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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948908443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Nevada Press |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2020 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Sales rank: | 1,109,826 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 16 - 18 Years |
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CHAPTER ONE
Wine By Design: Wine Begins its Journey to Santa Barbara
In 1946 Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis published Zorba the Greek and aptly portrayed the depth of wine’s mythical role in western cultural and economic traditions. His chief character Zorba provided readers with a living paradigm of the beverage’s cultural ability to temporarily release humans from the bondage of everyday existence and celebrate life. In one scene Zorba, the simple Greek philosopher, warmed by an evening of wine drinking, lectured his new boss Basil, a middle-class Englishman, on “how simple and frugal a thing is happiness.” He reminded readers that wine imparts a glimpse of happiness and the good life.[i] This observation stood in stark contrast to the serious capitalist Basil who attempted to profit from re-opening an abandoned lignite mine. Depending on your relationship with wine, the beverage can produce either happiness or capitalist profits. In the best-case scenario, it can provide both.
Much like the relationship between Zorba and his business-minded friend the history of wine has become a tale of capitalist production and consumer experience. Though not entirely analogous, the story exemplifies over 7,000 years of the human need to escape an ever-increasing complex world and an agricultural industry’s need to design efficient vineyards, production facilities, and distribution systems capable of providing profit for business-persons.
While wine became a cultural means to distract and celebrate it also became deeply rooted in western civilization’s economic and political story as entrepreneurs profited from the lucrative international wine trade. Historical geographer Tim Unwin believes that viticulture is “an expression of transformations and interactions in the economic, social, political and ideological structures of a particular people at a specific place.”[ii] Thus, by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European viticulture served as one of many symbols of class and wine business-persons instituted the mercantile ideas of capital, credit, science, new technology, and marketing. Early entrepreneurs then transported their business wine culture to their new homes in the Americas, where at first they struggled and were unsuccessful in building a wine industry. It would not be until the nineteenth-century that they found success in California.
The struggles continued into twentieth-century America as the wine industry suffered through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II. But wine businesspersons proved to be resilient and gave birth to a new cadre of winemakers that sought state-of-the-art solutions to boost production. In America, this history of wine manifested itself as a translocated struggle of a wealthy class in need of an artistic hobby, western European religious and cultural tradition, a wine-industry seeking profits, a consumer-focused middle-class seeking symbols of the good life, the Jeffersonian agrarian myth, the quest of temperance groups to legislate alcohol morality, and a nation in search of a national public health policy. Wine has served as the lubricant for the machines of human movement across continents and oceans and found success in California and for the purposes of this story Santa Barbara.
Between the 1960s and 2010s the California Central Coast region of Santa Barbara became a model for the American Wine By Design movement. Ultimate consumer recognition for their new role as a premium wine region came in 2005 when Rex Pickett’s buddy novel Sideways premiered as a movie.[iii] Deeply imbedded into this story is the spirit of wine and the attitude of never giving up on simultaneously building an American wine industry and an American wine culture. The novel’s chief protagonists, Miles and Jack, in many ways mirrored the spirit of Zorba and Basil. This time the setting was the Wine By Design region of Santa Barbara.
The amazing part of this modern Santa Barbara wine tale is the fact that for centuries wine history has continuously presented similar problems and solutions to the industry’s vineyardists and winemakers. Like wine entrepreneurs of the past they adapted science, technology, and market forces to overcome pests, diseases, taxes, wars, depressions, regulations, anti-alcohol proponents, waffling government intervention, consumer trends, and environmental concerns to keep the industry profitable and consumers happy.
Premium Wines: Bigger the Wine the Smaller the Barrel
For centuries class-conscious European consumers had demanded premium wine as a means to distinguish their social status from the masses who drank low cost plonk. Disruption of the European wine trade by sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars, had crippled trade and left consumers with raising prices and dwindling supplies of their favorite French, Italian, and Spanish wines. Faced with these shortages European entrepreneurs then turned to their New World colonies to meet their needs. Thus, the early wine industry started a modern trend of meeting market needs by looking for the next new region to grow wine-grapes. This expansion philosophy played out centuries later as San Francisco Bay Area (Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino) wineries, short on premium wine-grapes, turned to areas like Santa Barbara to source grapes for their growing brands.
