In 1910, the future of California wine looked dim. Beset by crises ranging from earthquakes to insect infestations, and with momentum moving toward prohibition, the nascent industry seemed dead on the vine. How then, a mere sixty years later, did a blind taste test from some of France’s toughest sommeliers judge California wines superior to their French counterparts? In Crush: The Triumph of California Wine (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781647790684) (University of Nevada Press, 2018), writer, lawyer, and University of California Berkeley Distinguished Fellow John Briscoe explains who rescued the California wineries and how they accomplished the task. This is a global story two hundred years in the making, full of fascinating stories and larger than life characters. As California wines face an uncertain, climate-changed, future, Briscoe argues we should look to the past to understand how the state’s viticulture has weathered difficult storms in its long and fascinating history.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann (https://cas.stthomas.edu/departments/faculty/stephen-hausmann/) is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
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Welcome to the new books Network hello and welcome back to new books in the American West a channel on the new books network of podcasts I am your host Stephen Housman and today I’m speaking with John Brisco a lawyer and an author many times over who is currently a distinguished fellow at the
SE Institute at the University of California at B at Berkeley and we’ll be discussing his new book crush the Triumph of California wine which came out with the univ univ of Nevada press in 2018 thank you so much for joining me today John it’s good to have you well
Thank you Steve thank you it’s a it’s a pleasure to be here with you on the new books Network we always like to begin by hearing a little bit about the author so let’s just start by hearing a bit about you what is your background and how did
You become interested in history and California history in particular well I may have become history interested in history because um I never had a professor like you in in history or a teacher like you in high school um or college it was the usual here are 397 dates memorize them
They’ll be on the final exam uh see you then uh that’s a gross exaggeration I had very tough history teachers who occasionally occasionally lifted The Veil The Veil that hides the fact that history can be very very fun and it was just enough to make me interested in history I didn’t major in
History I took a lot of history uh when I was in college uh and various aspects of History made me interested uh when I was um oh many many years ago I read about the death of a Berkeley Professor named um Arthur Quinn he was the chairman of the
Department of rhetoric like most B Berkeley professors I’m not counting myself uh he was a genius and I looked at the books that he wrote and virtually none of them was about rhetoric they were about history and he would find some little niche in American history or California history that
Fascinated in and then I thought well there’s you know I’ve got that same ailment that same problem and once he got tenure I later learned that then he was free to write whatever the heck he wanted he had to get that University press published book in his
Field and I’ve been writing about things that interest me uh some of them may border on the frivolous like the history of the California wine industry what is so important about that answer nothing uh but you might find it interesting and I’ve also written about uh the history
Of the nuclear age uh and out here in California I’m in San Francisco um the horrible history of the treatment of the uh Native California where 95% um were killed there was a genocide and one of your uh history Brethren at UCLA Benjamin madley wrote a who’s a good
Friend of mine wrote a fabulous book called an an American genocide which blew the lid off of that and I have written follow-up articles so Sublime to the ridiculous I’ve written the gastronomic history of San Francisco and a history of wine in California and there these things that you get I’m sure
You know the feeling why am I wasting my time on this but it’s interesting it’s interesting oh I see a story here and I’ve just got to tell it and then there comes a point where it’s sort of like you’ve half painted the bathroom you’ve got to finish
It and and as we were emailing AIT about this as well and that you know we’re talking here about your book Crush but that’s not even your most recent book that you’re a pretty prolific author yourself you you and not only do you cover a lot of topics but you you’ve
Just written quite a few books too which was very impressive to me as someone that’s struggling to get through one single book right now as far as writing goes yes and it’s just uh you’re absolutely right my latest one came out two weeks ago a book of
Poetry two years before that came a child’s Christmas in San Francisco which has almost nothing to do with Christmas it’s not religious at all it’s about food and drink if you can believe that um translations from the ancient Chinese and 2016 and so forth yeah just all all over
The ballpark wherever my wandering mind takes me well I’m wondering then what brought as you put at your wandering mind to the history in this book um what’s your relationship with wine and what made you want to write a book about the history of wine in California
Specifically it started out as a chapter in a book I wrote that came out 20 years ago um right about now uh that was a history of restaurants in San Francisco now why would that be of any interest to anybody well when I was growing up I was
Raised by my grandmother uh in San Francisco in North Beach which is the Little Italy of San Francisco uh but in those immediate post-war years uh Chinese had moved Chinese families had moved across Broadway which was a long uh maintain It’s a very Broad Street um not barrier actually but the northern boundary of Chinatown and they began living in North Beach and right across from the little place where we lived in little apartment we boarded with a woman was the North Beach playground and all the kids there were
Italian or Chinese and of course I thought that all people on Earth were Italian or Chinese and my grandmother who was a Yaki woman from Mexico had a heck of a time telling me no you’re not you’re neither Chinese nor Italian but we would go out to eat and
Then I would see my father on occasion and he would take us to restaurants and he would tell us tell me the history of restaurants in San Francisco and these were he was a fabulous Storyteller as was his mother my grandmother um and he had actually worked as a bus boy
He wanted to become a chef he signed on as an apprentice Chef on a luxury liner and in those days there weren’t culinary institutes per se in France yes but not here uh that’s what he really wanted to do and he never lived to fulfill that
Well he died when I was a boy uh few years after that but I I kept those stories in mind and I had a lot partner who lived in England whose first language was French and I would visit him I have two kids two grown kids 41 in
39 as a matter of fact it’s my daughter’s birthday today and I’ve got to remember to call her um and I would take my kids to England and we visit with my law partner’s uh family and his kids and grandkids and so forth and he grew up speaking French uh
First and he had a whole small room that was a the French libraries all the books were in French and here was a multivolume work it looked like the Oxford English Dictionary uh by Alexandra Duma and I thought well I know of The Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers and the
