"Soft Earth - Black Grape": Experience of Italian Winemakers in California

"Soft Earth Black Grape" provides evidence that previously deterministic assumption found in much of the available scholarly literature that Piedmontese immigrants successfully transplanted a shared, traditional wine culture to California thanks to

striking geographic, climatic, and environmental similarities between the place they had left behind and the Golden State, were Totally Incorrect..

To the Contrary, None of the successful entrepreneurs had any enological training prior to immigration, let alone the skills that a modern wine industry would have required. Lacking the initial capital, the would-be winemakers typically purchased marginal and poor tracts of land, which scarcely resembled the hilly landscapes of their native surroundings. Intensive immigrant labor, first and foremost, transformed what would have been hopeless efforts into profitable investments.

The book also touches on the Racial Discrimination against Italians and how Prohibition effected the Italian grape growers.

Soft Earth Black Grape:

Labor, Social Capital, and Race in the Experience of Italian Winemakers in California

By Simone Cinotto

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian-Swiss Colony of Asti in Sonoma County shipped thousands of gallons of wine each year from San Francisco to large cities along the eastern coast of the United States, as well as various destinations abroad.

Its director, a former pharmacist named Pietro Carlo Rossi, was widely considered one of the brightest minds in the California wine industry.

At the same time, Secondo Guasti, the founder of the Italian Vineyard Company in Cucamonga (some fifty miles east of Los Angeles), could claim to possess the largest vineyards in the entire world. And in 1933, Ernest and Julio Gallo established the Gallo Winery in Modesto, California that was destined to become the leading American wine company after World War II. Rossi, Guasti, and the Gallos were all first- and second-generation Italian immigrants who had come to California from Langhe and Monferrato, two small neighboring rural areas in southeastern Piedmont.

Why did such a negligible number of immigrants from a single Italian region have such a dramatic impact on a major trade in California’s economy? Soft Earth Black Grape deconstructs and rejects the deterministic assumption found in much of the available scholarly literature whereby Piedmontese immigrants successfully transplanted a shared, traditional wine culture to California thanks to striking geographic, climatic, and environmental similarities between the place they had left behind and the Golden State.

None of the successful entrepreneurs discussed in the book had any enological training prior to immigration, let alone the skills that a modern wine industry would have required.

Lacking the initial capital, the would-be winemakers typically purchased marginal and poor tracts of land, which scarcely resembled the hilly landscapes of their native surroundings. Intensive immigrant labor, first and foremost, transformed what would have been hopeless efforts into profitable investments.

In fact, it was social capital - their ability to access limited resources like credit and cheap labor through personal, ethnic, and family social networks - that gave Piedmontese winemakers the initial edge over competitors who were richer in financial capital. As for labor relations, they could not only take advantage of a constant source of skilled manpower - supplied by professional chain migrations from Piedmont - but they were also able to keep both wages and conflict to a minimum.

Race was a major factor. As opposed to what happened to their more numerous counterparts in industrial cities like New York and Chicago - where a major in-migration of Blacks from the South did not take place until the interwar years- from the very beginning (in the 1870s), Italian immigrants entered a complicated racial mosaic in California that included a significant population of people of color (Chinese, Latinos, and later Japanese, African Americans, and Filipinos).

Scientific racism and a racial division of labor caused them to be placed in what labor historians David Roediger and James Barrett have called in-between jobs: unskilled, low-paid occupations in agriculture, destined for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe whose racial identity - and sometimes even whiteness - was disputed. In 1911, the survey on "The Wine-Making Industry of California" by the US Congress Immigration Commission discriminated among "white" (American born and non-Italian European immigrants), Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican winery workers. Italians and Japanese were among the lowest-paid workers in the trade.

On the other hand, due to the presence of "non-white" groups that were permanently marginalized and discriminated against (which in viticulture meant being assigned the most demanding, dangerous, and tiresome temporary jobs for minimal salaries), Italian immigrants enjoyed the wages of whiteness - the privileges inherent in the fact of never being at the very bottom of a racially-determined social ladder.

