CHAPTER ONE Wine By Design: Wine Begins its Journey to Santa Barbara In 1946 Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis published Zorba the Greek and aptly portrayed the depth of wine''s mythical role in western cultural and economic traditions. His chief character Zorba provided readers with a living paradigm of the beverage''s cultural ability to temporarily release humans from the bondage of everyday existence and celebrate life. In one scene Zorba, the simple Greek philosopher, warmed by an evening of wine drinking, lectured his new boss Basil, a middle-class Englishman, on "how simple and frugal a thing is happiness." He reminded readers that wine imparts a glimpse of happiness and the good life.[i] This observation stood in stark contrast to the serious capitalist Basil who attempted to profit from re-opening an abandoned lignite mine. Depending on your relationship with wine, the beverage can produce either happiness or capitalist profits. In the best-case scenario, it can provide both. Much like the relationship between Zorba and his business-minded friend the history of wine has become a tale of capitalist production and consumer experience.
Though not entirely analogous, the story exemplifies over 7,000 years of the human need to escape an ever-increasing complex world and an agricultural industry''s need to design efficient vineyards, production facilities, and distribution systems capable of providing profit for business-persons. While wine became a cultural means to distract and celebrate it also became deeply rooted in western civilization''s economic and political story as entrepreneurs profited from the lucrative international wine trade. Historical geographer Tim Unwin believes that viticulture is "an expression of transformations and interactions in the economic, social, political and ideological structures of a particular people at a specific place."[ii] Thus, by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European viticulture served as one of many symbols of class and wine business-persons instituted the mercantile ideas of capital, credit, science, new technology, and marketing. Early entrepreneurs then transported their business wine culture to their new homes in the Americas, where at first they struggled and were unsuccessful in building a wine industry. It would not be until the nineteenth-century that they found success in California. The struggles continued into twentieth-century America as the wine industry suffered through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II. But wine businesspersons proved to be resilient and gave birth to a new cadre of winemakers that sought state-of-the-art solutions to boost production.
In America, this history of wine manifested itself as a translocated struggle of a wealthy class in need of an artistic hobby, western European religious and cultural tradition, a wine-industry seeking profits, a consumer-focused middle-class seeking symbols of the good life, the Jeffersonian agrarian myth, the quest of temperance groups to legislate alcohol morality, and a nation in search of a national public health policy. Wine has served as the lubricant for the machines of human movement across continents and oceans and found success in California and for the purposes of this story Santa Barbara. Between the 1960s and 2010s the California Central Coast region of Santa Barbara became a model for the American Wine By Design movement. Ultimate consumer recognition for their new role as a premium wine region came in 2005 when Rex Pickett''s buddy novel Sideways premiered as a movie.[iii] Deeply imbedded into this story is the spirit of wine and the attitude of never giving up on simultaneously building an American wine industry and an American wine culture. The novel''s chief protagonists, Miles and Jack, in many ways mirrored the spirit of Zorba and Basil. This time the setting was the Wine By Design region of Santa Barbara. The amazing part of this modern Santa Barbara wine tale is the fact that for centuries wine history has continuously presented similar problems and solutions to the industry''s vineyardists and winemakers.
Like wine entrepreneurs of the past they adapted science, technology, and market forces to overcome pests, diseases, taxes, wars, depressions, regulations, anti-alcohol proponents, waffling government intervention, consumer trends, and environmental concerns to keep the industry profitable and consumers happy. Premium Wines: Bigger the Wine the Smaller the Barrel For centuries class-conscious European consumers had demanded premium wine as a means to distinguish their social status from the masses who drank low cost plonk. Disruption of the European wine trade by sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars, had crippled trade and left consumers with raising prices and dwindling supplies of their favorite French, Italian, and Spanish wines. Faced with these shortages European entrepreneurs then turned to their New World colonies to meet their needs. Thus, the early wine industry started a modern trend of meeting market needs by looking for the next new region to grow wine-grapes. This expansion philosophy played out centuries later as San Francisco Bay Area (Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino) wineries, short on premium wine-grapes, turned to areas like Santa Barbara to source grapes for their growing brands. Grape-growers, winemakers, and marketers had become fully entrenched in the politics and culture of Western Europe by the seventeenth-century. In England the business of wine merchant ( negotiant in French) prospered as it was discovered that wines could be matured, transported, and stored in glass bottles with shaped corks.
Merchants now shopped worldwide and governments established wine import taxes as a means to provide additional royal revenues and consumers shifted to the new and exotic premium wines like champagne and port. They brought these traditions to the New World and from the start the American wine industry faced global competition, distribution issues, and government attempts to regulate and tax their product. By expanding production wine capitalists successfully produced different and better wines with smaller price tags for a larger group of consumers. But this new trend could not keep pace with consumer demands and resulted in world-wide wine shortages. Exacerbating the shortage problem were differential customs and duties and shifting political boundaries. Despite the problems international wine-trade became profitable and by the eighteenth-century most wineries required high levels of capital investment. Much like today, only the wealthy class of landholders, merchants, and entrepreneurs could afford the long term investments required by the premium wine industry and much like today small producers found it difficult to compete outside their local region.[iv] Quest for an American Wine Culture European explorers and immigrants brought viticulture to the Americas during the Age of Discovery (1500-1750) and early explorers found that none of the native-American peoples had any knowledge of wine or for that matter any fermented spirits.
[v] This was not an accident, for the native grape varieties made a very poor-quality wine. In response colonial settlers, with home country encouragement, introduced European vines ( Vitis vinifera ) countless times in an attempt to develop a successful wine industry in South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Baja and Alta California. All thirteen of the original American colonies failed to establish a viable wine industry forcing wine drinking settlers to substitute new libations while they continued the search for a means to produce their own wine. In the few places where grapes would grow yeoman farmers followed their European traditions and left grape growing and wine production to gentleman farmers. This helped deepen the American mystique of wine as a drink for a gentler class. Yet, many like President Thomas Jefferson hoped to cultivate the European tradition of a wine culture for all Americans. These hopes diminished as viticultural failures grew and post-revolutionary Americans turned to cheaper rum that quickly accounted for one-fifth of the value of all imports from England. Jefferson and many others worried that this new dependence on distilled spirits would diminish the vitality of the nation''s health and pushed to intensify the quest for an American wine industry to moderate drinking habits.
Wine as a moderating alcoholic beverage has been a hope for many Americans throughout our history. Just before the American Revolution, all ages and social groups consumed alcohol and foreign travelers reported that America was a nation addicted to drinking. The national consumption rate had reached three and a half gallons per-person (more than the present rate of consumption) per-year. This astonishing rate of consumption forced many Americans to view wine as a means to moderate excessive drinking habits and led to historian William J. Rorabaugh labeling the nation as the Alcoholic Republic .[vi] As many American citizens began to worry that alcohol was destroying the moral fiber of the developing republic they worried that moderation ideals had failed to keep pace with increasing destructive alcoholic behaviors. Their concerns resulted in early nineteenth-century reform measures aimed at moderation through wine consumption and teetotalism. These early reformers started a national debate on the health and social values of fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages that lasts to the present day.
While most people still believed that wine and distilled spirits were a food and medicine to be imb.