260 other novels that he ostensibly wrote but I never heard of Cuisine so I pulled down volume one and I had three years of high school French and if you had any High School French you know what I’m talking about you go to France you’re lost because you
Really didn’t learn how to speak it but you can with a dictionary you can kind of make your way through the written French word and I’m thumbing through and thumbing through and I see the words San Francisco which I later learned are the same in French as they are in English
And what he wrote was after Paris the greatest restaurant city in the world is San Francisco now that hit me like Thunderbolt because San Francisco wasn’t really born until 1849 New York was 1624 Boston was 1630 those towns are 200 years older when could this book have been
Written at the very latest when can those words have been written remember this is an encyclopedia the greatest work on food ever written not later than 1869 because Duma died in early 1870 so here’s a Frenchman a perisian saying the second greatest restaurant city in the world is
Someplace in California there is no Panama Canal there is no Transcontinental Railroad there is no way he apparently never went there its reputation was so great that he wrote that I mean the French were pretty Hy about everything particularly their food even then that’s High Praise exactly right it’s just outrageous yeah
Second greatest in the well I began to dig when I got home and I I thought to myself well there’s more to this story than I thought I dug into it and it’s a fascinating story San Francisco in 1847 had a population of 442 people they did a census they also
Counted the docks because there was so little to do the census takers right by the end of 1849 the Gold Rush was in 1849 and I I could bore you to Cheers about the gold rush but from that population of fewer than 500 people the leading citizen was a freed black slave
From the Danish West Indies which is now the American Virgin Island the population swell to something like 50,000 from fewer than 500 to 50,000 people in a year boom now who are these people well they’re mainly men uh they know how to drink curse fight steal I mean these are not the
Cream of the civilization the male civilization of anywhere and it came from all over the world they didn’t know how to cook a very enterprising French businessman in San Francisco soon as the gold rush began he knew and he went to his homeland and brought back 50 uh pardon me 40
Classically trained French chefs now why was it easy to lure them to California the second French Revolution had just happened their employers the aristocrats had lost their heads literally so they came and they immediately infused uh San Francisco food restaurants popped up everywhere they immediately infused San Francisco food I
Used that verb accidentally but I should have used it intentionally because today we speak of fusion so what do we have here we have fresh fish Seafood um eggs were a long time coming uh game of all sorts of ducks geese Fe turkey on and on and
On and these fellas had gotten used to how delicious they taste when freshly slaughtered and cooked the French chefs came with their sauces the sauces were developed because there was no Refrigeration in France and the seafood and the meat tasted pretty awful so you drowned it in sauce so the chefs in
Order to keep the customers had to really cut back on their use of sauce that’s how it’s it all began to this day San Francisco has um of the five oldest restaurants in the United States three are in San Francisco and again we’re 225 years younger than
New York almost that much younger than Boston I could go on and on with Philadelphia and Charleston and so forth New York City does not have a restaurant older than Sam’s Grill which I own I co-own with the the group of friends uh why did we get into it because we’re
Fools and because we love history and the darn thing was going to go the way of All Flesh so so I started writing this book and then I realized you know if in a period of 20 years from 1849 to 18 69 San Francisco became the second
Greatest Food City in the world in the mind of the most knowable food writer apparently that ever lived you know those 260 novels of Duma I mentioned he didn’t write them he had ghost writers writ for them once he had a bastard son Duma Fe and once Father and Son met understood the
Son is now grown and when he growing up father and son would take little we would call them bonding trips you know to Prague or Moscow to visit the brothel in those towns they were they were very close so son grows up and becomes a playwright
Father and Son meet on the streets of Paris they Embrace and father says to son DOA Feast have you read my latest book yet and the son says no father has have you that’s how well known it was but what the dad did write was this Encyclopedia of
Cuisine so I was astonished at how in a mere 20 years San Francisco attained that food reputation and to this day it has a pretty good food reputation I wouldn’t say it’s the second best in the world by any stretch of the imagination uh I’m no judge of
That uh but then I began to reflect on California one and I was struck by the fact that the story of California wine many people there was a movie made about it uh remember that in 1976 there was a blind tasting in Paris put on by an English wine merchant
Who just died named Steven spier no relation to the football coach of the same name and in America uh in which California wines there blind completely blind tasting that eight judges they’re all French they’re just the top of the top of the line Odette KH uh Raymond Oliver big big names the
California wines beat the French and a blind taster and but I knew that Wines had been planted way back as early as 17 7 that grapes had been planted here with the idea not of providing table grapes but of making wine why did it take so long seemed to
Me it was the opposite story it just took forever and ever and ever so it started out as a chapter in a book a very um tough but but a right thinking editor said that is isn’t the chapter in this book about San Francisco Cuisine that’s a that’s something else
So it ended up on The Cutting Room floor but I didn’t throw it away and the first thing you know I was at work making a book out of it and that’s that’s usually how these projects go right is you’ll start one project while you’re researching and writing you’ll come
Across something else that just kind of sticks in your mind or in this case you write a whole chapter about and next thing you know you’ve you know planted the seeds so to speak of of your next project so it’s it’s a feel it’s a story
I hear a lot on this show honestly I’ll bet so you touched on this a bit but as we get into the narrative the story that you tell in this book let’s go all the way back to the beginning of this history what is the history of wine in
North America and of course specifically what’s the history of wine in California the earliest grapes planted the earliest glasses of wine that someone was drinking in in in California who was making it who was drinking it and what did these wines taste like do you have any
Idea I don’t know that the earliest wines were made in the Southeast and they weren’t particularly good I mean that the wine industry simply didn’t take off that’s all I can say I mean even today you and I were chatting before the show about uh I may know something about
California wine but I don’t know didly about wine in the sense am I drinking a world class Cabernet or am I drinking Punk well you’re a historian not a somier essentially yes yes it’s a good way to put it somebody says well put the glass to your nose and I said well I