Piedmontese winemakers resorted vigorously to paternalism, non-monetary benefits, and open discrimination against their "non-white" workers in order to secure the loyal cooperation of their coethnic employees. [ This was similar to the Jewish "We help each other mentality.]

Race was also an important factor in determining the success of Piedmontese winemakers over other competing Italian groups. Racial discrimination among compatriots had been a feature of Italian life since the political unification of the country. In California "different again from what was happening in the rest of the United States" Northern Italians were more numerous than Southerners, and regional-sectional conflicts exploded out of the efforts by different groups to control economic niches, which were narrated and construed in terms of racial differences.

Their early take-over of the wine niche provided the Piedmontese with a dramatic advantage over later comers, which they transformed into cultural capital- the narrative of the "Piedmontese as skilled winemaker." Ironically, the historiography of Italian immigration to California has subsequently transformed this capital into the "explanation" for the success of the Piedmontese in the California wine business.

Matters of race further overlapped with the accumulation of social and cultural capital in determining the consolidation of the Piedmontese presence in the California grape and wine industry during Prohibition. While wine was never considered a truly “American" product in the United States before the 1960s, the Temperance movement managed to attach a nasty stigma of foreignness to the production, commerce, and consumption of it from the 1820s on. In the cultural and political climate of World War I and its aftermath, it was exactly the association of wine, along with other alcoholic beverages, to any "alien force" present in American society that led to National Prohibition (not incidentally concurrent with the racist Immigration Acts of 1921-1924, mainly directed against Italians and other Southern and Eastern European national groups).

Spurring the retreat of German Americans (who were especially targeted by the 100 percent Americanism of WWI and the Red Scare of 1919-1921) and other competitors from the wine trade, Prohibition was paradoxically the main factor in creating a distinctive Italian niche in viticulture. Because of the dispensation in the Volstead Act that allowed the domestic production of wine for selfconsumption, Piedmontese winemakers turned into grape growers and shippers, and they relied on a commercial network of ethnic growers, distributors, and auctioneers to flood the markets of immigrant consumers in enclaves of the eastern industrial cities. Much of the wine produced out of the grapes they shipped eventually entered the illegal market. In fact, the illegality of transforming those grapes into wine for commercial purposes supported the price of the product sent off by the Piedmontese viticulturists to their fellow-countrymen in the east, and in turn allowed them not only to survive Prohibition, but also to gain even further shares of the market and to emerge at the time of the Repeal as major actors in the wine business. Prohibition frustrated the dream of earlier Piedmontese entrepreneurs to create a national market for wine, forcing them to rely on a relatively vast, but still limited and risky, ethnic market. Even the Gallos, who eventually realized the dream of their first-generation predecessors, had to depend on an ethnic market for several years: their early products "cheap and fortified wines" were designed for and mostly consumed by poor consumers in the Black ghettoes of the decaying inner cities. It was only in the late 1960s that their efforts to turn wine into a mainstream American beverage could be considered successful.

Rich in anecdotes and oral histories, and complete with more than one hundred photographs, "Soft Earth Black Grape" is an interesting case study of the social history of wine, the history of ethnic entrepreneurship, and the history of Italian immigration in the United States.

The Author is a member of the Piero Bairati Center for American and Euro-American Studies at the Universities of Turin and Eastern Piedmont, Italy. He teaches Food History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo and Colorno, where he is the Coordinator of an International Graduate Program in “Food Culture: Communicating Quality Products”. He also teaches US Social History at the University of Turin. He is the author of Una famiglia che mangia insieme: cibo ed etnicit? nella comunit? italoamericana di New York, 1920-1940 [A Family That Eats Together: Food and Ethnicity in the Italian AmericanCommunity of New York City, 1920-1940] (2001). His article “Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the Eating Habits of Italian Immigrants in New York” won the 2004 David Thelen Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best article on American history published in a

language other than English, and was published in The Journal of American History. He has been Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2004), Visiting Fellow of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University (2000), Visiting Scholar of the History Department at Columbia University (1998, 2000, 2007) and Resident Fellow of The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia (1998, 2000).

SOURCE: H-ITAM@H-NET.MSU.EDU