Grape-growers, winemakers, and marketers had become fully entrenched in the politics and culture of Western Europe by the seventeenth-century. In England the business of wine merchant (negotiant in French) prospered as it was discovered that wines could be matured, transported, and stored in glass bottles with shaped corks. Merchants now shopped worldwide and governments established wine import taxes as a means to provide additional royal revenues and consumers shifted to the new and exotic premium wines like champagne and port. They brought these traditions to the New World and from the start the American wine industry faced global competition, distribution issues, and government attempts to regulate and tax their product.
By expanding production wine capitalists successfully produced different and better wines with smaller price tags for a larger group of consumers. But this new trend could not keep pace with consumer demands and resulted in world-wide wine shortages. Exacerbating the shortage problem were differential customs and duties and shifting political boundaries. Despite the problems international wine-trade became profitable and by the eighteenth-century most wineries required high levels of capital investment. Much like today, only the wealthy class of landholders, merchants, and entrepreneurs could afford the long term investments required by the premium wine industry and much like today small producers found it difficult to compete outside their local region.[iv]
Quest for an American Wine Culture
European explorers and immigrants brought viticulture to the Americas during the Age of Discovery (1500-1750) and early explorers found that none of the native-American peoples had any knowledge of wine or for that matter any fermented spirits.[v] This was not an accident, for the native grape varieties made a very poor-quality wine. In response colonial settlers, with home country encouragement, introduced European vines (Vitis vinifera) countless times in an attempt to develop a successful wine industry in South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Baja and Alta California.
All thirteen of the original American colonies failed to establish a viable wine industry forcing wine drinking settlers to substitute new libations while they continued the search for a means to produce their own wine. In the few places where grapes would grow yeoman farmers followed their European traditions and left grape growing and wine production to gentleman farmers. This helped deepen the American mystique of wine as a drink for a gentler class. Yet, many like President Thomas Jefferson hoped to cultivate the European tradition of a wine culture for all Americans. These hopes diminished as viticultural failures grew and post-revolutionary Americans turned to cheaper rum that quickly accounted for one-fifth of the value of all imports from England. Jefferson and many others worried that this new dependence on distilled spirits would diminish the vitality of the nation’s health and pushed to intensify the quest for an American wine industry to moderate drinking habits.
Wine as a moderating alcoholic beverage has been a hope for many Americans throughout our history. Just before the American Revolution, all ages and social groups consumed alcohol and foreign travelers reported that America was a nation addicted to drinking. The national consumption rate had reached three and a half gallons per-person (more than the present rate of consumption) per-year. This astonishing rate of consumption forced many Americans to view wine as a means to moderate excessive drinking habits and led to historian William J. Rorabaugh labeling the nation as the Alcoholic Republic.[vi]
As many American citizens began to worry that alcohol was destroying the moral fiber of the developing republic they worried that moderation ideals had failed to keep pace with increasing destructive alcoholic behaviors. Their concerns resulted in early nineteenth-century reform measures aimed at moderation through wine consumption and teetotalism. These early reformers started a national debate on the health and social values of fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages that lasts to the present day. While most people still believed that wine and distilled spirits were a food and medicine to be imbibed in moderation extreme reformers focused on the evils of alcohol and attempted to force moderation or teetotalism on the public in general.[vii] These concerns and struggles have helped shape the modern American wine industry.