Can’t smell anything so why why put the glass to my nose uh but nothing much happened from those early days I do touch on them early days on the east coast of America uh there is a a towering figure in the history of American wine and his name is Thomas Penny who um
Interestingly is an English Professor uh at I believe ocidental college but one of a liberal arts school in Southern California he doesn’t teach history he doesn’t teach wine history and his field is the Romantic Period in English literature and he’s written a two volume thoroughly thoroughly uh sourced book on the
History of American wine the history of wine in California really begins with the missions and when when I say the missions I’m I’m too accustomed to speaking to a California audience and they kind of know what I’m talking about so let me explain our history books are
Are wonderful you know they they say you know bboa discovered the Pacific Ocean John Keats thought it was Cortez of course and his famous poem but uh those those Incas you know who were staring at the Val at the Pacific Ocean for a long time they were astonished to find out it
Was some guy named baloa who this discovered it h here in California we read as children that u a man named Cabrio in 1542 discovered California when he sailed into San Francisco Bay he claimed it for uh the king of Spain who did nothing about this phenomenal place that had just been
Claimed for him by one of his Navigators and it’s you know on reflection when you think of how tiny Spain is Spain has a population I don’t know 50 million people today maybe it had a population of 20 million then it claimed most of Latin America except for
Brazil uh all of Central America the Philippines Guam U many of the islands in the Caribbean and now they’re claiming California how can you possibly govern I mean what what what do you do with all of this land so they had it 1579 Sir Francis Drake lands in Northern
California he wasn’t Sir Francis Drake yet he was just an ordinary pirate I mean he’s just a no good Oceano pirate a criminal but he was Queen Elizabeth pirate and we he bought brought back all that gold that he stole from the Spaniards who had stolen it from the
Philippines uh why she made him a knight he claimed all of this for uh Queen Elizabeth but again England didn’t settle the place and then there were Rumblings that the Russians were coming so Spain thought well we better do something about it and I believe you
Teach at a Jesuit school is that right Steve um not Jesuit but a Catholic Affiliated school yes University of St Thomas yes yes I thought I thought it was oh yes right right uh well there many Jesuit schools the Jesuits were the spiritual arm of the king of Spain and
They had been sent to the new world to establish missions to convert the native people however by whatever means uh but in 176 9 the Jesuits got themselves in hot water with the King for reasons that are unclear to history and the King said you’re out and kicked the Jesuit order
Out of the new world and turned it over to the franciscans and said to one particular uh priest who was just made a saint Sarah I need you to establish a series of missions in this place called Alta California what we call California so he established in 1769 the first of 21
Missions they extend from San Diego which is near the Mexican border all the way to Sonoma uh which is north of San Francisco by 40 miles as the crow flies maybe not even that um and these were established over a period of about 50 years it it took a long
Time uh he planted he and his Padres and they were accompanied by small garrisons of soldiers they planted great VES wherever they went with the idea that this was to be wine with meals and wine with the uh Eucharist the sacrament the Roman Catholic Sacrament uh that is celebrated at Mass
Uh the grape that was planted was called the mission grape and people have figured out genetically what was it you know related to grapes that we know now well I can tell you it’s not related to any grape that is grown for wine producing reasons uh I’ve tasted uh wine made from
That gra people do have those Vines mainly for historical interest and it wasn’t particularly good but that’s that really was the inconsequential beginning of California wine and it wasn’t a a business I could find no record of uh uh The Franciscan priest selling wine they
Would give it um you know to guests and give them small barrels to take on their travels and so forth uh because there W there weren’t any distilleries and there weren’t any breweries and a lot of people who were traveling up and down California wanted something to drink so that’s how it
Started and these are these are very humble beginnings for California wine um and like with so much else like with seemingly every single story in California history it’s the Gold Rush of the late 1840s which really changes everything so these are the the you know so to speak deeper roots of California
Wine go back to the Spanish in the 18th century but what you might call the more modern roots of California wine as you explain in the book really date back to the gold rush so how how is this the case how are are these modern roots to
Be found in the rush and especially in the immediate aftermath of the gold rush in the 1850s well first I should mention that it’s it’s a curious historical fact but commercial wine making really began in Los Angeles it did not begin in Northern California and there was a man named
Jean Louie Vena v g nees which means literally vines or Vineyards who was from Bordeaux he was trained as a Cooper but he knew how to make wine he established uh one of the early wineries in Los Angeles right near the the big train station Union Station in Los
Angeles today and it was apparently very very good one uh but over time the climate in Los Angeles is very hot in the summertime uh many other good wineries established there uh but slowly and over time wine took root in Northern California particularly in Sonoma County
I mentioned that Sonoma is the home of the last mission San Francisco de Solano uh in in the in the chain of missions um but a man named uh uh General Mariano gu Lupe vjo Vallejo is how people pronounce it here there’s a town called
Vallejo um he was born the son of a Spanish Soldier uh he was born in Monterey California so he was born a spani uh in 1821 Mexico successfully had a revolution against this the last of the bolivarian revolutions uh so he became a Mexican General Vio did he’s he wasn’t a general
By this point um uh Mexicans in California during that very brief Cali period 1821 to 1846 it breathtakingly short this is the era of Ramona the big land grants and the fiestas and the fandangos and all of that you know it was only 25 years that’s it and then the Yankees came uh
So he became a californ the Mexicans in California preferred to call themselves Californios and then he became an American and he became a legislature in the future state uh but he found it a winery he knew a bit about wine making he employed a a fellow who had
Been a Trapper uh named George y y u n t uh now this is in the 1830s and 40s before the Gold Rush um Y and his buddy wolfkill had traveled all across the United States trapping and carrying their Furs until they could get to a trading post sell them move on in
Los Angeles which is where they first arrived in California wolf skill met that Frenchman I mentioned earlier Venia and said I’m tired of this life of trapping it’s a lot of hard work I want to settle down he settled down learned wine making opened his own wi which was
Very successful his buddy y made his way all the way to California went to work for General vjo in Sonoma and himself became a thorough California doesn’t matter your ethnicity it’s you’re living here you speak Spanish H there were 150 different Indian dialects in California there were approximately 370,000
