Wine Wanderer 8

The Adige: Wine-Based Prohibition-Era Cocktail

Veins and Vines: A Historical Perspective of Winemaking in the Sierra Foothills


Part 3: Plagues! Phylloxera and the Prohibition

Though the Civil War had been something of a boon to wine consumers of the dusty, rusty Sierra Foothills of the mid 19th-century, the late 19th century and early 20th century would bring two disasters-one small and one irrefutably enormous. One plague was real: the phylloxera louse which, though it did far more damage to vineyards outside of the Foothills, still took its toll on wine growers. The second event, the passing of the dreaded Volstead act, laid waste to the Sierra Foothills as a wine growing region. The Foothills would not recover until the late 1960s.

Fate dealt a crippling blow to winegrowers worldwide in the mid 19th Century. A plague was to be loosed upon the vines of Victorian England, France, Italy, and the western United States that would lead to devastation. A pair of botanists returned to their native England after a short furlong on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, carrying with them a number of grapevines. A small root louse known as phylloxera (a pale, almost microscopic sap-sucking insect native to North America that feeds on the roots and leaves of almost all grapevines) was transported with those vines, and made short work of the few vineyards that Victorian England had by the mid 1860s. By 1863, vines in the southern Rhone region of France began to deteriorate rapidly. Soon, most of France succumbed, including the Loire Valley, Champagne and Bordeaux. By the end of the 1870s and into the 1880s, the pest had consumed thousands of acres in Germany, Italy and Spain. By 1875 wine production had plummeted to a quarter of the previous decade’s output. By 1889, the whole of the French wine industry had collapsed, and some estimate that some nine-tenths of the world’s vineyards were destroyed. And the lousy pest was about to ravage the California wine market as well.

The North Eastern phylloxera louse, ineffable, inexhaustible and seemingly inextinguishable, either was transported west from eastern wine merchants, or ironically, arrived in a full-circle fashion. Italian and French wine producers traveled westward, bringing good vines but with the bad vibes of pestilence in the form of the phylloxera louse. In 1873, the root louse was found carousing in the vineyards of Sonoma, and by 1880, it had laid waste to much of Napa, Sonoma, and the Livermore Valley. By 1893, 244 of Napa’s 577 vineyards were destroyed by the phylloxera louse

By the mid 1880s, it had even encroached on the vineyards of the Sierra Foothills. George Blanchard, the State Viticultural Commissioner of the Sierra Foothills, stratospherically (and enigmatically) announced that the phylloxera blight was due to the large amount of magnetism which had been thrown out by the sun through the solar system for the two years past.” Though the little creature did not nearly affect the wine commodities and grape growing market as it did in Europe and in Napa, several acres of Zinfandel and Mission were affected. It aggravated the stress upon an already foundering wine market (especially in Amador County). The phylloxera was a key player in creating a kind of wine depression that occurred in the late 1890s If it weren’t for a new technique in grafting rootstock of which was immune to the phylloxera, the Sierra Foothills would have been ravaged as well. Luckily, much of Amador’s old vines survived. And the influx of Italian winegrowers into Amador and the foothills created a minor renaissance, and by 1915 the area’s wineries began to flourish again. But another more devious kind of creature would prematurely cut its growth: the Volstead Act.

Just after the end of the Great War, when doughboys were marching home from a European theater of war, the Eighteenth Amendment passed through Congress and through Woodrow Wilson’s futile attempts at a veto. On January 16th, 1919, the entire nation would dry up, almost completely decimating the wine industry in California, and all but wiping out commercial production in the Sierra Foothills. An editorial appeared in a 1919 edition of the Amador Dispatch, furiously promising that Prohibition enforcers attempting to carry out the law in Amador would be “shipped home in a box. For there are plenty of old country foreigners who stand ready to resent official interference with knife or bullet. To make this class of people drink water – well just try it!” For obvious reasons, Prohibition in Amador and the Foothills was enormously unpopular. But by 1922, it was evident that the Foothills wine industry, experiencing a fledgling resurgence in business, was crushed like a grape as the 18th Amendment passed. By 1922 only 500 acres of vineyards remained intact, and by 1930, three years before Prohibition was repealed, a scant 200 acres remained.

The price of grapes skyrocketed. Almost all of it was shipped to the East Coast. Home winemaking, however, was allowed, albeit at limited quantities. Only 200 gallons of wine was allowed, per year, and was not to be sold for profit (and much of it was to be used strictly for sacred or religious purposes). By 1933 when Prohibition was repealed by the passing of the 21st Amendment, only one winery, formerly owned by Adam Uhlinger, remained in operation. The Uhlinger winery was purchased by Enrico D’Agostini, an Italian who supported himself and his winery by growing and selling grapes. The D’Agostini winery (now Sobon Estate) operated as one of the only vineyards in Amador County, as Prohibition had wreaked havoc upon commercial winemaking in the Shenandoah Valley.

Before 1920, there were more than 2500 wineries in California. Less than 100 survived the onslaught of prohibition. Three long decades would pass until California and the Sierra Foothills would emerge from something of a prolonged wine drought. The 1970s, 1980s would see a resurgence in local commercial winemaking, and Amador county would be once again emerge as an important AVA.

The Adige

Ingredients
Ice
Dash of Angostura bitters
1/2 ounce Amaro Nonino
2 ounces Sauvignon Blanc
Club soda
1 orange wheel

Fill one-third of a large wineglass with ice. Add the bitters, amaro and wine and top with a splash of club soda. Float the orange wheel on top.