In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Progressives had tried to bring professionalism and expertise to bureaucracy with partnerships between government and businesses such as the BSVC. Other reformers pursued policies designed to mend society’s ills, and frequently blamed individual alcohol abuse rather than the social constructions of industrial capitalism for those ills. Temperance gained support as alcohol use increased. Americans drank more beer and distilled spirits, but high-alcohol dessert wines were perceived as part of the problem with alcohol abuse.
Prohibitionists rejected the idea of wine as part of a civilized cuisine.
The United States’ entry into World War I had allowed them to link abstinence and patriotism. Wine and beer received a two-year exemption to a wartime prohibition on using foodstuffs in alcohol production, but the future looked dim for Napa Valley’s wine indus-try. In addition, in a xenophobic era, its large immigrant population, drawn heavily from Germany and Italy, did not enhance its image when vintners fought temperance.24
When the necessary number of states had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1919, beer and wine were among the banned items. Prohibition represented a
“desire to restore an (imagined) American past,”25uncorrupted by industrialization, urbanization, and the ethnic immigration they seemingly spawned. A modern state acts autonomously, but is influ-enced by civil society. Here, state action reflected a minority reli-gious view that took hold because U.S. state structures have been embedded in a constitutional system. The nation did not inherit a centralized preindustrial bureaucracy; Americans traditionally gave greater legitimacy to law and the Constitution.26As the state exer-cised more power, its actions invariably reordered relations between public authority and civil society, and between this society and its
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physical world. Prohibition had unintended consequences for soci-ety’s consumption of alcohol and for the use of Napa’s resources.
Under the Volstead Act that provided the terms for Prohibition’s enforcement, most Napa wineries closed their doors.27 Growers, however, discovered a twist. Shipping representatives from Chicago, New York, and other cities with large ethnic populations flooded the valley, demanding future shipments. A loophole in the law allowed families to make two hundred gallons of wine a year. Local growers could ship grapes for large profits in this home production market.
The law also permitted wineries making sacramental wine and
“medicinal” tonics to remain open. In the Napa Valley, for example, de Latour maintained Beaulieu’s ties with the Catholic Church.
High production figures at these wineries suggested widespread reli-gious conversions, new health crises, or a more likely legal sidestep-ping with little fear of retribution. A local winery worker noted,
“The churches don’t use too much of that wine. Seventy-five tons could furnish all the churches in the United States. They found it leaked out somewhere. I don’t know of any of the [open] wineries that didn’t bootleg.”28Diversified agriculture persisted, but many Napa Valley farmers responded to the new demand for grapes.
Vineyard acreage increased more than 30 percent during the first five years of Prohibition. With the permission of revenue agents, de Latour planted new varietals every year. Beringers maintained its better vines by producing wine under bond to Beaulieu.29 Most growers, however, turned vineyards over to thick-skinned varieties, such as the Alicante Bouschet or Green Hungarian, which traveled well, but were poorly suited to quality products. With the exception of Beaulieu, white wine grapes almost disappeared from the valley.
Consumers preferred grapes with a heavy color and farmers chose those with high yields. At the time white grapes sold for about $10 a ton, and red grapes, especially Alicante, sold for $130, $140, or
$150 a ton. Grape prices remained high for five years, and by then, more than 40 percent of the Napa Valley vineyards held Alicante, although some Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, and Carignane remained.30 The bottom fell out again when supply outstripped demand. Some growers had anticipated these trends and returned to a more reliable crop—prunes.31
In the end, banning alcohol only whetted American appetites for it. Franklin Roosevelt made the Repeal of Prohibition central to his 1932 election, and a little more than a year later, it ended. Repeal
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revealed the full damage of the state’s intervention. The Volstead Act lasted thirteen years; its effects were felt for decades. Napans reopened wineries in the waning months of 1933, but, with few exceptions, facilities had been stripped of most equipment. What remained was rusty, warped, or broken. Lacking experience, new industry entrants made wine under unsanitary conditions and stored it in infected cooperage. Most Napa Valley vineyards produced low-quality grapes that now contributed to California’s surplus of young, poorly structured sweet wines. Given the excessive and substandard production, many new wineries closed by 1938. Leading local vint-ners released well-aged Cabernets, but these limited vintages suf-fered by association with the poorer products.32Prohibition also had affected consumer tastes. With Repeal, oenophiles who preferred fine dry wines again turned to Europe, while other Americans had learned to enjoy homemade wines with weak vinosity and coarse sweetness. As a San Francisco wine purveyor observed, “The people of America must be re-educated to an appreciation of fine wines.”33 Some Napans prepared to improve local wine, spread the valley’s reputation, and change consumer habits. In 1943, seven wineries—
still privately owned and primarily family ventures—formed the Napa Valley Vintners Association (NVVA). They returned to the idea that quality must define their market niche, although bulk pro-duction was still essential to their financial survival. Linking symbol-ism and materiality, the NVVA erected signs promoting “bottled poetry,” a description coined by Robert Louis Stevenson during a nineteenth-century visit. NVVA hoped to educate sophisticated cus-tomers in the finer aspects of wine, and in the 1950s hosted San Francisco conventioneers, such as the American Medical Association and the Western Conference of Bankers, who could regularly afford wine. Wineries wooed travel writers, created newsletters, and sent agents across the country offering blind tastings with comparable European products.34
In another partnership between the state and industry, Napa winemakers adopted ideas from viticulturists and enologists at the University of California–Davis regarding microclimates, grape vari-eties, cold fermentation, and stainless steel equipment.35 With Repeal, the university eagerly returned to research on wine in support of the industry. A land-grant institution created under the provisions of the federal Morrill Act of 1862, the university proved one of the most significant agents of the state’s intervention in agriculture.
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Under the Morrill Act, the federal government granted the individ-ual states large tracts of land to be sold for the support of institutions teaching mechanical and agricultural arts. The government hoped to nurture scientifically trained graduates who would productively har-ness the nation’s natural resources. These agricultural modernists at the university worked within an associational state, based on cooper-ative planning between public actors and private economic groups rather than a rigid top-down state structure.36
The university’s influence grew as Americans entered an unprece-dented era of affluence. A rising demand for table wines in the 1950s and 1960s matched the expansion and greater wealth of the middle class. Traveling abroad, Americans discovered wine as a courtly aspect of daily life. The technical improvements and microclimatic cultivation that the university and industry jointly promoted had insured that tasty, stable wines were regularly available. In 1967, U.S. table wine sales exceeded dessert wine sales for the first time.37 Nine years later, to observers’ surprise, judges selected two Napa Valley vintages over French wines at a blind competition in Paris.
Napa Valley did not replace France atop the global hierarchy, but the results suggested Napa’s best products merited inclusion with the world’s finest and solidified the valley’s domestic leadership. A county supervisor noted, “We represent the only county in the United States which has within its boundaries an internationally rec-ognized wine industry.”38