By the 1880s, fruit growers and shippers were marking the ends of their wooden shipping crates with colorful paper labels made possible by advances in lithographic printing. The labels identified the source of the fruit, while the designs, images, and names helped encourage brand recognition among buyers. California growers used such labels on grape crates until the 1950s, when printed labels on corrugated cardboard boxes replaced the old wooden crates.
While many packers used imagery of attractive women to decorate their labels, Cesare Mondavi and his two sons turned to the popular Italian sport of Bocce to brand their products. The label shows two young men playing bocce while an older gentleman watches and presides over a table of bread and wine. The meaning here is clear: Cesare Mondavi and his sons, Robert and Peter, and their Italian heritage, were an integral part of the branding message.
Cesare Mondavi was born in Le Marche, in northern Italy, in 1883 and immigrated to the United States in 1906. His wife Rosa was also born in Italy and, in 1908, came to the U.S. as a young bride. They settled on the “Iron Range” in northern Minnesota, an area that attracted miners from various European countries including Finland, Poland, Sweden, and Italy. Mondavi worked for a time in the mines, but left to run a saloon and grocery business in Virginia, Minnesota. The Mondavis had four children: Mary (born 1910), Helen (1912), and sons Robert and Peter, who were born in 1913 and 1914, respectively.
Prohibition had a major impact on the course of the Mondavi family’s history. Wine and winemaking were important traditions among Italian immigrants and members of the Italian American community in the small mining towns of northern Minnesota designated Cesare Mondavi as their grape buyer for home winemaking. Prohibition’s Volstead Act allowed families to make up to 200 gallons of wine per year for their own use and, beginning in 1919, Mondavi traveled to California to purchase wine grapes on behalf of his Italian neighbors. In 1922 he moved his family to Lodi, California, in the Central Valley’s grape-growing region. From there he began buying grapes wholesale and shipping them to customers in the Midwest and on the East Coast. This was the beginning of what became one of California’s most significant and innovative winemaking families, with sons Robert and Peter, and their children, continuing the tradition shaped by Cesare Mondavi.
This valve fitting was used in the mid-1990s to seal an opening in one of the stainless-steel fermentation tanks at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (SLWC) in California’s Napa Valley. Stainless steel tanks and fittings are among the major innovations in 20th century winemaking. Easily cleaned and maintained, the stainless steel tanks also prevent bacteria from spoiling the wine. Fitted with temperature-monitoring metal jackets, they also allow more control over the temperature of the wine during the fermentation process.
In an interview with Smithsonian researchers in 1997, Julia Winiarski, daughter of SLWC founders Warren and Barbara Winiarski, described how she learned the important function of tank valves as a child growing up at the winery. She recalled,
I was curious about the valves on the tank and I had wondered how they worked. So one day I came home from school and instead of walking right up the hill I wandered through where the tanks were and decided to find out how the valve worked. I opened a valve, I think my face was at the height, and the valve was kind of right face level and I just got blasted backwards by a jet of red wine. So I was terrified and I ran away, of course. Luckily someone had heard me shout when it first happened and came up and closed the valve and came and found me sniveling and wine soaked. At least I learned a healthy respect for valves.
Vineyard managers, workers, and winemakers don’t venture far into the vineyard without their pruning shears, often carried in a leather holster attached to their belts. These pruning shears were among the many used at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in California’s Napa Valley in 1996-97 for a variety of grapevine management tasks. Regular tending of the vines is an essential part of viticulture practice and helps ensure a good crop, the foundation for good wine.
Pruning dormant vines in late winter is one of the most critical tasks. A pruner has to know what to remove and what to leave, and how to make an efficient, clean cut. This skill requires knowledge of the plant as well as the desired balance for shoot growth and fruit production. Pruning during the growing season helps maintain the shape of a vine, training it to adhere to the vineyard’s trellising system. While machines are often used on very large vineyard tracts, workers using hand tools accomplish pruning and trimming year-round on the smaller estate vineyards in Napa.
This notebook contains documentation of winery operations at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (SLWC) in California’s Napa Valley, during its first seasons of activity in the early 1970s. It reflects the basic tasks that were faithfully recorded by founder Warren Winiarski and others as they built operations. The notes, made in ink on loose-leaf paper include technical information on crushing, pressing, fermenting, and racking of the SLV (Stag’s Leap Vineyards) Cabernet Sauvignon. Notes on grapes from other growers are included as well, including Birkmyer Pinot noir and Riesling.
When Smithsonian researchers discovered this notebook (that smelled strongly of the wine cellar!) among the papers in the Winiarskis’ family archive, they saw its value as a record of operations at the fledgling winery when it produced the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, the vintage that surprised the wine by placing first among reds at the Paris Tasting in 1976. The notebook also provides a stunning contrast to the highly organized, technical documentation the team observed at SLWC in the 1990s, when GPS and various computer programs had revolutionized the level of detail that could be more easily tracked from the vineyard to the bottle in modern wineries.
Record-keeping is an essential part of vineyard and winery work. Whether keeping track of berry clusters on vines or monitoring the movement of juice from one container to another, winery workers have to track a lot information.
This sheet tracks the history of the wine that was aged in the French oak barrel (1998.0181.17) before bottling at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in California’s Napa Valley in the 1990s. It records the number of the fermentation tank from which the wine was taken, as well as the temperature and brix (percent of sugar as measured in degrees brix) on various dates and the dates of cellar operations pertaining to the wine in the barrel. Other data recorded by the winery included the precise location where the grapes were grown, the sugar level at harvest, and technical information about the fermentation process.
