From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America

From Demon to Darling

From Demon to Darling

A LEGAL HISTORY OF WINE IN AMERICA

Richard Mendelson

Foreword by Margrit Biever Mondavi

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2009 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mendelson, Richard.

From demon to darling: a legal history of wine in

America / Richard Mendelson; foreword by Margrit

Biever Mondavi.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-520-25943-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Wine and wine making—Law and legislation—

United States—History.   I. Title.   II. Title: Legal

history of wine in America.

Manufactured in the United States of America

18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10   09

10    9    8   7    6    5    4   3    2    1

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains

50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum

requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997)

(Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents,

Max and Naomi Mendelson

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Wine Is Life: A Foreword by Margrit Biever Mondavi

Acknowledgments

Note

Introduction

1 / Temperance

2 / National Prohibition

3 / Solving Problems Past

4 / Transforming Wine in American Culture

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Reverend Increase Mather

2. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin

3. Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Moral and Physical Thermometer

4. The Ladies of Logan, Ohio

5. Saloon in Turret, Colorado, circa 1900

6. A woman’s liquor raid

7. Prohibition

8. Concannon’s 1929 Angelica, a sacramental wine

9. Port wine prescription: one ounce, three times per day

10. Vin Mariani advertisement in The Cosmopolitan, 1895

11. Vine-Glo advertisement, 1931

12. The Genna family of Chicago

13. The Galleron brothers, 1926

14. Prohibition bust in Colorado, circa 1920

15. The vintner Martin Ray and friends celebrate the end of Prohibition

16. Monopoly (or control) states

17. 25th Street Liquor Store, Ogden, Utah, circa 1969

18. East-Side Store, Pittsburgh, circa 2007

19. What a Headache! 1933

20. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

21. Robert Mondavi

22. Ernest and Julio Gallo

23. J. Lohr Cabernet Sauvignon, Northern California, nonvintage

24. Mendelson Pinot Noir, Santa Lucia Highlands AVA, Sleepy Hollow Vineyard, 2005

25. The crusading Strom Thurmond

26. Nancy Reagan promotes Just Say No

WINE IS LIFE

A Foreword by Margrit Biever Mondavi

I have always been fascinated—and often amused—by the intersection of wine and law, especially here in America. I was born and raised, you see, in the canton Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland. Every day our main meal, what we call lunch, was a celebration, and be it outside between rosebushes and hydrangeas or in our dining room, there was always a bottle of wine on the table. No fuss, no muss, it was part of our daily meal.

My first memories are of my little glass of water slightly tinted with wine and maybe a bit of sugar. As we grew up, it contained less water and more wine. Either way, wine was a natural part of the wonderful, delicious meals my mother cooked. It was an accepted part of daily life throughout Switzerland. I don’t even know if there was a consumer alcohol law in Switzerland at that time. Today, though, wine and beer are permitted there for those sixteen years and older, and hard liquor for those eighteen years and older.

I was first married to an American in the U.S. military. Our first U.S. assignment was in Igloo, South Dakota, beginning in 1947. I was surprised, almost unbelieving, when I realized that wine and alcoholic beverages were looked upon as almost illicit. The first time we went to a party in South Dakota, for instance, I realized that you could not drink and dance in the same place. We danced on the second floor, and anytime somebody wanted a drink they went down to the first floor. Of course, that left the women upstairs and the men merrily drinking downstairs. South Dakota was not exactly a culinary heaven, but we did go to restaurants for steaks and baked potatoes. When I ordered wine I was definitely looked at askance, and they brought me only a thimble of sweet port. I believe that at the time, bars in South Dakota—called saloons—were not allowed to have windows, so that women drinking inside could not be seen, and the entrances were in the rear. Laws were such in our county that no alcohol was sold on Sunday, but everybody went to the next county and loaded up the Chevrolet.

