Ban on Cheap, Potent Wine Making Little Impact on Skid Row

One year after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called for a voluntary ban on the sale of fortified wine on Skid Row, Jack’s Market is well stocked with cases of the cheap, potent booze favored by street drunks.

Gallo’s Thunderbird and Night Train Express cannot be found because the winery last year halted shipments to Skid Row. But liquor stores continue to sell other brands, thwarting a county effort to see if eliminating the screw-top wines will reduce alcohol-related problems.

“They’d just drink something else,” said Jack Simone, owner of Jack’s Market, who has cases of cheap wine stacked to the ceiling. “All this hullabaloo about alcohol being the menace when it is really crack.”

County supervisors last September called on wine producers to suspend shipments of fortified wine to Skid Row. Supervisor Ed Edelman proposed the move after reading about a similar effort in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

The cheap, sweet wines--fortified with twice the alcohol of chablis or burgundy and selling for a fraction of the cost--are the beverages of choice of curbside alcoholics, according to county health officials. A typical pint bottle of fortified wine--known on the street as a “short dog”--contains about 18% alcohol, is the equivalent of four cocktails and sells for about $1.75.

Shortly after the supervisors’ action, E. & J. Gallo Winery, the nation’s largest wine maker, halted sales of its fortified wines to Skid Row neighborhoods around the country. Canandaigua Wine Co. of New York, the other big producer of fortified wine, followed suit.

A year later, “The overall availability of fortified wines in general does not appear to have changed substantially,” according to a county consultant’s report submitted to the supervisors.

“Given the current level of availability, the potential impact on consumer behavior can be based only on speculation.”

Though Thunderbird and Night Train Express are difficult to find, other brands--including Canandaigua’s Richard’s Wild Irish Rose and Cisco--are widely available.

“I’m surprised,” Canandaigua Chairman Marvin Sands said. “If you see it, it is being bootlegged into the area.” He said he has no control over retailers buying from other retailers outside Skid Row.

Sands said the wine maker has stuck to its pledge not to sell to Skid Row. “Although we don’t think the product is the cause of the problem . . . that market gives our product a black eye,” he said, “and we don’t want it.”

Virginia McLain Rusk of the consulting firm Ernst & Young, hired by the county to assess its effort, said many store owners had built up inventories in anticipation of the ban.

“The ban has been a complete joke,” said Mike Neely, director of the Homeless Outreach Project, a Skid Row organization staffed by former homeless people.

Though some manufacturers have tried to keep their products off the shelves, Neely said there has never been a time in the past year when there was no brand available. “The price went up. That’s about all that happened,” said Neely. “That just means that (alcoholics) have to panhandle you for another few minutes.”

Besides being ineffective in practice, Neely said, the ban was flawed in its conception. “Banning alcohol is not the solution,” said Neely. “They tried that during Prohibition. What makes them think it will work in the 1990s?

“It’s easy to pass a ban. That costs nothing . . . the real answers cost money.”

Real answers to alcoholism and deterioration of the Skid Row area, Neely said, include more drug and alcohol treatment, therapy and counseling programs.

Edelman said he wants the county to stick with its current effort. Failing that, he said, the supervisors should impose a mandatory ban. Store owners contend that only the governor and Legislature can impose a mandatory ban.

The county’s consultant also has recommended that supervisors wait a bit longer before considering stronger measures.

“It may require as much as six months to eliminate available inventory, at which point the first consumer impact will be experienced,” according to the consultant’s report.

The consultant recommended that if voluntary efforts fail, the county should consider bringing nuisance abatement lawsuits against troublesome liquor store owners.

Skid Row liquor store owners remain skeptical of whether eliminating fortified wine will reduce the neighborhood’s alcohol-related problems.

Chang Ho Yoon, owner of El Rey market, took a razor blade from behind the counter, and said, “Since Gallo stopped selling, people started buying these.”

Asked why he sells razor blades if he suspects they will be used for preparing drugs, he said, “Because if they want, I sell.”

However, McLain Rusk said she doubts that alcoholics have substituted cocaine for fortified wine, pointing out cocaine is a stimulant while alcohol is a depressant. She said that drug use is a growing problem on Skid Row, separate from the heavy use of fortified wine.

Jack’s Market owner Simone, a pistol tucked in his pants, said, “You’re not going to dry up the area. No way in hell. . . . After the stores close, you can still buy. You can buy it on the street. You can go to a hotel where somebody buys it by the case and sells it out of their room.”

One liquor store owner who stopped selling the cheap wine five years ago “to eliminate the wino problem in front of my store” is also skeptical that a ban will make a difference.

“They’ll just switch to other stuff,” said Carl Johnson Jr. of Duke’s Liquor.

In San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin District, there are conflicting reports on the impact of efforts to reduce sales of fortified wine.

Edward Goehring, project coordinator of the Safe and Sober Streets Committee, said, “There is less of a problem of people being drunk on the street and aggressively panhandling,” although no statistics are available. Goehring said the committee has pressured many stores into discontinuing sales by staging demonstrations in front of the businesses and threatening boycotts.

However, Lt. Daniel Hallisy of the San Francisco Police Department said of the effort, “It didn’t really make much of a dent.” He said that although some stores halted sales, “surrounding stores began ordering double and triple what they normally sold.”

The winemakers, meanwhile, say they have no plans to cease production of the cheap wines, which critics say is tailor-made for alcoholics.

Gallo and Canandaigua spokesmen insisted that the wine is popular among many older, retired people on fixed incomes.

Mike Petro, manager of alcohol services at the Weingart Center, said, “If you make it more difficult for alcoholics to get their hands on alcohol, some of these people are going to stop drinking.”