Indians in California when Cabrio landed in 154 to diminished by 95% by the US Census of 1880 so that is beginning to happen was the Gold Rush that killed off the Indians murder just pure and simple um so y learns this learns wine making from General vijo in
Sonoma and Y has become a favorite of the Mexican governor of California and gets himself a land grant so so this brief period 1821 to 1946 is a period of uh 600 valid never mind the questionable ones 600 valid large Mexican land grants there were six prior ones by the Spanish
Government but that just pale you they’re rare when you find a somebody’s property just deres from a Spanish land grant that’s really something because it’s so rare just mainly Mexican yach gets a land grant in Napa and founds the first Vineyard and Winery in Napa so the
Folks in the Napa Valley are never happy to learn that no no no you weren’t the first you your cuting came from Sonoma and that’s how you got started by the large s and the spiritual the mental generosity of General Vio who taught George y everything he knew so that’s
That’s how that happened so by the time we get to the 1860s so after the Gold Rush um by that point the industry has pretty much entirely shifted North and you describe in the book how this Northern shift of the industry how it has really important implications for both the quality and
The variety of wines um and for the California wine industry more generally so who are some of the early characters in the sort of post uh uh Gold Rush 1850s 1860s wine industry and why does this movement North that you just described why does that matter so much
For the production of different kinds of wine and of a higher quality of wine well there are many people I can talk about but I probably should should dwell a little bit on a very interesting character auston harasti h r a s z t h y
It’s a i i my tongue stumbles every time I try to pronounce his last name and of course I have no idea what whether I’m pronouncing it correctly he came from Hungary called himself a count I am count arasti and other times a colonel I am Colonel
Bari he came here to make wine he came here during the gold rush but he came here to make wine that was his passion most of the smart people who came did not come to make gold they came to engage in banking to Corner the market in nail
Like Mr Huntington of the railroad the Central Pacific Southern Pacific Railroad um they weren’t going to get on their hands and knees and dig for gold that was for fools they were going to make money uh Levi Strauss he made tents and then somebody asked him to make a pair
Of pants out of that marvelous canvas that he used for his tents you know no idiot I’m just I’m going to sell to the miners this is a heck of a lot better way so harasi came here and he had his hungarians appreciation for wine he flubbed a couple of attempt he
Even tried to grow wine grapes in San Francisco but he ends up in somoma uh a piece and he bought a piece of property very near Vos um I can tell you many remarkable things about harosi he’s called by the way the father of California one that’s an official state of California
Proclamation in in 1949 but you might say you could say that about Jean Louis Vig the Frenchman I mentioned earlier who settled in Los Angeles who wrote uh marvelous letters about how California could be a rival of France even his home country as a wine producing region people had this dream
That this Place could really make some of the finest Wines in the world uh harasi had that dream he talked the legislature of California into underwriting a trip to Europe so harasi goes to Europe and uh comes back with hundreds of cuting and the makings of a
Book he wrote a quite good report to the legislature uh he wrote about soil about diseases he even wrote about the infamous feler uh and and he did a lot he gets back to California fortunately and he gets into a dispute with a legislature that doesn’t want to you know it’s
Looking at his bill for this junket and they decide not to pay him in the meantime harases got these huge green houses with these thousands really I’m forgetting the the number I might have it here in my I can’t find it it would take take to too long to to
Find but thousands of cuting that he’s brought back aboard the the ship that he sailed in um again no Panama Canal this is a long long long trip to and from Europe and in the green houses the labels of the seedlings start to fall off people will buy them but
They don’t know what it is they’re buying one thing we do know that it was inventoried and a particular wine grape that for a hundred some odd years was thought to be uniquely California Zinfandel and everybody assumed that it must be harasi I mean it even sounds Hungarian Z right
Z it must have been one of the grapes that harasi brought back no it’s not on his inventory uh I have it I have a copy of it from the library at Berkeley and I went through it to verify it myself it’s not there nothing that looks anywhere
Near it um today we know what it is it’s Primitivo which comes from Italy but it took you know DNA testing 20 years ago to figure that out uh in any event he really kickstarted everything he founded a um uh Cooperative is the best way to put it
The way of Vista viticultural society and it exists to this day as the buav Vista Winery in Sonoma the oldest Winery in the state 1857 uh founded in the fall of 1857 coincidentally the second oldest Winery in California is gundock bunu another mouthful which is all of
Three miles down the road from harasi wine ring so harasi I mean when he arrived here he was he was a character he was elected a sheriff uh he he failed as a wine maker in San Francisco I could have told him that you can’t go grapes that make one
In San Francisco look at the fog he I got a job at the Old Mint uh at 608 commercial Street and very soon got indicted for this is where gold uh nuggets and whatnot were melted down into ingots were made into coins I mean the the idea that all I
Need is just a few little things in my back pocket every day and within a couple of years I’ll be rich and that’s what he was accused of and it took him 15 years to settle those legal issues and then uh toward the end he had money
Troubles he went to South America on a trip and it’s reported One account that in trying to cross a river that was teaming with alligators he was trying to go arm overarm on overhanging tree branches slipped into the river and met his death at uh I guess it would be alligators there not
Crocodiles my when I was six years old I knew the difference but not sure I do that anyway this was one colorful life this fell had and and and this colorful life this is the this is the the kind of modern roots of the California wine
Industry and I really I like so much about that story of harass and part of it is it really underscores just how Global of a story this is that California uh you know you might think that California wine is this like you know purely Californian story and I mean
In some cases I I suppose that’s true but you really can’t tell it without this larger Global context between Zinfandel actually being an Italian varietal and and haras himself and all that that just underscores how much this story is connected to so many other places in the world well it is I mean
There’s no native California wine grape right there are two native California grapes but they’re not even good for eating and certainly not for making one yeah I should I should say also the theme that emerged uh as I was writing the book was from the beginning there were people and they