On our next assignment, in Spokane, I found that women (always referred to as ladies) were not allowed to carry a whiskey sour from a restaurant’s bar to its dining room. Only a waiter could do that. At that time, everybody started with a cocktail for the first course and then drank mugs of coffee with the rest of the dinner. (There was even a judging of which coffee went best with which pork chop!) Because of the Balkanized state of American wine laws and because of the reigning social mores, my first twenty years in the United States were pretty much wine-less.

When we moved to the Napa Valley, in 1960, I again had to wonder and laugh. The little town of Yountville had an old Veterans’ Home on its outskirts, housing over two thousand vets. It was not permitted to sell alcohol within 1.5 miles of the Home—and the little town of Yountville was exactly 1.5 miles from the Veterans’ Home! As a result, there were twenty-one bars in Yountville, most of them made of only cardboard and corrugated aluminum. Likewise, there was a fleet of ten taxicabs whose main job was to bring the lonely, thirsty vets back and forth. By contrast, the nearby town of Napa, with a population of seventeen thousand, had only one taxicab.

Still, when I settled into the Napa Valley, I truly thought, Eureka!—this is it. And here I met a wonderful man. Wine was his passion. Bob Mondavi and I were married over twenty-seven happy years, and there wasn’t a day that we didn’t open a good bottle of wine. We usually opened it before supper, and by the evening’s end the bottle was empty. Bob not only thought and acted like a European, he wanted to change America’s attitude toward wine and food. And when Bob had a project, he realized it. He worked hard and spent a lot of energy and money doing the industry’s job in telling the truth about wine. His Mission program—to promote wine as an integral part of our culture, our heritage, and the gracious way of life—echoed across the country, and for this endeavor we brought together eminent artists, academics, and food and wine people. Dr. Curtis Ellison went on to star on the landmark CBS 60 Minutes program that explained why the French have a high-fat diet but very low rates of coronary heart disease, a phenomenon known as the French Paradox. That program changed, in a profound way, the image of wine in this country.

With only one exception—regarding at what age young people can be served wine at the table—our country has made great strides when it comes to wine and law. In that regard, I still believe in the method we followed in Switzerland. We introduced tiny amounts of wine to the children, diluted for the younger ones, and to me that is the safest and most effective insurance against later alcohol misuse. I followed that method with my own three children, and it worked beautifully. They understand and appreciate wine but never abuse it.

Thanks to my unusual background, I read Richard Mendelson’s history of wine law in America with great interest and appreciation. Richard tells the story in a clear and illuminating way. His book belongs in every wine library and winery and every other establishment that caters to wine and wine lovers. I wish Richard great success, and I congratulate him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This labor of love, which arose from my Wine Law class at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law), has been supported by many people who have shared their knowledge, research, insights, and perspectives. They include, in alphabetical order, Nicholas Bergman, Lou Bright, Federico Castellucci, Paul Chutkow, Joe Ciatti, Neil Cohen, Joe Criscione, Dan Davis, John DeLuca, Jon Fredrikson, Richard Gahagan, Harley Garrett, Lawrence Gedda, John Gillespie, Jim Goldberg, Steve Gross, George Hacker, Jerry Jolly, Wendell Lee, Kingsley Liu, John Manfreda, Robert Mondavi, Margrit Biever Mondavi, Vincent O’Brien, Persis Ramroth, Dean Rowan, Jean-Claude Ruf, Hobert Rupe, James Seff, Jim Sgueo, Representative Mike Thompson, Robert Tinlot, Rob Tobiassen, Dotson Wilson, Chris Wirth, Lawrence Wu, and Robert Zerkowitz. I also owe debts of gratitude to a cadre of courteous, patient, and professional librarians and researchers at the American Medical Association, Berkeley Law, Giannini Foundation Library, California State Library, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and Wine Institute. Dean Rowan of Berkeley Law and Robert Zerkowitz of the Wine Institute, in particular, went above and beyond the call of duty.

