The interior of a crowded New York City bar moments before midnight on 30 June 1919, when Prohibition came into effect.
What we have in mind when we talk about ‘fine wine’ is European – bottles of French, maybe Italian, maybe Spanish origin. Even in the US, a country not lacking in ego, European wines have long been hailed as the hallmark of quality.
‘Wine has never been embedded in the American lifestyle the way it is for so many Europeans. It’s a luxury product, not an art form tethered to day-to-day life,’ says Axel Borg, the distinguished librarian emeritus for food and wine at the UC Davis Library (a title just as hard-won and venerable as it sounds).
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It goes without saying, however, that American wine arrived on the scene at a bit of a temporal disadvantage. European winemakers began to cultivate vines and generational traditions long before we’d even entered the arena, but in addition to the timing deficit we also have Prohibition to blame – essentially an involuntary reset button for much of the US wine industry.
‘Wine has always had cultural cachet, cultural value, cultural capital,’ says Borg. ‘And after Prohibition, the state of domestic wine was so abysmal that it had the opposite effect.’
A fleet of trucks outside the California Wine Tonic Co premises in Los Angeles, 1931. Credit: Dick Whittington Studio / USC Libraries / Corbis via Getty Images
Lasting damage
Say what you will about Prohibition – call it destructive, misguided, generally disastrous – its impact on the American wine industry was catastrophic. And, with regard to the reputation of domestic wine in particular, it’s entirely possible that we’ve yet to undo that damage.
‘By the 1880s, it was no longer disputed that California had the potential to produce great wine. And by the start of Prohibition in 1920, there were hundreds of wineries – 719, to be specific – in operation,’ says Vanessa Conlin MW, global head of wine at Sotheby’s.
‘Then, with the start of the Volstead Act, aka Prohibition, quantity became more important than quality to grape buyers. Prohibition all but killed the wine industry in a number of major production states.’
When the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1919, prohibiting the sale of ‘intoxicating liquors’, Californian wine had been on a rather shiny trajectory. By the time the Volstead Act (formally the National Prohibition Act), which executed the amendment, came into effect the following year, local winemakers had well over 600,000hl of wine ready to go (1919 had, ironically, yielded quite an impressive harvest). Tragically, however, they had no way to sell it… not legally, anyway.
A group of men dump wine from barrels into a drain in Chicago in 1921 during Prohibition. Credit: Chicago Sun Times / Chicago Daily News Collection / Chicago History Museum / Getty Images
‘My great grandfather came over here in the 1870s, and he was a true pioneer in terms of growing grapes,’ says Darek Trowbridge, owner and head winemaker at Old World Winery, a low-intervention wine producer based in Sonoma County. ‘And when Prohibition came about, he came home one day to find that government officials had padlocked his barn shut. It seemed like he’d simply lost access to his property and his equipment – his livelihood.’
Fortunately, there were loopholes available to those crafty enough to risk dispensing their goods illegally (wine dealing, if you will). ‘The Volstead Act prohibited the sale of alcohol, but not its consumption – which left room for “home winemaking”, as well as wine that could be made and sold for sacramental purposes, or prescribed by medical professionals,’ says Borg. And as he explains it, plenty of archival data regarding wine prescriptions lives on (Paul Masson Mountain Winery in Saratoga, near San Francisco, for example, was specifically…
Source : https://www.decanter.com/wine/wine-in-the-us-a-fraught-evolution-527394/