Were all men today there are a lot of women wine makers and some of the best are women uh but they were all men at the beginning and there were many dreamers uh people who know anything about California wine will today will speak of Robert mandavi who was certainly a dreamer in that
Category uh but there were dreamers before him such as Jean Louis vgan the the the priests don’t fall into that category you know they weren’t thinking about making great wine as as near as I can tell none of the Diaries reveals any thought of that U but jean Louis Vig and
Others Coler in the uh 1870s and 80s it was a fellow in San Francisco uh certainly harasi but then the wine industry experienced in Rapid succession I mean if you ask the question well they were dreaming that then in the middle of the 18 19th century and they beat the French in 1976
Really put them on the map what took so long and it was a series of four really catastrophic setbacks and the first one was a disease a l that attacks the roots of the grape Vines uh and it’s called felax now curiously the Lae apparently originated where American wine making
First originated in the southern Atlantic states over in Europe where they were having problems with this that and the other they thought well we need new vigorous root stock so I’m now going back to 1800 that that period so they said well the new world let’s get root stock from you know Wild
Grape root stock it hasn’t been subjected to what we’ve got here in France it’s going to be very vigorous they brought that over well it had this louse and it began to ravage The Vineyards of Italy France Germany Hungary okay but the L was not here in
California but beginning in the 1870s it began to destroy Vineyards my 1890 90% 90 some percent of the vineyards in Napa were destroyed every single wine growing region in the state had suffered catastrophic losses well how’ the Lae get here hari’s trip he went to Europe brought cuting back from his trip to
Europe and those cuting were infected with the with the l so we exported from the North Carolina region to Europe and then we bring it back to California that’s how the laugh got here and just when California wine is starting to to kind of uh uh I mean I
Keep using the same Pond accidentally but just starting to take root basically right like at this really Prime period that you have this crisis that hits right when it seems like California wine is maybe just about to take off like as you said you know 70 80% and more of
Some of the crops are lost and as you mentioned a second ago that’s just one of basically successive crises that hit the industry over the course of the early 20th century what happens next well what happens next um first off there were other there were other problems with the wine industry uh at
The time false labeling uh a lack of um a lack of consistency uh uh all manner of problems and some enterprising uh venters got together flaxer was the big crisis and said we got to do more we’ve got to make sure the legislature funds research at the University of
California and it did um uh but we all we should do something as as a business entity and so they formed a Cooperative that was phenomenally successful the California wine Association um it was found that in 1894 response to all these issues that I’m talking about by 1900 It
Produced three4 of all the wine produced in California and it was run by an Englishman who was extremely Savvy business-wise and kept all the members together we’re GNA have one label uh CWA California wine Association had a beautiful logo uh we’re going to have different whites and different Reds but the
Customer when they take when they grab a bottle of Claret um and this is where we just began expropriating words like uh burgundy burgundy just meant red table wine it did not mean a Peno Noir one from the burgundy region in France not at all um shabi same same thing that
Just meant a generic house white wine but they would taste the same the quality would be uniform you got what you were expecting from that last bottle for you know 10 years or so so it built up um it owned blocks and blocks in San Francisco it stored the wine here uh it
Aged the wine the uh and and and this began very very rapidly uh um so you had cage so you had whole Industries devoted to you know Lumbers being brought in and barrels are being made you’ve got the iron foundies to make the Hoops for the barrels and
The barrels have no nails but a lot of other things Palace or whatnot need Nails um Glass Works you got to make bottles why not make the bottles right near where you’re going to use them cork um sulfur for dusting the crops okay and so everything was localized in San
Francisco block after block and these are huge city blocks these are quarter of a mile long uh in the south of Market Street area and then on um April 18th 1906 one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history hit San Francisco it’s estimated it was an
8.3 uh the Fukushima earthquake of a few years ago was in Japan was a nine 9.0 but it’s it’s um very very tricky a a nine has 1,000 times the power of a seven you know a 9.0 has a thousand times the power of a 7.0 so you have this earthquake but more
Devastatingly the water Mees were ruptured and fires broke out there were about a hundred separate fires that they’ve accounted for and the firefighting people couldn’t couldn’t uh extinguish them because they didn’t have water pressure and so about 70 somewhat percent of all the structures in San Francisco were
Destroyed uh I’m not going to try to work the math out right here but the population was 400,000 people at that time roughly half of what it is today okay 400,000 people 250,000 people were homeless within 48 Hours wandering the Streets of San Francisco and it’s a tribute to the
Civic leaders of the day uh which did include the United States Army there’s a huge military Garrison at the predio of San Francisco they were all housed and fed in went back to ordinary lives in the full fullness of time it was a great great response to that disaster but three4 of
All the wine of California were lost boom just like that so that was a huge setback fortunately the California wine Association I haven’t even talked about the other wineries I’m just kind of focusing here on this one because it produced three4 of all the wine in California at the time it was well
Insured it continued to pay dividends to its shareholders and it completely rebuilt a brand new facility on the uh Richmond Shoreline not in San Francisco uh and it was a company to called win haven and it was up and running in no time again just really really Keen I I
I’m no business person I in awe of people who can see things in business and and anticipate problems and everything else but this there was a remarkable recovery for this organization um so once again the California wine industry is on its heels um up in Napa there was extensive
Damage but there were many many great names the greatest of them was ingel nerk which was founded by a Finnish fur Trader of all things in the 19th century Gustaf nebal and uh he got interested in wine just like you know so many of the U Roman Aristocrats when they retired from
Life they they moved to Bordeaux and they built themselves a a winery and planted a Vineyard and and that’s the that’s that’s the life I want to leave now live now so that was the so the earthquake was the second earthquake and fire fire really uh April 18th to April 22nd 1906
That was the Second Great catastrophe and then I want to focus on um another catastrophe which occur it’s it’s I guess we could call it a catastrophe of the US government’s own making in the the beginning Decades of the 20th century and that is of course the experiment of prohibition uh what I
