California Vintners Remember Dry Days of ’26 : Winemaking: While many pioneering families went out of business, others survived or even prospered by shipping grapes and concentrated grape juice back East for the lucrative home market.

More than 65 years have passed since the day the wine flowed like a river in Healdsburg, but Sonoma County winemaker Louis Foppiano remembers it as if it were yesterday.

Prohibition was 6 years old, with no end in sight. In the Foppiano Vineyards cellars, 150,000 gallons of old wine was slowly turning to vinegar.

“We couldn’t sell it and it was going bad,” Foppiano said. “(So) in 1926, we dumped it down the side of the highway.”

And as two federal agents watched, the good people of Healdsburg did what they could to stem the flow.

“Everybody in town came up and picked up the wine--in gallons, quarts, tin cans, anything they could pick it up in,” said Foppiano, who was 15 at the time. “It was heartbreaking to see all that money go down the side of the highway.”

It was a strange scene that befit Prohibition, which took effect in 1920 and was repealed 60 years ago, on Dec. 5, 1933.

Born of a spirit of moral rectitude, Prohibition inspired Americans to new heights of decadence and provided an economic base for organized crime.

The Volstead Act set penalties for the transport and sale of alcoholic beverages, but not their consumption. It banned the sale of wine except for sacramental or medicinal purposes, but allowed home winemakers to ferment up to 200 gallons a year for their own use.

“Prohibition wasn’t a single monolithic condition, but had all sorts of contradictions . . . curious gaps and crazy compromises,” said Thomas Pinney, a Pomona College professor who has published a history of the wine industry.

Nowhere were the paradoxes greater than in California’s wine country, according to industry pioneers reminiscing about the dry years.

U.S. wine production plunged from 51 million gallons in 1918 to 3 million in 1925, according to government figures. The number of wineries in California fell from 694 in 1922 to a quarter that number in 1933.

But while many winemaking families in California went out of business, others survived or even prospered by shipping grapes and concentrated grape juice back East for the lucrative home market.

“At the outset of Prohibition, everybody supposed that the California wine industry would disappear. But the grape-growing acreage of California doubled between 1920 and 1925,” said Pinney.

“As someone said, if only Prohibition had lasted long enough, America might have finally become a wine-drinking nation.”

Grape prices shot up--from as low as $8 a ton to as high as $200 before they collapsed--and many a young wine country boy’s hands grew calloused nailing together lug boxes which held 25 pounds of fruit.

“When I was not in school I used to make those boxes,” said Ed Mirassou, 74, a fourth-generation winemaker. “It was quite an art, and I remember my brother and I tried to make them as fast as the professionals.”

Mirassou’s family left the wine business to ship grapes and grow prunes in 1920. He and brother Norbert didn’t make wine again until 1937, when they founded Mirassou Vineyards in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco.

Wine makers were largely Italian, French and Eastern European immigrants, and their craft was so intertwined with their culture that they couldn’t quite believe Prohibition would actually come about. “It seemed strange and unnatural to us because wine was part of our everyday meal,” Mirassou said.

Louis P. Martini, the 74-year-old chairman of Louis M. Martini Winery, said his father had a hard time believing Prohibition would last.

But it did last, as did the damage to the wine industry.

“Most of the best grapes were uprooted and inferior wine grapes--thicker skinned ones that shipped better--were planted,” Martini said.

Mirassou said poor grape quality and an exodus by expert winemakers to other professions set the industry back two decades.

“The skill of winemaking in California was lost,” he said.

And when repeal finally came, who really cared? For years, table wines were outsold by fortified dessert wines with more kick.

“Consumers were not used to drinking wine. They wanted a quick jolt--a lot of alcohol without a lot of quantity,” Mirassou said.

The descendants of California’s turn-of-the-century winemakers say they won’t make the same mistake twice, and they are speaking out loudly against what they believe is a neo-Prohibitionist movement.

“I think there are some people who want to see all alcohol eliminated. It doesn’t matter if it’s a glass of wine with meals or somebody getting soused and driving,” Martini said. “The lesson of Prohibition is you really can’t legislate that sort of thing.”

Other things have changed too. The wine industry is better prepared, but anti-alcohol forces have changed their approach.

“The real motive behind the Prohibition drive was moral. . . . Now it’s under the guise of health,” Pinney said. “But from either point of view, wine is seen as both destructive and unnecessary. It’s the same puritanism.”