I extend a special thank you to my daughter, Margot Mendelson, who grew up around wine and is herself a legal scholar and the finest writer I know. Margot collaborated with me on the research and writing of chapter one and served as my editor-in-residence. Other special contributors include my secretary, Jaymie Kilgore, my Berkeley Law student researchers Dana Howells and Eleanor Blume, my partners at the law offices of Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty, who supported me in every way, and my family, including son Anthony, who now works in the wine business, and my wife, best friend, and fellow wine lover, Marilyn Knight-Mendelson.

Without the help and encouragement of all of these people and the vision of Blake Edgar of the University of California Press, this book never would have been written. That being said, I take full responsibility for the contents.

Richard Mendelson

Napa, California

NOTE

While the story of wine in America is captivating, the laws regulating wine and other alcoholic beverages are often hopelessly complex. For readers who are interested in this level of detail, I have included numerous legal citations and other supporting information in the backnotes. Readers who do not wish to be so distracted should disregard the backnote references.

Introduction

Two weeks after I arrived at Oxford in September 1975, I rambled down a corner staircase in the main quadrangle of Magdalen College to a nondescript door marked Wine Steward. Little did I know that it was the entrance to the college’s massive underground cellars and my future career. Over the next two years those cellars served as my introduction to the world of wine and led me to France and then America in pursuit of fine wines and their accompaniments—food, art, history, and culture. Law would come later.

As a native Floridian, I had never drunk or heard about any of the wines on the college’s wine list, and I could hardly pronounce their names—Chambertin, Pouilly-Fuissé, Graacher Himmelreich, and the like. Magdalen offers its wines to students at cost plus a small markup. Access to the cellar’s stock depends on the length of your gown; undergraduates have the most limited access and dons the most extensive. I was a graduate student with a thigh-high gown, so the steward handed me the fifteen-page wine list, full of offerings from around the world, including old vintages, and all at reasonable prices. I committed to drinking my way through that list during my two-year stay.

Before Oxford, the only wines I had drunk were jug wines swilled at college parties and Manishewitz drunk with the family at Passover. Mostly my friends and I drank beer and punch laced with grain alcohol. The Old World changed all of that.

I was captivated by the wonderful array of aromas and flavors, by the wine labels and bottles ranging from classic to exotic, and by the foreign names. The British, without serious domestic wines of their own, fancy themselves the world’s wine cognoscenti. I attended the wine auctions sponsored by Christie’s and the social tastings of the Oxford University Wine and Food Society. My friend Kingsley Liu ran the Oxford University Wine Circle, training its members for blind tasting competitions, including the main event against rival Cambridge. And I took wine education courses offered by the London Wine and Spirit Education Trust and cooking classes at Cordon Bleu in London. For each wine that I sampled or drank, I recorded tasting notes in a black book, next to the label that I had carefully soaked off the bottle.

My introduction to winemaking came after my two-year stint at Oxford, when I landed a job in Beaune at the négotiant house of Bouchard Aîné et Fils. For a year I drove our customers around the Burgundy vineyards, from Gevrey Chambertin to Mercurey. After our visits I would conduct tastings of wines from each of the areas we had visited. I met my wife, Marilyn, over a double blind tasting of Côtes de Nuits wines. Through these tastings I came to appreciate the concept of terroir, which posits that a wine’s character and flavors reflect the unique features of the site where the grapes are grown.

In Burgundy I saw the inner workings of the cellars and the occasional shenanigans. I already had learned the ins and outs of wine labeling in England. We used to hunt down cheap Burgundy appellation wines from the vintages of the early 1970s that were the same as those labeled under more exclusive appellations selling at far more expensive prices. In those days, France imposed strict yield limits for the smallest and most prestigious appellations. But many winegrowers did not limit the size of their crop. Instead, they called the same grapes by different appellation names. For example, two tons of the crop would be called Clos de Bèze, and the remaining tonnage from the same vineyard would be declassified as Gevrey Chambertin, Côtes de Nuits, or simply Burgundy. But all the wines were the same, made from grapes harvested at the same place and at the same time. Unfortunately, France changed this system before I could locate and lay down a good stock of the declassified wines.

