Salud!
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Salud!

The Rise Of Santa Barbara's Wine Industry

Victor W. Geraci

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eBook - ePub

Salud!

The Rise Of Santa Barbara's Wine Industry

Victor W. Geraci

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About This Book

In 1965, soil and climatic studies indicated that the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria valleys of Santa Barbara County, California, offered suitable conditions for growing high-quality wine grapes. Thus was launched a revival of the area's two-centuries-old wine industry that by 1995 made Santa Barbara County an internationally prominent wine region. Salud! traces the evolution of Santa Barbara viticulture in the larger context of California's history and economy, offering insight into one of the state's most important industries. California has produced wine since Spanish missionaries first planted grapes to make sacramental wines, but it was not until the late twentieth century that changing consumer tastes and a flourishing national economy created the conditions that led to the state's wine boom. Historian Victor W. Geraci uses the Santa Barbara wine industry as a case study to analyze the history and evolution of American viticulture from its obscure colonial beginnings to its current international acclaim. As elsewhere in the state, Santa Barbara County vintners faced the multiple challenges of selecting grape varieties appropriate to their unique conditions, protecting their crops from disease and insects, developing local wineries, and of marketing their products in a highly competitive national and international market. Geraci gives careful attention to all the details of this production: agriculture, science, and technology; capitalization and investment; land-use issues; politics; the specter posed by the behemoth Napa and multinational wine corporations; and the social and personal consequences of creating and supporting an industry vulnerable to so many natural and economic crises. His extensive research includes interviews with many industry professionals. California is today one of the world's major wine producers, and Santa Barbara County contributes significantly to the volume and renowned quality of this wine production. Salud! offers a highly engaging overview of an industry in which the ancient romance of wine too often obscures a complex and diverse modern vintibusiness that for better, and sometimes for worse, has shaped the regions it dominates.