Believe you call in the book The failed experiment of prohibition um you know again as you just said a second ago that the California wine industry is on its heels after these crises and then as of 1919 1920 the 18th Amendment is passed and suddenly it is it is you know uh an
Illegal industry in many ways essentially so I guess my question is to turn this Preamble into a question how does the California wine industry weather the storm of prohibition and who are some of the people after prohibition who rededicate themselves to raising the St status of viticulture in California
In the aftermath of prohibitions appeal in 1933 yes the the wine industry just to answer one of your questions very succinctly did not weather that storm very well um it’s a it’s it’s fascinating to think as a matter of American constitutional history we amended the Constitution and then 14 years later repealed that
Amendment and it was an amendment that has such a profound effect on so many aspects of American life that’s just mindboggling uh how could the political Machinery be created to get the amendment passed and then how could it disintegrate so quickly uh you know the answer to the former question is really
Intriguing for political sciences it was a perfect storm the dries those were the people who were in favor of banning all alcohol sales um made uh a PCT with the women suffer Jets women wanted the vote um and they didn’t have it Far and Away more women were in favor of prohibition
Than men aha I see in Alliance forming here possible Alliance um but there was but there’s a problem how did the federal government Finance itself then tax on alcohol that was the biggest single source of federal income the United States Constitution says point blank no tax on
Income well there there was a movement saying we need to have a tax on income to find Finance this growing federal government so you see how these three interests merged um and so the the three amendments passed in Rapid succession but it was a miserable failure everybody who wanted to
Drink somehow found out how to how to do it um mfk Fisher a fabulous writer I think her first book was how to cook a wolf and in it she has a basically known for writing about o Cuisine and you know all of that this is this is really basic
Stuff how to make a Sumptuous meal out of a can of spam okay this sort of thing she has a chapter on how to make vodka you will guess what that’s all about and it’s not quite as simple as you would think there’s a little art to
It and it’s you have your own VOD and it’s very inexpensive and it just takes a trip to the hardware store but you better get the right kind of alcohol or you’re going to be gasly sick U it it hit the wine industry particularly hard because wine drinkers in America who lik drinking
Uh people weren’t boot laking wine you know all the stories about Bootleggers you don’t hear much about bootlegging wine wine is 133% alcohol booze whiskey good old American rye whiskey 40 to 50% alcohol even higher if you want it so if you’re looking for that butt and you’re worried
About shipping and being discreet about shipping you’re concerned about volume so you invest in hard liquor and that’s mainly what happened so the speak EES didn’t serve one wine for the most most part so people who had been drinking wine lost their taste for wine during those 14
Years when uh repeal happened in 1934 they didn’t all of a sudden regain their taste for one they’re used to a martini or a Manhattan now they can simply buy it legally you know the liquor legally and they don’t have to go through the regular they they used to but also
So it’s we’re in the middle of the depression it is not as though it’s a time of you know uh great affluence in America it’s it’s in the heart of the depression so the wine industry really struggled a few a few wineries did very well old ones I mentioned ingelnook
Before some say the greatest California wines ever and they still exist and private Sellers and the owners will bring around on special occasions for take ttings and you you hear these oh it’s just screamy Eagle can’t hold a candle to this you know a $2,000 bottle of wine today
Um but by and large the wine industry was having a very difficult time uh during that period then comes the war so now you have rationing of all kinds of things uh people don’t have excess money to spend on wine so the wine industry just is just
Taking it on the chin over and over again until after World War II and we get back to work and really Eisenhower is elected president uh seven years later uh and is largely credited with you know keeping kushev from the Soviet Union at Bay and playing golf which was
His symbolic way of saying America we all have just been through this horrible depression this horrible World War II and then we got dragged into that police action in Korea U just get back to work raise your families make some money and it was during that period that
Um um Robert and Peter mandavi Brothers um they had grown up in Loi California which is east of San Francisco Northeast of San Francisco their father had made wine uh had been in the protu business they decided they they wanted to get in the wine making and the two sons went to
Napa to the Napa Valley and bought one of the old wineries that had fallen on very very hard times Charles Kook Krug there you go again a German influence here The Finnish fur Trader you’ve got French um aladon influences from all over so they buy this Winery and they begin producing quite
Good jug wine we would say today it’s not going to win any contests um but it’s quite drinkable now the brothers were very very competitive growing up they uh played football at Loi high in at Stanford University um they were combative Peter just saw that boy we’re
Making money hand over fist in the business as we’ve designed it Robert however belonged to that class of people I was referring to earlier the dreamers we can make great wies in California but we have to invest well Robert started taking trips he started investing in this and that
And it was a source of great struggle between the two so much so that on a Friday afternoon early evening in October they were at their mother’s house um in Loi Cali California and they got into a fight these guys are in their early 50s they got into a fist fight
They end up on the ground Roberts on top of Peter he’s got his hands around Peter’s neck and he’s throttling him so much so that Peter had purple marks for for weeks and the mother though I forgot the father had been killed in an auto accident a few years before the mother
Comes out screaming separates the two um orders Robert out of to to leave the property and then she and Peter fire Robert from U the family business Charles crew Robert goes off founds Robert mandavi Winery within days with the help of some friends buys a piece of the old Engel Vineyard and
That’s when finally the ascent began of California one well and as we start to get up toward the present day I’m wondering what did Mondavi do that made that was so revolutionary in California wine what is the story post Mondavi I mean in the book you describe how in some ways he
Kind of began a wine revolution in California you see this explosion this flourishing of the wine industry that will last up through the end of the 20th century so what is the story after the founding of of this new winery by Robert mandavi after this this Friday night
Fight that you described the Friday night fight yes well it it it it launched the a scent of California wine that led to the Judgment of Paris so this is in 1976 so in 11 years less than 11 years that all happened it was not a lot of
Fanfare here’s here’s some guy kicked out of his family business and he buys 27 Acres or whatever but in 1969 he takes gold medal at the uh Los Angeles County Fair which is a sign that he’s striving for Quality his first wine maker was a man named Warren