Yet, anti-alcohol activism did not lessen the consumption of spirits as consumers associated drinking with the American ideals of personal freedom and a modern lifestyle. Despite these newfound freedoms factory owners, needing a sober workforce, sought a means to decrease alcoholic consumption. To accomplish this they joined forces with middle-class urban Americans recently emboldened with the moral calls of evangelical leaders, women’s temperance groups, and political leaders to bring about an era of temperance reform. The fiery rhetoric of extremists blamed economic decay, poverty, and social upheavals on all forms of alcohol. Many others favored abandoning distilled spirits for wine and they pushed for tax laws to incentivize moderation. Regretfully, high prices kept wine out of the reach of most Americans as wine prices skyrocketed to one dollar per-gallon or four times the price of whisky. Making matters worse was the fact that high wine prices increased import duties and worsened the American balance of trade. Luckily for the wine industry the moderation approach brought a new commitment to establish an American wine industry for production of cheaper wine. Despite these concerns hopes remained high and Journalist Hezekiah Niles prophesied that in time the United States would produce all its own wine.[viii]
Attempts to Build an American Wine Industry
Wine industry failures in the original colonies worried those seeking to establish an American industry. But these fears lessened as early colonial failures gradually gave way to limited commercial successes in the new western territories of Ohio and Kentucky where the climate was more suitable for grape-growing. The renewed optimism prompted President Jefferson to predict that Americans could “make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe,” just “not exactly the same kinds, but doubtless as good.”[ix] This faith in the ability of America to produce wine encouraged wealthy entrepreneurs to continue their quest.[x] But the successes were limited and like vintners throughout history they turned to new regions.
Moving West and Modernizing American Agriculture
As the American Republic struggled to grow a wine industry many farmers, winemakers, scientists, and entrepreneurs looked towards the new western territories along the Pacific Ocean. Hopes for an American wine industry continued and in 1851 Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas enthusiastically stated that the “United States will, in a very short time, produce good wine, so cheap, and in such abundance, as to render it a common and daily beverage.”[xi] Many agreed with this optimistic view as they observed vintners and entrepreneurs move beyond regional trial-and-error to action plans that disseminated information, funded research, formed organizations, vigorously marketed their product, lured investors, sought government support, and relied on university programs and experimental stations. Despite all the optimistic hype W.J. Flagg’s 1870 Harper’s Monthly magazine article correctly identified the problem; “The question of wine-drinking in America revolves itself into the question of grape-growing in America.”[xii] America need to find a home for the wine industry.
Important for grape growing was the new national commitment to large-scale agriculture. From colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century agriculture had always been at the heart of the American economy and the majority of Americans engaged in agricultural occupations. This changed as Manifest Destiny, the industrial revolution, and the exponential growth of cities pushed and pulled the nation in new directions and forcefully pushed agriculture into the industrial era. The agricultural shift for wine sped-up in 1862 when the newly established United States Department of Agriculture directly sought ways to assist in the development of an American wine industry. Dreams of building a wine industry now turned to California, with its history of Spanish wine successes, Mediterranean climate, agricultural geography, cheap land, and ample man-made water supplies.
California Becomes America’s Vineyard Garden of Eden
Since statehood in 1850 many considered California to be an exceptional state, a national jewel, and an important global agricultural region and in a short time California lived up to the expectations of industrial agriculture. By the early twentieth-century geographers like M.K. Bennett made observations that California had become a model for specialized, commercialized, and mechanized agriculture with high yields per-acre.[xiii] Another geographer, James Parsons, believed that; “In the popular mind it is somehow different, a state with distinctive qualities both of the physical environment and of the human spirit which give it a personality of its own.”[xiv] The California wine identity quickly became tied to these visionary dream and in many ways, became part of the present-day highly political and contentious culture wars of Blue versus Red State politics in a modern version of Gemeinschaft - Gesellschaft battles of the past.[xv] The common man versus corporations trying to steal and plunder the land for profit while delivering manufactured wine. Despite the war of agricultural ideas it did not take long for wine to become part of the state’s sense of regional identity. For this story the rural versus urban ideological struggles would play a large part in how the Santa Barbara wine region would develop.
