During the 1920s’ Prohibition era, Italians strengthened their monopoly: Given their “in-betweenness,” they had no qualms in seizing the opportunities deriving...