When the rivers ran red
Subtitle: how California's legendary winemakers survived Prohibition
By: Vivienne Sosnowski.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
Subjects: Vintners -- California, Northern -- History -- 20th century; Wine -- Social aspects -- California, Northern -- History -- 20th century; Vintners -- California, Northern -- Biography; Prohibition -- California, Northern; Prohibition -- United States; Violence -- California, Northern -- History -- 20th century; California, Northern -- History -- 20th century; California, Northern -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Genres: Biography.
Description: Today, millions of people around the world enjoy California's legendary wines, unaware that 90 years ago the families who made these wines--and in many cases still do {u2013} turned to struggle and subterfuge to save the industry we now cherish. When Prohibition took effect in 1919, three months after one of the greatest California grape harvests of all time, violence and chaos descended on Northern California. Federal agents spilled thousands of gallons of wine in the rivers and creeks, gun battles erupted on dark country roads, and local law enforcement officers, sympathetic to their winemaking neighbors, found ways to run circles around the intruding authorities. For the state's winemaking families--many of them immigrants from Italy--surviving Prohibition meant facing impossible decisions, whether to give up the idyllic way of life their families had known for generations, or break the law to enable their wine businesses and their livelihood to survive. Including moments of both desperation and joy, Sosnowski tells the inspiring story of how ordinary people fought to protect to a beautiful and timeless culture in the lovely hills and valleys of now-celebrated wine country.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: The land was sacred to these families; title: No nation is drunken where the wine is cheap; title: These vines are like members of my family; title: It was a clamoring mob; title: To hell with Prohibition; title: If we hadn't bootlegged, we wouldn't have survived; title: Moonshine is almost as ubiquitous as the radiance from the Moon itself; title: We never wore shoes in summer, or, A million dollars to go away to France; title: The reign of bludgeon and of force; title: The worst and most cruel experiences to which a thrifty and prosperous rural community was ever subject.