Like all agricultural stories one must begin with geography and climate. The geographic history of California is a complex story deeply set in plate tectonics theory. By the 1960s earth scientists formulated a theory of plates, or floating land masses, that moved across the earth’s surface driven by volcanic action and earthquakes. Over millions of years these actions created the continental regions that we experience today. Writer John McPhee described how California had been “Assembled” by thousands of violent earthquakes that brought landmasses from far parts of the world to fashion the region.[xvi] Parts of the original North American lithospheric plate acted as the prow of a ship as it floated on hot mantle and slipped into and acquired other masses of land creating California as we know it today.[xvii]
In essence parts of California have slid into place and divided the state into three parts creating a profile that from the Pacific Ocean moves eastward (inland) about forty miles to Coast Ranges and drops down to flat sea level in the Great Central Valley and then butts up to the Sierra Nevada range, the highest mountain range in the lower forty-eight states. Millions of years of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, weathering, and erosion left the state with large swaths of flat rich soil and deposits of valuable minerals like gold and silver in the Sierra batholith. In this tumultuous process the San Francisco Bay became the largest estuary in the Western Hemisphere and one of the world’s best harbors, the Central Valley flatlands favored large commercial agriculture, and coastal regions enticed growing of cool weather crops and wine-grapes.[xviii]
California has a classical Mediterranean or West Coast subtropical climate with dry and hot summers that are drier, except along the coastal fringe, and hotter than those of Italy, Greece, or Spain and more comparable to those of North Africa or Israel. Yet, on the coastal hill areas like Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Santa Barbara geography created microclimates that offer drastic differences to interior temperatures and create perfect conditions for premium wine-grape cultivation. The coastal hills funnel maritime fogs with their cool moist air to the west sides of the hills leaving the eastern hillsides warmer and sunnier. Thus, creative farmers had the ability to cultivate artichokes, brussels sprouts, lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli on cooler western facing locations, and grapes and fruit orchards on the warmer eastern sides. Statewide, the geography and climate produced four regions capable of producing cool climate premium wine grapes—San Francisco Bay Area, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and Temecula.
From the start, business people promoted this sense of identity and nicknamed California the Golden State for its 1849 Gold Rush, ample sunshine, and fields of golden grain. Over the next few decades wine became a large part of this new sense of regional identity and California earned this sense of place or what wine writer Matt Kramer labeled “somewhereness” based upon it’s geography and Mediterranean climate that allowed it to become one of the top food and wine producers of the world.[xix]
California Develops Terroir
For hundreds of years French gastronomes spoke of terroir as a means to describe the environmental and social conditions including soil, topography, and climate on agriculture and the specific regional taste of foods and wines. Derived from the French term le goût de Terroir, loosely translated as “taste of the earth,” food enthusiasts expanded the term’s meaning to provide a means to allow people to have a common language when describing their regional foods and wines and their effects on the social and cultural lives of the region’s residents. University of Vermont Nutrition and Food Science professor Amy B. Trubek describes this human side to terroir as the development of cultural values through farming, cooking, and eating. Adapted by many food enthusiasts, Trubek’s definition rightly supports the idea that terroir is more than the mere need for sustenance and believes that every “American deserves a chicken in his or her pot.”[xx] Her anti-industrial food stance gives quality sustainable food the dual role of nourishing our bodies and helping us to define our social environment. For the purposes of this book terroir also refers to its business implication whereby businesses use terroirterminology to differentiate their product from competitors’ products as a means to increase sales. Over the centuries this business description grew to include specific agricultural techniques, processing practices, political policies, cultural, religious, and ethnic preferences. In essence each distinct geographic region of a country could impart both the cultural unique flavor and aroma of a region’s social environment and a business marketing description used to sell a product.
From this sensory profile locations became know for their agricultural products and our regional landscapes became inseparable from an individual’s sense of identity. English Historian Simon Schama reminds us that; “Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product.”[xxi] Food and wine are products of terroir annexed through the cultural, economic, and political mindset of humans. Terroir both creates and is created by the humans and environment of people in a specific location.
For this California and Santa Barbara wine story a cool Mediterranean climate with grape friendly soils determined the terroir, agriculture, industry, and the lifestyle of citizens. It also served as a lure to waves of both immigrants and American migrants that dates back to the 1849 Gold Rush. During the post-World War II years the state underwent a massive Sun-Belt population growth and by the 1990s ninety-five percent of the state’s thirty million citizens gravitated to urban centers in part due to the pull effect of the Cold War military-industrial complex. Overall the state benefited from a rapid rise in America’s consumer wealth and the new era of conspicuous consumption.[xxii] This growth, in turn, created new mass markets which opened opportunities for new agricultural industries best able to benefit from the economies of size offered by large-scale production. The California wine industry learned to use the components of terroir in a Wine By Design scheme composed of science, technology, and marketing to efficiently produce a quality marketable product in a profitable manner.