Winarski and he burns him out and Warren goes off and starts working uh as the wine maker at Stag Leap also in the Napa Valley second wine maker uh a Croatian by the name of Mike gich and he burns Gage out after bad 20 months and Gage goes off and becomes the
Wine maker at Chateau Montelena now let’s remember those two names one of the other things vabi does is he he founds a an organization in the Napa Valley he is spending his own money researching better ways to train the vines uh better root stock um every single aspect of the production of wine
The growing of grapes and production of wine bottling corkage you name it he his his mind was consumed with doing it better he brought over the best Artisans from Europe in every one of these elements and of course brought in the best wine makers and he was always
Heavily involved in in the wine making what makes him so what there are a lot of people like that but what he did with the other Napa Valley Growers and wine producers was he told them everything he learned this he didn’t keep this knowledge to himself he wanted it shared he wanted
Everybody to be better now in the meantime he sues his mother and his brother for kicking him out of Charles crew and that case winds its way through the tortuous California court system so that trial began in April of 1976 in Napa Robert mandavi versus Rosa mandavi and Peter bandabi it was in
May that that blind tasting was held in Paris and I mentioned earlier that American Wines California wines Napa Valley Wines beat all the French and this was in the opinion of eight French judges probably the best eight judges in France at the time what were the American wine Stags Le Cabernet made by
Warren winarski who had been mavi’s first wine maker and the white was made was a chardonay made by Mike gurage at chatau Montan well is mandavi around to celebrate this oh he’s in trial he doesn’t know for weeks what happened July 4th as a court holiday as he did every day
During trial he went to visit his mother who’s dying of pancreatic cancer he knelt at her bedside and prayed for forgiveness then went off to court to sue her you know to continue with this trial against his own mother she dies on July 4th in the middle of trial it goes
On finally in August the judge rules after nearly three months of trial that’s a very very long and grueling trial that Robert was absolutely right that the others had defrauded him uh so Robert got a very very nice settlement out of that which helped him financially but unfortunately he was not in
Paris he probably wouldn’t have traveled uh there was not a heck of a lot of publicity going on about that wine tasting it happened to be the proverbial slow news day the bureau chief of time magazine TBL you know it’s like well what do I do today and drifing through his papers
Well the only thing in this whole city of Paris seems to be going on is the blind tasing in this wine shop Cav madalin Matalin is the name of the wine shop so he went if he hadn’t been there nobody would have reported it those eight judges would have kept their
Mouths shut they were shocked when they realized they had voted for California wi so m did that as an interesting sideline so this all started October of 1965 as I mentioned that fist fight it may have been the exact same day October 15 1965 was a Friday I have
Not been able to pin down which Friday in October I’ve gone through the whole court trial record and there is no transcript because it wasn’t appeal and the court reporter discarded to notes uh the living lawyers who were involved uh the I know Robert mavi’s laer he’s a friend of mine
Uh and he John Marell is his name he’s an author uh he he doesn’t remember his notes don’t say anything but uh it was right around that time within days uh that a guy named Fritz matag bought the last standing brewery in San Francisco anchor Brewing Company and Fritz mayag was to craft
Brewing in America what Robert mandavi was to Wine as Fritz taught himself everything and he shared it with anybody you talked to so many Lanas um Sierra Nevada Brewery up in Chico California how’d they get their start they paid a visit to Fritz mayag and he told them everything they needed
To know and he would always answer their phone calls and so forth but anyway that’s what mavi did he was dispersing all of his knowledge and and whatnot and of course a phenomenal sense of Goodwill throughout the Napa Valley he was pretty Centric to the Napa
Valley and to this day his uh proteges are out there everywhere it’s interesting to me that for someone that is competitive enough to sue his his own brother and mother and to get into a fist fight in his 50s with his brother on the floor of his childhood home that
He’d be also so generous with with his knowledge and you talking a second ago about um uh how all of these uh wine makers who trained under mandavi how they went off to found their own wi wineries it reminded me I don’t know if you’re a football fan at all but of the
Kind of coaching trees that you see where this coach had these coaches working under him and they went on to do all these things they train these other coaches it reminded me of something like that where just one person who decided to you know not be too precious about
The knowledge that he has was willing to to basically put this industry on the map it’s it’s it’s quite a story it is very very generous and there were other parallel stories so Fred frano who we talked a little bit about tuuk Chuck as most of the world knew him uh who died
Very recently uh he came along later but he came from one of those old wine Winery families in the Central Valley of California uh that uh Fria I mean it bears that name tuuk Chuck the label reads uh Charles Shaw um so his Story begins postor War
II now franel was half a generation I think he was 78 or 77 when he died um but the Gallows Ernest and Julio Gallow I mean it’s a phenomenal quite scary uh book written about those two uh and it’s a very different uh sort of story and
Now we’re down to uh there was the father and the mother who supposedly died of murder suicide and I’ll just say there are substantial doubts that the husband killed the mother and um and then himself uh right as uh repeal is about to happen and so Ernest and Julio
Are 21 and 19 I think and they they take over the family business and it’s Far and Away the biggest wine producing entity in the world uh even to this day and it’s now down in successive generations with mandavi uh it’s terribly sad ending I
You would take a you know Ides or a Shakespeare to write it but after all of that success he turns things over to his two sons who cannot agree and a principal source of argument between them was the exact same thing that Robert and Peter quarreled
About make a lot of money off of jug wine or do we strive for the very best and in the end the company fell apart and it’s now owned by uh I don’t know you know the Montgomery Wards of the world what is it constellation or one of those INB or one
Of those large sort of conglomerates of yeah I know what you’re talking about yeah yeah I think they make razor blades and tire rims and soap yeah so as we begin to wrap up here um where does the wine industry in California stand today what are some of
The crises that it’s facing does it stand on on firm ground and I know that you and I are both historians we tend to look backwards and at least I personally am always loathed to make predictions about the future but nonetheless I’m curious what do you foresee as the
Future of California wine what should change what needs to change and maybe what shouldn’t change at all well I don’t think that there’s anything in the offing nearly as dramatic as the 1976 Judgment of Paris and let me tell you the headline writer the person who wrote that headline for
