The Growth of Related Trades and a Literature of Wine
To supply an industry on this scale, the trades related to winemaking gradually developed in California. Coopers, of course, had been in California almost from the beginning, for in a world without tin cans, paper boxes, plastic buckets, and cheap disposable bottles, the art of the cooper will be urgently required. The coopering skills available in California from an early period are suggested by the diploma awarded in 1857 at the Mechanics' Institute Industrial Exhibition to Eck & Chicolot of San Francisco for a brandy cask, "all of oak, in the French style, with willow-bound hoops, and of superior workmanship and good finish."[71] By the 1870s there was a specialized branch of the state's cooperage industry devoted to the needs of the wine trade: the Santa Rosa Planing Mill could produce tanks up to 5,000 gallons' capacity, and in San Francisco there was a rivalry between the firms of Fulda Brothers and David Woerner, both of which undertook to supply a complete range of locally manufactured wooden containers.[72] It is interesting to note that West Coast woods were not regarded as suitable for wine storage and aging. It was one of Haraszthy's claims that he had been the first to show that California redwood could be satisfactorily used to make the vats and barrels for California's wines.[73] If so, the demonstration was slow to take effect. The Committee on Wood Work and Cooperage of the Mechanics' Institute Exhibition reported in 1868 that the cost of casks was one of the heaviest expenses for winegrowers, and that "the discovery on the Pacific Coast of wood suitable for wine cooperage would be very valuable."[74] And twenty years later the complaint was still the same. The committee noted in 1888, apropos of David Woerner's exhibit of cooperage, that Woerner's factory, the largest on the coast, consumed an "incredible" quantity of lumber, most
103
Woerner's firm was the largest producer of cooperage on the West Coast, all of the
work being done by hand, without machines. ( Pacific Rural Press , 20 February 1875)
of which would continue to be imported "until some adequate substitute for eastern oak is found."[75] There is no doubt that redwood was being used for wine cooperage; the Korbel brothers of the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County were advertising vats made from their redwood in 1885. But such vats were for fermenting, not for aging wine. It must have been later that what was done out of necessity came to seem a virtue and that California winemakers boasted of their redwood storage vats. The precipitous decline in the use of redwood storage in California in recent years confirms the earlier reluctance to use it.
The more complicated and specialized machines peculiar to the making of wine—crushers, stemmers, presses, and pumps, especially—required a little longer for local industry to provide. It is still true today, as a matter of fact, that the wine industry of the United States depends to an important extent on machines and supplies from Europe. Still, Californians made a beginning towards self-sufficiency in these things at least by the sixties; a press designed and made in California was being offered as early as 1863 by a Sacramento firm.[76] In the Mechanics' Institute Exhibition of 1869 were exhibited an "improved grape crusher and stem separator" and a hydraulic wine press.[77] There was, thereafter, a fairly steady number of entries at the annual exhibition of machines for winemaking, machines that grew more and more sophisticated and complex. The combined stemmer-crusher exhibited by Schoenstein & Klein in 1874, for example, improved on the old batch-process models by making a continuous feed possible: "With one of these machines nine tons of grapes have been crushed and the stems automatically discharged in a thoroughly separated condition without the necessity of stopping or varying the operation of the machine."[78] The early stemming devices in question were no doubt on the model of the perforated tray, the standard design until 1878, when the first design based on the revolving cylinder was introduced.[79] The exhibition of 1888 showed that the combining of multiple functions in compound machines had continued: two exhibitors in that year showed combined crushers, stemmers, and presses. The crusher operated with adjustable rubber rollers, and though the press was still the old basket style, it had the strength of the double-action lever principle.[80] At some indeterminate later date the continuous screw press was introduced; such presses were certainly in use in California before Prohibition, but they were not general.
The machines basic to the process of winemaking—crushers and presses—were naturally the staple items of manufacture, but in 1877 J. M. Curtis exhibited a "wine heater," that is, a pasteurizing mechanism suitable for wine.[81] It would be interesting to know how widely used the process was in nineteenth-century California. Special designs for vineyard tools were also experimented with: plows specially made for use in the vineyard were exhibited in the seventies and eighties, including the "Napa Plow Company's Vineyard Plow" in 1874, and a "side-hill vineyard plow" in 1884.[82] The first must pumps (as distinguished from ordinary force pumps) did not appear until 1896, and they made a significant difference to winery practice and winery design. Up to that time, a California winery was likely
104
An advertisement directed at the California wine trade in 1892: hydraulic presses were
available by that time, but the traditional screw press went on being "improved." Small
producers—and most were small producers— would not have needed anything more.