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Information

Year
2004
ISBN
9780874176414

Chapter 1

NORTHERN EUROPEAN ROOTS AND THE FIRST AMERICAN WINE CULTURE

Wine Traditions
Warmed by an evening of cheap wine Zorba lectured his capitalist friend on “how simple and frugal a thing is happiness.” He continued his scolding with a firm reminder that “a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier,” and “the sound of the sea” are at the soul of the human experience.1 Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek captures the depth of wine’s mythical role in Western cultural tradition. His chief character provides readers with a living paradigm of the beverage’s ability to temporarily release humans from the bondage of everyday life. Moreover, the simple Greek philosopher Zorba reminds his friend, and many readers, that wine imparts a glimpse of the good life.
Inherent in the story is the symbiotic relationship between the grind of daily existence and the need for moments of distraction from its constant burdens. 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. Although not entirely analogous, the story exemplifies the need of humans, ancient and modern, to escape to the simple life in an increasingly complex world. One way to achieve this diversion is through wine and its back-to-nature associations. Just as wine’s legendary spirit flowed through Zorba’s veins, it has streamed for more than seven thousand years through the history of Western civilization. Over time wine culture became the story of a journey, beginning in northern Iran and continuing west to embrace Egyptian, Greek, Roman, European, and American wine enthusiasts.2 Integral to the story has been the business of viticulture, the science of grape growing, and viniculture, the study of winemaking.
Throughout this journey scholars and oenophiles studied and praised wine for its dual role as a preserved food and as a beverage for feasting and celebrating. Early fascination with grapes and wine provided humans with one of their first domesticated crops as well as with a cultural food heritage. This concern for grapes and wine intensified over the last two millennia, as Europeans and then Americans utilized the food and beverage as a medicinal substance, a major trade item, and a symbol of their God. Thus, wine’s role has played itself out in the political and economic dramas of the empires built by the Greeks, Romans, early Christians, European nations, the New World colonies, and modern nation states.
The libation became deeply rooted in Western civilization’s economic and political story as early entrepreneurs profited from the lucrative international wine trade. Historical geographer Tim Unwin describes this cultural landscape of viticulture as “an expression of transformations and interactions in the economic, social, political and ideological structures of a particular people at a specific place.”3 Wine and viticulture became historically intertwined with politics, legal systems, cultures, and prevailing economic systems throughout the world. Thus by the fourteenth century viticulture served as one of many symbols of power for Northern and Western European ruling classes. More important, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wine merchants experimented with the mercantile (and later capitalist) ideas of capital, credit, banking, new technology, and marketing.4
In America, this history of wine manifested itself as a translocated struggle of a wealthy class in need of an artistic hobby, a wine industry seeking profits, a consumer-focused middle class seeking symbols of the good life, the Jeffersonian agrarian myth, the quest of temperance and religious groups to legislate alcohol morality, and a nation in search of a national public health policy. Wine served as the lubricant for the machines of human movement across continents and oceans and found success and a friendly audience on California’s central coast. Zorba could now rest assured that many Americans had finally embraced, on a limited basis, the world’s wine culture.
Western Civilization’s Wine Roots
Jews and Christians integrated wine into their ceremonies and entrenched its symbolic power in the psyche of future generations. The Old Testament tells how Noah, a tenth-generation descendent of Adam, survived forty days and forty nights on an ark, and then cultivated a vineyard as soon as the floodwater receded. Jewish and Christian scriptures remember how “Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and was drunken” (Gen. 9:20–21 KJV). Medical historical researcher Isadore Kaplan believes that this was the first recorded case of alcoholism and that Noah’s drunkenness followed by delirium tremens pushed him to banish and curse his son Ham. To this day Jews celebrate their Passover seder feast with enough wine for a minimum of four glasses per guest—not including the glass set for the prophet Elijah. Jewish sacred ceremonies like the bris (circumcision ceremony) and wedding feast also include a symbolic role for wine.5
Christians have carried their own wine tradition through the centuries. Their biblical narrative utilizes wine symbolism in liturgical and allegorical instruction for believers and in lessons for candidates seeking conversion. Genesis 27:28 says “God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.” Ceremonial wine symbolism is further established in the book of Numbers 28:7: “In the holy place shalt thou cause the strong wine to be poured unto the Lord for a drink offering.” Old Testament scripture continues in Isaiah 24:11 with warnings: “There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.”
New Testament scripture continues the biblical wine theme. Throughout time, wedding feasts have served as a major celebratory and generational symbol. John 2:3–11 recounts the story of Jesus Christ turning water into wine at the Cana wedding feast so the celebration could continue. Wine becomes the most recognized Christian symbol in the story of the Last Supper, during which Christ symbolically shares his soon-to be-sacrificed blood in a communion of wine (Mark 14:23–24). Mentions of wine in the Bible also provide more practical lessons, as shown in Mark 2:22, which includes a description of proper wine bottling.
