The financial stakes are enormous.
California produces a whopping 90 percent of North American
wines. So commercial vineyards across the Golden State now
anxiously await the Supreme Court’s verdict concerning
discriminatory wine-sales laws.
The financial stakes are enormous.
California produces a whopping 90 percent of North American wines. So commercial vineyards across the Golden State now anxiously await the Supreme Court’s verdict concerning discriminatory wine-sales laws.
On Tuesday, justices heard arguments in a trio of cases involving state laws regulating the interstate shipment of wines. The impact of their up-coming ruling will most definitely be felt by our own local vineyard economy. Most winemakers in Santa Clara and San Benito counties are small, family-run businesses. They might see a significant boom in their bottom-line if the Supreme Court strikes down laws in 24 states prohibiting out-of-state shipping of wine directly to the customer.
As we wait for the ruling from the nine judges, let’s sit back, savor a glass of merlot or chardonnay, and chat about wine, its history and the origins of the vineyard industry in California and the South Valley.
In the early days of civilization, wine was one of the first things human beings invented. Imagine a hot, humid afternoon in the flat land along the Tigris River. Two guys notice their pot of grape juice smells a little, er, funny.
“Phew!” one wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Whatcha gonna do with this spoiled stuff?”
“It’s way past its shelf life, huh,” the other guy says. “I’ll just chuck it.”
But guys being guys even back then, the first fellow says: “I dare you to drink it.”
His friend immediately turns the tables: “Yeah? Well I double-dog dare you.”
So the double-dogged dude takes a cautious sip. Then another. A grin forms on his face.
“Hey! This stuff ain’t bad. It’s pretty damn good.”
Now both start drinking down the newly discovered refreshment.
Pretty soon they’re having a good old time swigging the vino. They sing, laugh and make comments about the plonk like: “The charming richness is nicely balanced with velvety tannins that linger on the palate.”
Over the centuries, wine’s reputation became celebrated. People discovered that a bottle of fine wine is an enchantment. It can magically transform an ordinary meal into a feast. They also realized wine can be used as an antiseptic, a water purifier and as medicine ( “a little wine for thine infirmities” St. Paul advises).
Throughout history, wine has also been incorporated into religious ceremonies – most famously in Jesus’s Last Supper. For many Christian believers, it represents Christ’s blood, a vital element in the Holy Communion.
“If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me,” perhaps went a wine advertising jingle Madison Avenue devised for the early Church. In the 1770s, Spanish missionaries first introduced wine to California.
The padres established vineyards and produced sacramental wines as well as wine for ordinary consumption. But it wasn’t commercially manufactured here until the Gold Rush era. That’s when a Frenchman named Pierre Pellier came to California. Like most “Forty-niners,” he found little of the precious mineral up in them thar hills.
But luckily for us, he did discover true gold elsewhere. His keen eye observed the struck-it-rich folks living the high life in San Francisco. They’d pay dearly for a nice bottle of fine wine. And Pellier also noted coastal California’s Mediterranean-like climate and fertile soil could produce grapes of a high quality and abundant sugar content.
So, from his homeland, the Frenchman imported grape cuttings to the Santa Clara Valley. From these, Pellier started a vineyard in the San Jose foothills. His winery was the first in California to produce a pinot noir.
In 1881, Pellier’s oldest daughter, Henrietta, married a neighboring vintner named Pierre Huste Mirassou. The ambitious Mirassou joined with his father-in-law to produce some of Northern California’s finest wines.
Today, the Mirassous still bottle vino – “America’s oldest wine-making family,” they call themselves.
Inspired by Pellier’s success, other vineyards started popping up along the coastal region. Unfortunately, hard times hit them at the end of the 19th century. In 1894, a parasite called phylloxera attacked many of California’s vines and killed the plants. The state’s young wine industry took an economic thrashing.
Over time, the vineyards came back. But in 1919, winemakers were hit hard again when Congress – another form of parasite – passed the 18th Amendment. The era of Prohibition began.
During this period wine was still produced in California – “for medicinal purposes” (wink, wink). Or it was cooked up in secret hideaways. My parents owned a rental home in Hollister that had two cellars. One of them was essentially a small hole concealed under a kitchen trapdoor. During Prohibition, an old Italian covertly produced his nectar of the vine down below.
In the 1970s, two events really set off California’s wine industry and boomed its global reputation. Researchers at the University of California, Davis developed high-quality grape varieties that produced more sophisticated and better-tasting wines. And vintner Robert Mondavi started to market wine from Napa Valley heavily. Californian wines flourished and their world-wide clout burgeoned. The state’s wines – once considered a curiosity for connoisseurs – earned a reputation to rival the foremost European wines.
In the last 30 years, South Valley witnessed the emergence of many new winemakers. Sarah’s Vineyard, Solis Winery, Thomas Kruse Winery in Gilroy’s Hecker Pass, Sycamore Creek Vineyards in Morgan Hill, and Pietra Santa Winery in San Benito County are just a few that took root.
And during the last decade, as a gizmo called the World Wide Web grew popular, California’s small wineries discovered a high-tech way to by-pass wholesalers and connect to consumers. The Internet’s direct distribution led up to this week’s Supreme Court case concerning various states’s wine-shipping laws.
So now, while we wait for whatever wisdom will be pronounced, let’s raise our glasses to justice and make our own pronouncement – a toast first given by the Greek poet Homer around 900 B.C.: “Wine can of their wits the wise beguile; make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.”