(Pacific Rural Press . 8 October 1892)
to be sited against the side of a hill, so that grapes could be delivered directly to the top floor of the building to be crushed; thence the must could flow down to the fermenting and storage tanks by force of gravity. Often the means used to convey the must down from crusher to fermenting vat was an open wooden chute, so that the must was exposed to oxidation and contamination. A must pump allowed the use of pipes, to the greater protection of the must. At the same time, since gravity was no longer required as the moving force, wineries could move away from the hillsides to the flatlands, where they could be expanded or altered much more easily.[83]
It would be fair to say that by the end of the 1880s the California wine industry came close to being self-sufficient. Some materials had to be imported still: corks, most obviously.[84] but, as we have seen, wood from eastern oak too. The only
105
An arrangement for pasteurizing wine, from Pasteur's Etudes sur le vin . Pasteurizing
machinery was available to California winemakers by the 1870s, but it is doubtful
whether many made use of it. (California State University, Fresno, Library)
chemical in much use for winegrowing and winemaking was sulfur—as a pesticidal dust in the vineyard, and as a disinfectant gas in the winery—and that had to be imported too, though there was some native supply.[85] Nurseries to supply the vines, coopers to make the necessary barrels and vats, foundries and iron works to make the machines, glass blowers to make the bottles, and printers to print the labels were all in good supply, and the scale of operation was large enough to allow at least some specialization. The Union Machine Company and the Atlas Iron Works in San Francisco, J. L. Heald of Crockett, Contra Costa County, and W. Worth in Petaluma all stood ready to provide the mechanical needs of wine-makers.[86] Heald was the leading specialist, who would undertake to advise on the design and equipment of an entire winery and to furnish the machines: presses, crushers, stemmers, elevators, pumps. The list of his customers in the early eighties is a roster of the industry: Krug, Beringer, Niebaum, Gundlach, De Turk, and so on.[87] Thus, a man who wanted to enter winemaking in California in, say, 1890, stood in a radically different position from a beginner just a generation before not only in technical knowledge but in equipment and supply. There was plenty of pioneering still to be done, but the pioneer was now surrounded by help.
The wine industry in California was recognized fairly quickly as a subject for journalism, and it was not long before it began to attract specialized publications to report its activities. Early newspapers, like the Star in Los Angeles, and the Alta California in San Francisco, took an interest in the state's winegrowing as early as
the 1850s: buried in their old files is much local detail about pioneer viticulture and winemaking that has not yet been exhumed. The general agricultural magazines of the state, such as the California Farmer (San Francisco, 1854-84) also made wine-growing a regular subject of coverage from an early period. The first periodical known to proclaim wine as a central item of its interest was a monthly called the California Wine and Wool Register , which began publication in Sacramento in January 1863 and expired at some indeterminate date not long thereafter. Close on its heels, and bearing almost the same name, was the California Wine, Wool and Stock Journal , published in San Francisco from 1863 to 1864. A Wine Dealer's Gazette began publication in San Francisco in 1871. Interest in the southern part of the industry was served, after 1877, by the Los Angeles journal called the Rural Californian . In 1879 the San Francisco Merchant began publication, without any special reference to the wine industry among its commercial subjects; in the early eighties, the boom in California vineyards brought about a change in emphasis, however, and beginning in 1884 the Merchant proclaimed itself "the only viticultural paper in the state." In 1889 the journal was renamed the Merchant and Viticulturist , and by this time it had come to dominate the field. In 1890 it was renamed again, now as the Pacific Wine and Spirit Review , and so continued down to its demise in 1919, a victim of Prohibition. It is remarkable that only the unimportant Wine Dealer's Gazette among these early periodicals was exclusively devoted to wine. Even in the state producing the overwhelmingly larger part of the country's wine there was not a large enough readership to sustain a journal entirely given over to the industry.
Final evidence for the settled establishment of winegrowing in California was its use as a literary subject. Wine in California, so far as I know, has not yet found its poet, the writer who will by the force of his passion and skill impose his vision on the popular mind. There have been many to try their hands in recent years, especially since about 1970. But the victor has not yet been crowned. The earliest venture that I know of was made by George H. Jessop with a story called Judge Lynch: A Tale of the California Vineyards , published in Chicago and London in 1889 .It is a poor affair, melodramatic and conventional; and though Jessop was a Californian, he shows no authentic understanding of the scene. The setting is somewhere in southern California, on the western slope of the Coast Range; a few purple patches of description about vines and wine cellars are sewn on to the fiction from time to time, though otherwise the story might just as well have transpired in the High Sierra—or in Patagonia, for that matter. But the book is at least interesting as evidence that California, as early as 1889, and as far away as London, was popularly thought of as a land of vineyards.