After the fall of the Roman empire, religious leaders and wine producers, concerned about maintaining adequate supplies of suitable ceremonial wine and guaranteeing business profits, attempted to manipulate government and religious policies to counteract the continuous economic, social, and political cycles that interrupted wine production. Catholic monastic orders kept the art of winemaking alive by seeking human solutions to pain and suffering. This created a conflict with conservative religious leaders who believed that suffering glorified God and helped pave the path to heaven and a better life. Eventually, wine’s image as a healthful beverage and its reinstitution into the European pharmacopoeia in the latter Middle Ages deeply internalized Westerners’ beliefs in the value of wine.6 Today, ironically, reports of health benefits attributed to wine have met opposition in the United States at a time when scientific evidence has corroborated ancient health claims.
A weakening of the wine industry between 1300 and 1600 resulted in a restructured business configuration for European viticulture and viniculture. Population declines, from war and the plague, reduced the demand for wine and discouraged expansion of the industry. Large wineries with vast acreage and multiregional distribution responded by reducing in size and marketing locally. This industry constriction also led to the development of a clear distinction between the quality of wines produced for nobility and those pressed for the masses. Attempts to recentralize in the seventeenth century, based on the needs of new, burgeoning urban centers, sparked a limited resurgence in low-end bulk wine production. As a result, cheap or watered-down bulk wines for the masses proliferated as urban populations increased. Notwithstanding, many wineries maintained production of quality mid-level and higher-end wines for the nobility. They accomplished this while retaining their small regional structure that utilized the best grapes and the best technological practices and promoted the aging of wine for better taste. This small-scale independent regional wine trend, in a modified form, stayed with the industry into much of the twentieth century as small provincial upscale wineries produced limited amounts of high-priced wines for an elite clientele. From these roots can be traced the development of today’s premium-wine industry in locations such as Burgundy, Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara, California.
Many of the basic tenets of the modern wine industry developed during this period as people involved in wine production laid the economic foundation for the eventual business practices used in the modern California and Santa Barbara wine industry. Growers specialized in raising specific grape varieties for climatic regions and increased wine quality through the development of bottling and corking of finished wines. Wine entrepreneurs, on the other hand, quickly realized that vertical integration of vineyards and wineries could help control the cyclic boom or bust markets caused by grape shortages or gluts. These same growers also realized that if they were to ensure premium prices for their wines they needed to enforce quality standards. Since growers and the nobility developed close personal, familial, and economic bonds, most looked to political leaders to establish and enforce policies aimed at improving the industry while benefiting governmental coffers through the collection of taxes. Successful wine entrepreneurs learned to streamline business and marketing practices to increase efficiency and ensure higher profits. At the same time, through trial and error, they ascertained ways to adapt to shifting consumer tastes, built regional product distinctions, and increased profits through capital expansion in new vineyards, modern scientific equipment and production techniques, and better marketing.
From all of this was born a modern capitalist industry that left a legacy for future wine merchants, wineries, and growers into the twenty-first century and led to an industry that responded to the new global markets. As politics, governments, war, trade policies, and consumer tastes shifted the industry adjusted to meet consumer demands through mergers and alliances to vertically integrate business structures. This ushered in a cyclic trend of centralization and decentralization that would follow the worldwide industry to Santa Barbara in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Premium Wines: The Bigger the Wine, the Smaller the Barrel
For centuries class-conscious European consumers and oenophiles have used premium wine to distinguish their social status. Wars in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries disrupted premium and table wine trade and production and left wealthy consumers with inconsistent supplies of French, Italian, and Spanish wines. More important, the shortages left the masses without a daily alcoholic beverage. Faced with this shortage these thirsty European wine drinkers found an alternative in cheap distilled whiskey and vodka. Dutch traders, plagued by these wine shortages, switched to brandy (brandewijn) until newly financed colonial vineyards in South Africa could export wine to European markets. English and Spanish colonies in the New World provided similar hopes. In the meantime, only rich Europeans could afford wine, further establishing its reputation as a symbol of wealth and power in Western civilization.
The premium-wine industry became fully entrenched in the politics and culture of Western Europe as new technology made the fine wine trade more profitable. In England the business of the wine merchant (negotiant in French) prospered when it was discovered that wines could be matured, transported, and stored in glass bottles with shaped corks. As consumer tastes shifted to the new and exotic tastes provided by aged premium wines, as well as to the recently discovered champagnes and port wine from newly developed regional industries, wine merchants shopped worldwide to secure wines. Local and national governments not wishing to miss an opportunity capitalized on the new trade and established wine import taxes to provide additional royal revenues.