By the time I returned to America, I had a good palate, a command of French, and an understanding of how Burgundy wines are made and sold around the world. I knew about the splash that California wine was making, especially in Europe following the Paris tasting of 1976, so Marilyn and I headed to Napa Valley, America’s best known appellation, at the end of 1978. The following year, after considering a job at Gallo to launch their new range of varietal wines, I decided to leave behind my nascent wine career for a legal education.

At that time I had no notion that the field of wine law existed. Neither Prohibition nor the Twenty-first Amendment was mentioned in any of my law classes at Stanford. With the support and encouragement of Jim Seff, who ran the legal division of Wine Institute, the trade association of California wineries, I spent a semester there during law school researching and writing about various wine law issues. But when I graduated in 1982, there were no job offerings for wine lawyers. Although the laws regulating the wine industry often were throwbacks to the Prohibition era and required both a lawyer and a historian to understand them, the industry was small and relied on self-help.

Three years later, as a litigation associate in San Francisco, wine came calling again, this time in the form of projects to establish wine appellations in Napa Valley and Temecula Valley. A year later, Marilyn and I returned to Napa for good. For the past twenty-two years, I have grown up with the wine industry, seen it expand, and, more important, witnessed the development of a genuine wine tradition in America, the likes of which Thomas Jefferson had envisioned at the founding of the republic. But this development was slow in coming. Native vines and imported Vitis vinifera vines did not thrive in early America, and hybrids had not yet been discovered. Domestic wine was made drinkable only by fortification and adulteration. In addition, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and immigration during the nineteenth century had made for a country of hard drinkers. The resulting temperance movement, fueled by religious revivalism, only occasionally distinguished wine from beer or spirits. Although ardent spirits and seedy saloons owned by brewers motivated temperance reformers, wines were tarred with the same brush during the waves of prohibition and teetotalism that swept through the country and culminated in National Prohibition.

Although Prohibition is widely regarded as the noble experiment that failed, its legacy continues to this day in the lingering fear of an all powerful whiskey trust and an underground liquor trade replete with bootleggers, racketeers, political corruption, excessive drinking, and various forms of licentiousness. Little wonder that government is so distrustful of the liquor industry. The Twenty-first Amendment that officially ended Prohibition assigned the control of intoxicating liquors to the states, allowing those that wished to remain dry to do so. Each state, and sometimes each county and city, chose its particular approach to liquor control on the theory that the only enforceable laws are those that the local community will accept. As a result, there are literally hundreds of different regulatory systems for wine in America. In addition, the federal government has its own comprehensive set of liquor laws and regulations, which cover many of the same subjects as those of the states. The result is a minefield of complex rules and exceptions that comprise nine volumes and more than fifty thousand pages in the Liquor Control Law Reporter.¹

I learned the details of wine law by handling cases covering every aspect of the wine business from grape growing to wine production, including distribution, sales, pricing, marketing, advertising, labeling, taxation, and licensing in the fifty states. I found that the only way to explain the arcane wine laws to my clients was to recount American history—our zeal for temperance; the early allure of cider, beer, spirits, and cheap fortified wines; and the failure of Prohibition. Without this explanation, the prospective winemaker, wholesaler, or retailer never could fathom the extensive background checks on their personal and financial qualifications, the tied-house rules and business practice restrictions that are unique to the alcoholic beverage industries, or the mass of red tape required to ship wine from one state to another.

During the course of my career, I have witnessed the development of an authentic American wine culture. I had the privilege of working with the pioneers—the Mondavis, the Gallos, the Martinis, and the Wine Institute, to name but a few. They envisioned and worked tirelessly to realize a legitimate place for wine in American society. In a single generation they transformed an underground industry making low-quality wine into an international economic force with a solid reputation for quality.

The laws, however, remained mired in Prohibition, designed to oppose evils and excesses that no longer existed. As the domestic wine industry succeeded and grew, the anachronistic features of the liquor control systems became increasingly apparent. The U.S. Supreme Court, which more than a century before had slowed the march to Prohibition by insisting on free trade in liquor among the states, again played a critical role in a landmark 2005 case that overturned discriminatory wine laws that blocked interstate shipments of wine to consumers.