That Time Magazine story deserves a special bullet Sur that’s just absolutely Priceless I don’t know if you picked it up but I I had too much fun opening that chapter trying to draw the parallel to the original story of the Judgment of Paris and this blind tasting
In Paris in 1976 it’s just Rich there’s not going to be anything like that I doubt and there will never be a um proclaimed best wine region in the world it’s California or we’re not going to hear something dramatic like that I think that California is going to
Continue uh to produce great wine um because I’ve met a lot of these people and they’re passionate most most of the people who are in the business today made their money something else which is historically how it’s happened uh Rough Child it was a banking family they got into making wine they bought
Some of the old you know great chat and but these people bill harand is a good friend of mine he’s got Harland estate is his you know it’s one of those cult wies no way I can afford it I like it when he offers me a a small glass of
His a good friend to know it sounds like well a good yeah a good friend to know and it but and he was a very very successful uh real estate developer and Country Club developer and so forth but he always had a passion for wine and then he threw everything into
It and he invests heavily um I mean every bunch of grapes has gone over by hand if there’s the tiniest little shriveled grape out it goes he’s absolutely fastidious about every aspect of of wine making and so it’s it’s going to stay good um my palette is not such that I could
Tell tell you 20 years from now whether it’s all gotten better or not uh but I think it’s going to stay good I think that the two things are uh the world’s economy uh if if there’s a global depression uh people just don’t buy luxurious items you you’re you’re going
To be buying used copies of uh Mary Francis Kennedy Fishers how to cook a wolf and so let’s see just how do I make vodka and how do I make a can of spam serve a you know an entire meal here uh it’s fine wine is something if you’re
Talking about Fine Wine fine wine is something people enjoy when they have a certain degree of affluence and you got to get there you gotta pay your rent and put shoes on your kids feet and all that sort of stuff first then you start thinking about what do you do with this
Little extra money that’s burning a hole in my pocket uh the other of course is climate change what does that mean uh nobody knows this is the short answer and in one of my other lives as as a lawyer International lawyer I’ve done a lot of work for the United
Nations and um my to my friends and there are many of them and they’re oceanography professors say at scripts or Santa Cruz uh you see Santa Cruz here and they will speak of uh climate change and global warming as the great existential threat if I see that word existential
One more time a fixed to you know is the existential threat no it’s not no it isn’t it’s nuclear war nuclear World War III and I’m saying it and saying it and saying it and I’ve got one of these books is three4 finished why have we forgotten all about
Well the the threat of nuclear war I have my theory it’s too long for your your listeners here but um that also would not be great for California wine for the record also no no it wouldn’t if you if you think that in 1962 we had the
Ability to you know it’s it’s just about 60 years since the 13 Days in October of 1962 we had the ability to destroy the world many many many times over and we have a much greater ability to do that today and to make it uninhabitable by
Humans for a very very long time after that um but my I think my book is move my book was focusing on why on Earth did we forget about the thing that concerned us the most we totally forgot about well you know events in Ukraine have have made
That book move because now we are thinking about it U but you know if if that happens all bets are off everything it’s just a matter of when does the cloud arrive and people should watch read read the book or watch U the movie on the beach which was based on a
U Rand Corporation study this is this is how it ends this is how it ends and that was in the 50s it’s it’s only it’s only more risky now well and for my my last question and you you touched on this a little bit um and indeed at the outset we talked about
How you’ve written a couple books since this book was was released but I always am interested in getting a preview as to what my guests are working on next and this book has been out for around four years now um so what have you what have
You done in in the interim and then what do you have next on the horizon are there any projects that you haven’t mentioned that you’re working on currently so we can get a bit of a preview on what’s coming next sure well I I I write
Poetry uh the book that was released two weeks ago strangers we have known is a collection of uh poetry light verse lyric verse I also write light verse and I write it quite seriously um one of the greatest poetry critics and editors in the in the
Country Joe pesi once told me he said it’s it’s infinitely harder to write a good piece of light verse than it is to write a good piece of serious verse so I have a um a book I’ve got to start chopping it to Publishers called fish feathers it’s got uh uh supertitles as
Opposed to a subtitle uh I’m working on a book called The Paper lawyer um which is really an examination of the rhetoric of law whether’s judg or lawyers you know what’s really going on when you read dos versus Jackson uh the case that overturned Ro versus Wade what is what’s really going
On to and trying to get it into plain English and you know teach people as rhetoric isn’t taught I don’t know is there a can you majure in rhetoric where where you teach not in rhetoric specifically this is asking me to I’m mentally going through the there I know the English Department
Offers uh uh like kind of Majors it not short answer not to my knowledge but if any one in the English Department or Communications at St Thomas is listening and wants to send me an angry email please do do so because I I don’t have it memorized well the only reason I
Mentioned that is that that uh you know when you ask people what are the liberal arts and they rattle off things like history well the original Seven Liberal Arts did not include history but the first three were the most important um grammar logic rhetoric and it was taught and Cicero
Midc career took a sabatical to study at the at the feet of the Great Master of rhetoric in the ancient world uh apollonius Mulan of of rhs I mean it was it’s a it’s a a rigorous rigorous discipline they’re simply not taught they used to have um a
Department of rhetoric at at Berkeley I don’t know if it still exists but so that’s it’s called paper lawyer which is a little pun on paper tiger and also George Plimpton wrote um paper Ling about his trying out with the Detroit Lions football club in 1963 Brave guy you know he played
Football in high school and here he is 35 years old and he gets walloped a few times by those defens so um and then a um and then a memoir which is not about me it’s about people I’ve I’ve met and known and it’s its working title is Life’s a
McGuffin and if you know what a McGuffin is I think you get it so John Brisco is a lawyer and is an author many times over uh he’s currently a distinguished fellow at the sea Institute at the University of California at Berkeley and he is the author of crush the Triumph of
California wine which we discussed today and which came out with the University of Nevada press in 2018 thank you so much for joining me today John it’s been a pleasure thank you Steve it has been a pleasure for Me