In order to expand production these new wine capitalists successfully produced different and better wines with smaller price tags for a larger group of consumers. Worldwide wine shortages occurred as expanding markets, differential customs and duties, and shifting political boundaries led to a rise in wine quality and a reorganization of the international wine trade. By the eighteenth century most wineries required high levels of capital investment, making it impossible for small or poor producers to compete outside their local regions. Only landlords, merchants, and entrepreneurs could afford the long-term investments required by the wine industry. European mercantile systems, in search of cheaper quality wines for the expanding urban centers, turned to their colonies to supply wine to quench consumer thirst.7
Wine Emigrates to English Colonial America
Viticulture arrived in the Americas during the Age of Discovery (1500–1750) as European immigrants brought their wine drinking traditions to the New World. Early explorers found that none of the native American peoples had any knowledge of wine or, for that matter, of any fermented spirits.8 This was not an accident, for the native grape varieties made a very poor quality wine. Over the next three centuries colonial explorers introduced European vines (Vitis vinifera) and wines in countless attempts to develop a successful American wine industry. Thus, viticulture took root in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, and North America, including Mexican Alta California, where Santa Barbara would be established.
Sixteenth-century European explorers and settlers quickly found native American vines and had high hopes for an American wine industry. In 1524, while off the coast of what would become North Carolina, Giovanni da Verrazzano found “many vines growing naturally, which growing up, took hold of the trees as they do in Lombardy, which if by husbandmen they were dressed in good order, without all doubt they would yield excellent wines.” A decade later Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence River and came across an island he described as having “many good vines, a thing not before of us seen in those countries, and therefore we named it Bacchus Land.” The first winemaking in the United States occurred in 1564 when a colony of Huguenots, on the mouth of the St. John’s River in Florida, failed to grow enough food for survival but used local Scuppernong grapes to produce twenty hogsheads of wine.9
Viticulture arrived in English North America with the Jamestown settlers in 1607, only to suffer numerous setbacks and, ultimately, failure. By 1609 samples of Virginia wine reached Europe. Reports from seamen described the wine as similar to Spanish Alicante.10 King James I, who hated tobacco, was entranced by wine’s possibilities and urged the cultivation of grapes and the production of wine. This led the Virginia Company in 1619 to enact a law that required each householder to plant and maintain ten vines yearly until a vineyard was established. That same year the company provided French vignerons to instruct and oversee the viticultural practices. By 1621 more than ten thousand vines were set out; but because of the poor quality of the grapes, little wine was fermented from native vineyards, despite valiant efforts. Two more attempts in the 1630s and 1650s failed. Growers soon realized that European winegrape varietals were unable to survive the climatic conditions found in the Virginia colony. Colonial merchants’ dreams of wine profits and freedom from French, Spanish, and Italian wines dimmed. By mid-century hopes for a get-rich-quick wine industry gave way to profitable tobacco production, and wealthy English colonists were forced to continue importing wine from Europe.11
Many colonial entrepreneurs were not about to give up on the development of a wine industry, and they placed their hopes in a series of wine trials in the agricultural southern colonies. These experiments proved unsuccessful in the long run. By the eighteenth century the home government no longer believed that the development of the colonial wine industry should be an official policy. With the loss of support from England, wine enthusiasts in 1744 turned to the South Carolina House of Commons for support. In response the Commons offered a £100 prize to “the first person who shall make the first pipe of good, strong-bodied merchantable wine of the growth and culture of his own plantation.”12 It would not be until 1758 that Robert Thorpe would lay claim to the prize and set off a new flurry of interest and experimentation in grape growing and wine production. In 1763 a Huguenot group in New Bordeaux, South Carolina, planted vineyards. They were joined by other French Protestants under the leadership of Louis de Mesnil de St. Pierre. Startup support for the new project came from the colonial assembly and private subscriptions. The American Revolution, however, put an end to the effort.
Southern setbacks in viticulture during the colonial period sprang from the selection of inappropriate varieties for climatic conditions and from political unrest. In 1766, for example, Dr. Andrew Turnbull, a former British consul to Smyrna, imported Greek and Mediterranean cuttings and immigrant viticulturalists to his 101,000-acre Florida landholding, but his effort failed when his Mediterranean agriculture succumbed to tropical diseases. In North Carolina native grapes continued to abound, yet colonists’ hopes for a European viticulture industry failed. In Louisiana, a Colonel Ball produced enough wine in 1775 to send a sample of his claret to King George III. His enterprise came to an abrupt end when local indigenous people massacred the colonel and his family during an uprising. Virginia also offered a prize, similar to North Carolina’s, and had no takers. Thomas Jefferson made one final pre-revolutionary attempt at viticulture...

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