The twenty-first century presents a unique opportunity to expand Americans’ appreciation of wine and liberalize access to wine in our country. Today, grapes are grown and wine is made in all fifty states. The number of wine-drinking constituents and elected representatives has risen dramatically in the past quarter century. Their wine partisanship has boosted wine consumption and provides the political will necessary to change obsolete liquor laws.

Wine has been alternatively the demon and the darling of American society since colonial times. Any thought that this duality no longer exists is misguided. Prohibitionist sentiment has not disappeared in America, nor will it anytime soon. The same concerns that motivated anti-alcohol activists in the past will recur—concerns for morality, religion, social stability, personal health, and public safety. Indeed, the concept of a sin tax is deeply embedded in American culture.

I have written this book in the earnest hope that the present and future generations of winemakers, wine drinkers, and wine attorneys will understand our country’s unique liquor history, appreciate concerns about liquor use and abuse, and participate actively in public policy debates about wine, beer, and spirits. Without that knowledge and involvement, wine will not achieve or maintain its rightful place as a beverage of temperance, culture, and health in America.

ONE

Temperance

One can scarcely study the history of liquor legislation leading up to the adoption of the Prohibition Amendment without coming to the conclusion that too often we have attempted to impose on law a burden which law by itself is not equipped to carry.

RAYMOND B. FOSDICK AND ALBERT L. SCOTT,

Toward Liquor Control (1933)

Since the early days of the republic, Americans have turned to the law to achieve their social goals with respect to wine, devising elaborate systems of legal incentives, subsidies, restrictions, and penalties in an effort to shape behavior. American laws since the early seventeenth century have regulated everything from the manufacture and marketing of wine to its distribution and consumption, and these laws have been almost continuously generated, dismantled, revived, revised, and reimagined.

The content of the laws and regulations regarding wine has varied dramatically as cultural perspectives on alcoholic beverages changed.¹ Over time, wine laws have been used for achieving highly divergent goals, ranging from directly encouraging viticulture in the colonies and the early republic to imposing stiff fines and criminal penalties upon people who distributed wine during statewide, and later national, prohibition. The early colonial governments went so far as to legally require citizens to plant vines; several hundred years later, state and federal governments were dispatching agents to wineries to enforce their permanent closure.

Historically, temperance has been the most important objective of American liquor law, but the meaning of temperance has changed dramatically over time. In the eighteenth century, temperance meant the moderate use of all intoxicating liquors, including beer, wine, and spirits.² By the early nineteenth century, it meant the moderate use of fermented liquors and total abstinence from distilled spirits. By the mid-1800s, it meant abstinence from all liquors, including fermented drinks.

These varying conceptions of temperance have been influenced by changing moral, religious, medical, social, and economic factors, which in turn shaped American culture and drinking customs. Key figures in American history have embraced and personified these views of temperance, and they have relied on various legal approaches to achieve their objectives, including the criminalization of public drunkenness, liquor licensing, local plebiscites on whether and when to allow alcoholic beverage sales (known as local option), and prohibition. During the nineteenth century, these laws were challenged repeatedly in the courts on constitutional grounds ranging from free trade to due process. The courts became the battleground for the fight between individual liberties (the right to manufacture wine and drink it) and public welfare (the concept of order and public health).

Despite the support of a domestic wine industry by early American leaders like Puritan minister Increase Mather and President Thomas Jefferson, wine could not escape the drive toward prohibition in the nineteenth century. The failed early efforts at domestic viticulture stymied the development of a wine tradition that might have withstood the onslaught of those who were now advocating abstinence. By the mid-1800s, when technical progress in grape growing and winemaking enabled the production of decent wine, prohibition already was taking hold of the country. Wine became just another form of alcohol, caught up in the crusade against demon rum, the whiskey trust, and brewery-owned saloons.