After over 200 years of mixed results American commercial grape-growers and wineries had finally found a perfect home and it did not take long for wine entrepreneurs to design a profitable industry. Yet, historian Erica Hannickel warns of a dark side to this new wine commercialism. She describes the California viticultural industry as having boosterish narratives guided by pastoral Republicanism and Manifest Destiny that left most people with a flawed version of American terroir. A version without the warts of environmental degradation, racism, capitalist greed, and class hierarchy. She argues that California’s capitalist wine culture had “acted as both a civilizing practice and one that strengthened Americas’ grip on the continent” and that “Viticulture was thus part of the elaborate, ever-evolving ideology that sanctioned imperial growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[xxiii] Through it all California agriculture became a capitalist terroir story with deep ties to consumerism, industrial food, California Cuisine, and an American wine culture.[xxiv]
[i] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek trans. Carl Wildman (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1981), 80.
[ii] Tim Unwin, Wine and The Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade, (New York: Routledge,1991), 3; Carlo Cipolla, “European Connoisseurs and California Wines,” Agricultural History (vol. XLIX, no. 1): 294-310.
[iii] Rex Pickett, Sideways: The Ultimate Road Trip. The Last Hurrah, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004).
[iv] Unwin, Wine and The Vine, passim.
[v] Ibid., 59.
[vi] Ibid., 41.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.,104.
[ix] Joni G. McNutt, In Praise of Wine: An Offering of Hearty Toasts, Quotations, Witticisms, Proverbs, and Poetry throughout History (Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1993), 108.
[x] Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), passim.
[xi] Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 105.
[xii] Lukacs, American Vintage, 35.
[xiii] M.K. Bennett, “Climate and Agriculture in California,” Economic Geography 15 (April 1939): 158-163.
[xiv] James J. Parsons, “Uniqueness of California,”American Quarterly 7: 1 (Spring, 1955): 45.
[xv] Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (generally translated as “community and society“) are categories coined in the late nineteenth-century by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies to categorize social ties or networks. Today it is defined by many as urban versus rural communities.
[xvi] John McPhee, Assembling California (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), passim.
[xvii] Ibid., 6-11.
[xviii] Ibid., 12-39; Brian J. Sommers, The Geography of Wine: How landscapes, Cultures, Terroir, and the Weather Make A Good Drop (New York: Plume, 2008), passim.
[xix] Kramer, Matt, Making Sense of California Wine (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992). Kramer first used the term “Somewhereness.”
[xx] Amy B. Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xiii-xviii.
[xxi] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books,1995), 9.
[xxii] Edward L. Ullman, “Amenities as a Factor in Regional Growth,” Geographical Review, XLIV, No. 1 (January 1954): 119-32.
[xxiii] Erica Hannickel, Empire Of Vines: Wine Culture In America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 5-13.
[xxiv] Victor W. Geraci, Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine (Cham: Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), passim.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTSPrefaceChapter One: Wine By Design: Wine Begins its Journey to Santa BarbaraChapter Two: Santa Barbara’s First Wine IndustryChapter Three: False Starts and the Road to Rediscovering Santa BarbaraChapter Four: The California Wine Revolution Looks To Santa BarbaraChapter Five: Santa Barbara Pioneers Plant Wine-grapesChapter Six: Santa Barbara Gains RecognitionChapter Seven: 1990s—Santa Barbara Gains Vintibusiness StatusChapter Eight: Booming Business—Continued ProblemsChapter Nine: Wine Is Here To StayChapter Ten: The New Millennium Brings New ChallengesChapter Eleven: New Millennium—New Land-use and Environmental ChallengesChapter Twelve: A Decade of Successful Expansion: 2000 to 2010Chapter Thirteen: Old Problems—New ChallengesChapter Fourteen: The Era of Boutique WineriesEpilogue: A Backward Look ForwardSources ConsultedIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Geraci is the author to read on the Santa Barbara wine industry. This book is the work of a master craftsman in history.