When the Rivers Ran Red: An Amazing Story of Courage and Triumph in America's Wine Country
When the U.S. Constitution was amended in 1919 to ban alcoholic beverages across the nation, few places were as devastated as the Northern California counties of Sonoma and Napa. Immigrant families, many of them Italian, had established productive vineyards. True, they did not yet claim their wines equal to Europe’s finest bottlings, but they were patiently waiting for American public taste to mature. Now they faced utter ruin, compelled to dump vats of valuable aging wines into streets, sewers, and rivers. As the 1920s rolled forward, these vineyards were in some cases pulled up and the land turned to other crops. Often bunches of ripe fruit were quietly shipped away, the growers able to sell grapes but deprived of the final vinification of the juice. Sosnowski records in heavily researched detail the real effects of Prohibition on people who wished only to produce sound wine. --Mark Knoblauch