The courts, which for a time insisted on free trade among the states, could not thwart the political and ideological zeal of the prohibitionists. Local option led to statewide prohibition and, eventually, National Prohibition. Yet this evolution did not ultimately promote the cause of temperance. Regulating personal behavior was both unpopular and unrealistic, and those who wanted to drink found a way to do so.

EARLY ASPIRATIONS FOR WINE

The earliest wine laws in America were designed by settlers and colonial governments to actively develop and encourage an American wine tradition. The settlers had come to the New World in search of riches and the trappings of a prosperous life, and they viewed wine cultivation as a tangible sign of colonial success.³

The colonial governments wasted no time in devising a range of laws and inducements to encourage vineyard development and wine production. One form of support was to arrange and sponsor the immigration of experts from France to advise the settlers in Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas on vine planting and to share technical expertise about viticulture and winemaking.⁴ In 1621, the king of England instructed the governor of Virginia to plant abundance of vines, and take care of the vignerons sent.⁵ The first legislature of that colony in 1623 required every man to plant a quarter-acre garden with vines.⁶

The pilgrims and other separatist Puritans who settled in New England and along the Atlantic seaboard accepted the consumption of alcoholic beverages. They regarded fermented beverages, in particular, as gifts to be revered, safer to drink than water.⁷ The Puritans had carried copious amounts of beer and cider with them on their maiden voyages to the New World.⁸ Conspicuously absent was wine, a beverage that found its way to the tables of only the most opulent, just as it had in England prior to the colonial enterprise.⁹

Alcoholic beverages were an integral part of the colonial social fabric. The Puritans believed that alcohol, consumed in moderation, had rejuvenative powers.¹⁰ Wine, for example, was prescribed by physicians to keep the body warm in cold weather, aid digestion, and ward off fevers.¹¹ Alcohol also was a stimulant for physical labor and an aid to conviviality.

The most common drinking establishment was the tavern—sometimes referred to as the ordinary—which, along with the church, was at the center of community life. Although its main purpose was to cater to the needs of the traveler, the tavern primarily served local clientele, offering food, drink, and various forms of social recreation, from music to political discourse to gambling.

The Puritan work ethic extolled the industriousness necessary to promote a domestic wine industry. Yet the Puritans also decried drunkenness as a sin. Increase Mather, the minister of Boston’s Old North Church and later president of Harvard University, expressed a commonly held view in his Wo to Drunkards (1673): The wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.¹² Increase and his son, Cotton, preached incessantly against intemperance. They feared that the abuse of alcohol would ruin the Puritans physically and economically and, in so doing, drown very much of Christianity.¹³

The colonies imposed legal sanctions against public drunkenness to thwart intemperance.¹⁴ Some colonial governments defined excessive drinking in their statutes. In Massachusetts Bay colony in 1672, it was illegal for an innkeeper to permit drinking above a half pint of wine for one person, at a time, or to continue Tipling above the space of half an hour, . . . or after nine of the Clock at night.¹⁵ Even the Keeper of Wines was prohibited from allowing anyone to drink to excess in his wine cellars.¹⁶ The drunkard paid a fine for the first offense, double fines for the second offense, and treble fines for the third offense. If the parties be not able to pay the fines, then he that is found Drunk shall be punished by whipping, to the number of ten stripes; and he that offends in excessive or long Drinking, shall be put into the Stocks for three hours, when the weather may not hazard his life or limbs. And if they offend the fourth time, they shall be imprisoned until they put in two sufficient sureties for their good Behaviour.¹⁷ Many colonies banned liquor sales altogether to habitual drunkards, minors, and Native Americans.¹⁸

Figure 1. Reverend Increase Mather, who said, Drunkenness is a sin. Engraving from The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1849. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-75070.

