Jews and Booze
Jews and Booze

Author: Marni Davis

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0814783848

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Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book Council Traces American Jews’ complicated relationship to alcohol through the years leading up to and after prohibition From kosher wine to their ties to the liquor trade in Europe, Jews have a longstanding historical relationship with alcohol. But once prohibition hit America, American Jews were forced to choose between abandoning their historical connection to alcohol and remaining outside the American mainstream. In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews’ long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity—the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer—and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

The Makers of American Wine
The Makers of American Wine

Author: Thomas Pinney

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-05-07

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0520952227

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Americans learned how to make wine successfully about two hundred years ago, after failing for more than two hundred years. Thomas Pinney takes an engaging approach to the history of American wine by telling its story through the lives of 13 people who played significant roles in building an industry that now extends to every state. While some names—such as Mondavi and Gallo—will be familiar, others are less well known. These include the wealthy Nicholas Longworth, who produced the first popular American wine; the German immigrant George Husmann, who championed the native Norton grape in Missouri and supplied rootstock to save French vineyards from phylloxera; Frank Schoonmaker, who championed the varietal concept over wines with misleading names; and Maynard Amerine, who helped make UC Davis a world-class winemaking school.

A Toast to Eclipse
A Toast to Eclipse

Author: Brian McGinty

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-09-10

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 080618745X

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The sparkling wines of California rival the best French Champagnes today, but their place at our tables came about through careful craftsmanship that began more than a century ago. The predecessor of today’s California bubbly was Eclipse Champagne, the first commercially successful California sparkling wine, produced by Arpad Haraszthy in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In A Toast to Eclipse, Brian McGinty offers a definitive history of the wine, exploring California’s winemaking past and two of the people who put the state’s varietal wines on the map: Arpad and his father Agoston Haraszthy, the legendary “father of California viticulture.” Inspired by his father’s dream of making California one of the world’s great viticultural regions, Arpad Haraszthy (1840–1900) pursued that goal at a time when the best grapes for making California wine had yet to be discovered, when the best locations for vineyards had not yet been established, and when the public could hardly believe that good wine could be made in a country overrun with gold miners and desperados. As a young man, Arpad spent two years in the Champagne country of northeastern France, studying the classic methods of French sparkling wine manufacture, before bringing his knowledge home to California. As McGinty shows, the story of the award-winning wine Haraszthy created is also the story of San Francisco during its heyday as the largest, most dynamic city in the American West. McGinty reveals new information about California varietals and winemaking districts, and probes the controversy about whether Agoston Haraszthy introduced the Zinfandel grape to the Golden State. Aficionados of wine and of California history will find this narrative insightful and refreshing, and all readers will gain an appreciation for Arpad Haraszthy, Eclipse, and the delicate process of making a wine sparkle.

A History of Wine in America, Volume 1
A History of Wine in America, Volume 1

Author: Thomas Pinney

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-09-17

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 052093458X

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The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

Tangled Vines
Tangled Vines

Author: Frances Dinkelspiel

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1250033217

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On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks. With a propane torch and a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, Anderson annihilated entire California vineyard libraries as well as bottles of some of the most sought-after wines in the world. Among the priceless bottles destroyed were 175 bottles of Port and Angelica from one of the oldest vineyards in California made by Frances Dinkelspiel's great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman, in 1875. Sadly, Mark Anderson was not the first to harm the industry. The history of the California wine trade, dating back to the 19th Century, is a story of vineyards with dark and bloody pasts, tales of rich men, strangling monopolies, the brutal enslavement of vineyard workers and murder. Five of the wine trade murders were associated with Isaias Hellman's vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga beginning with the killing of John Rains who owned the land at the time. He was shot several times, dragged from a wagon and left off the main road for the coyotes to feed on. In her new book, Frances Dinkelspiel looks beneath the casually elegant veneer of California's wine regions to find the obsession, greed and violence lying in wait. Few people sipping a fine California Cabernet can even guess at the Tangled Vines where its life began.

American Rhone
American Rhone

Author: Patrick J. Comiskey

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0520965140

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"Thoughtfully conceived and very well written, this is essential somm reading."—The Somm Journal "This is the most important wine book of the year, perhaps in many years."—The Seattle Times "Crisply written, impeccably researched, balanced if fundamentally enthusiastic, scholarly but accessible, and full of unexpected details and characters."—The World of Fine Wine No wine category has seen more dramatic growth in recent years than American Rhône–variety wines. Winemakers are devoting more energy, more acreage, and more bottlings to Rhône varieties than ever before. The flagship Rhône red, Syrah, is routinely touted as one of California’s most promising varieties, capable of tremendous adaptability as a vine, wonderfully variable in style, and highly expressive of place. There has never been a better time for American Rhône wine producers. American Rhône is the untold history of the American Rhône wine movement. The popularity of these wines has been hard fought; this is a story of fringe players, unknown varieties, and longshot efforts finding their way to the mainstream. It’s the story of winemakers gathering sufficient strength in numbers to forge a triumph of the obscure and the brash. But, more than this, it is the story of the maturation of the American palate and a new republic of wine lovers whose restless tastes and curiosity led them to Rhône wines just as those wines were reaching a critical mass in the marketplace. Patrick J. Comiskey’s history of the American Rhône wine movement is both a compelling underdog success story and an essential reference for the wine professional.