Unfortunately for the Puritans, both the development of a domestic wine industry and the struggle to control drunkenness failed. The English colonists in New York, New Jersey, the Virginias, and the Carolinas, as well as the Germans in Pennsylvania tried earnestly, but unsuccessfully, to make wine from native grapes.¹⁹ In Virginia, the legislature informed the king of England in 1628, With respect to the planting of vines, they have great hope, that it will prove a beneficial commodity; but the vignerons sent here either did not understand the business, or concealed their skill; for they spent their time to little purpose.²⁰

More than a century later, in 1733, the inventor, author, politician, and bon vivant Benjamin Franklin offered instructions in his famous Poor Richard’s Almanack on how to make Wine of the Grapes which grow Wild in our Woods.²¹ But the wines were foxy²² and of poor quality, made drinkable only by adulteration—with sugar, flavorings, and preservatives—and fortification.²³ Cider, made from fermented apples, was far more drinkable and more popular than wine. The settlers tried planting the European grape species known to produce fine wines, Vitis vinifera, which they imported, but those vines died because of excessively cold winters or high humidity that led to mildew and rot.²⁴ It was not until the 1820s, when American hybrids were introduced, that decent dry wines began to be produced.²⁵

The battle against public drunkenness was similarly ineffectual because of the allure of ardent spirits.²⁶ Rum aficionado Wayne Curtis writes: Starting about 1700, the colonial taste for home-brewed beer and cider began to fade and was displaced by an abiding thirst for stronger liquors.²⁷ The nation’s first rum distillery was established in 1664 on what is now Staten Island, and the production of rum from fermented molasses or sugarcane quickly became an essential industry in colonial America. American rum was exported and celebrated around the world, especially in Europe, and Americans themselves partook liberally of this domestic product. By 1770, the average white inhabitant of the Continental Colonies drank 4.2 gallons of rum per year.²⁸

One wonders whether an American wine culture would have been more readily established if the French had won the French and Indian War and not ceded its territory in North America to Britain in 1763.²⁹ Given the historic importance of wine in everyday French life, perhaps that would have been so. The British favored spirits, particularly gin,³⁰ and the fortified wines of Portugal and Spain—Port, Sherry, and Madeira—which British traders shipped around the world. Madeira, with its unique burnt flavor from trans-Atlantic shipment in casks exposed to the sun, was preferred by society families in America from colonial times until the mid-1800s.

Beloved as rum came to be in the early American republic, whiskey—distilled from such grains as barley, corn, and rye—became the American alcohol of choice after the Revolutionary War. When the British blockade interrupted the importation of foreign rum and molasses, farmers began to distill their surplus grains into whiskey. These liquid assets could easily be shipped or bartered.

According to the historian Thomas Pegram, Americans between 1780 and 1830 drank more alcohol, on an individual basis, than at any other time in the history of the nation.³¹ Liquor was ubiquitous. Workers received daily rations of spirits—a half gill of rum-and-water at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and again at four in the afternoon.³² And there was drinking at every social occasion. In 1790, alcohol consumption in America was 5.8 gallons per person of drinking age—mostly spirits and cider; it had increased to 7.1 gallons by 1810.³³

Wine was not consumed in large quantities—a mere six-tenths of a gallon per person of drinking age at the end of the eighteenth century. At one dollar per gallon (four times the price of a gallon of whiskey), wine was a luxury.³⁴ Nevertheless, wine occupied a uniquely privileged role because American leaders actively supported the establishment of an American wine industry and were known to drink it regularly themselves. Domestic vines and wine were exempt from taxation throughout the early republic, and the fledgling liquor industry was protected from international competition by import duties.³⁵

The first five presidents of the United States—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—were all close friends, enjoyed wine together on innumerable occasions and spoke and wrote much about the moderate beverage.³⁶ Of them all, Jefferson was the true connoisseur and the great patron and promoter of American wines for Americans.³⁷ Born and raised on a farm in Virginia and trained as an attorney, Jefferson later served as minister to France and tasted his way through the wine regions of that country. He promoted wine as a natural medicine for health³⁸ and prescribed for his ailing daughter Maria sherry, which was, in his opinion, as effectual to prevent as to cure [her] fever.³⁹ Jefferson drank wine, not spirits; in his later years, he even shunned fortified wines.⁴⁰

Figure 2. Thomas Jefferson (seated) and Benjamin Franklin (in profile, left) were early wine partisans