Among the myriad tools used at modern vineyard and winery operations are simple hand tools like this rake with four tines. During the 1997 season of harvest and crush at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in California’s Napa Valley, staff working the crush pad used this rake to guide the grapes out of the open gondola, as it tipped its contents into the crusher/de-stemming machine. The rake was also used at the other end of the de-stemmer to gather the stems into piles that could be returned to the soil in the vineyard. The purple grape stains on the rake’s wooden handle are reminders of harvest time.
This 225 liter (60 gallon) barrel is made of French oak and was used to age red wine at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (SLWC) in California’s Napa Valley in the mid-1990s. Manufactured by the French cooperage Seguin Moreau, in Merpins, it was one of hundreds stacked in a large storage room, where red wines were aged before SLWC’s cave was completed in 2000.
Cooperage is an integral part of winemaking. Wooden barrels typically hold 50 to 60 gallons of wine, while casks are larger, including some that hold 1,000 gallons. The wooden staves allow a small amount of air to slowly enter the wine, which many believe imparts some desirable flavor and aroma characteristics to the wine as it ages. Before Prohibition, redwood and American oak were typically used for aging wine in California. As the industry was rebuilt after Repeal, California vintners turned to France and experimented with storing their red wines in small oak barrels instead of large casks. They experimented with oak barrels for whites as well, which led to some robustly oaky Chardonnays in the 1980s and 1990s. Many now agree that limiting whites to a few months in oak produces a more desirable result.
While French oak is still preferred among many winemakers, some have found that oak from Hungary or various parts of the United States lend a different but pleasing character to wine.
Rows of galvanized metal heaters are a familiar element in winegrowing regions, including some of Napa’s traditional vineyards. This orchard heater, also called a smudge pot, was one of many that stood near the ends of vineyard rows at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in the Napa Valley. The heaters are used to protect the grapes from freezing when the temperature drops overnight during growing season. Fueled with kerosene, they are often used in conjunction with large fans set in the middle of the vineyard, which help distribute the heat.
The brainchild of cab driver Henry C. James, Jr., the James Remind-O-Clock was a useful innovation for people in various industries, from hotels to taxi services to laboratories. The electric clock’s unique feature is its mechanism for allowing multiple alarms for a single event, such as a laboratory experiment that requires the timing of various steps. The 48 small keys located around the face of the clock could be set to ring a maximum of 48 alarms or ‘reminders’ at one setting. James established the James Clock Manufacturing Co. in Oakland in 1933, and produced and patented this model in 1937 (Patent number 2,098,965).
Enologist Andre Tchelistcheff used this Bakelite-housed “Remind-O-Clock,” to time various experiments and processes in his winery laboratories in California’s Napa Valley. Tchelistcheff made significant contributions to the wine industry, helping to improve techniques and raise standards for winemaking in the postwar period. He helped many winemakers improve their operations by adopting the practices of sterile filtration, cold fermentation, and attention to yeasts.
Andre Tchelistcheff was born in Moscow in 1901; he and his family fled the country at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. After receiving his degree in agricultural science at the University of Brno in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Paris, where he was employed at the Institute of National Agronomy outside the city. While there he was contacted in 1937 by Georges de Latour, of Napa Valley’s Beaulieu Vineyards (BV). Latour was searching for a highly qualified wine chemist to help improve the stability and quality of BV’s premium wines, which had recently suffered the disastrous effects of microbiological spoilage and volatile acidity.
When he arrived in Napa in 1938, just five years after the repeal of Prohibition, Tchelistcheff was struck by the primitive conditions of winegrowing and winemaking. It took him several years to improve the winemaking at BV by upgrading equipment and controlling fermentation processes. He also worked in the vineyards, with, in his words, “the voice of nature.” Tchelistcheff was committed to the idea of community and promoted the sharing of both technical data and philosophical musings among the people trying to rebuild the wine industry. He also maintained close relationships with the scientists and scholars of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis.
After he left BV in 1973, Tchelistcheff became a consultant, serving dozens of California wineries old and new. He also played a key role in developing the modern wine industry in Washington State. In 1991 Tchelistcheff rejoined Beaulieu as consulting enologist. He died in the Napa Valley in 1994.
By the 1880s, fruit growers and shippers were marking the ends of their wooden shipping crates with colorful paper labels made possible by advances in lithographic printing. The labels identified the source of the fruit, while the designs, images, and names helped encourage brand recognition among buyers. California growers used such labels on grape crates until the 1950s, when printed labels on corrugated cardboard boxes replaced the old wooden crates.
This label, depicting a woman with beauty-queen looks and a basket full of gorgeous grapes, begs the question: who is the “Fresno Bella,” the lady, the grapes, or both? Distributed by the Heggblade-Marguleas-Tenneco Corporation, Fresno Bella brand grapes were shipped using labels like this out of Del Rey, California, a crossroads town located in the Central Valley’s Fresno County.
Migrant farm workers had to use the short-handled hoe or el cortito for thinning and weeding. Because it required them to stoop during long hours in the fields, the hoe became a symbol of the exploitive working conditions. Campaigns by the United Farm Workers and others helped outlaw use of the hoe in 1975.
American agriculture’s dependence on Mexican labor has always been a source of great conflict and great opportunity for field workers and the agriculture industry. In the U.S., agricultural labor was overwhelmingly Mexican and Mexican American. Issues of legal status, workers rights, and use of domestic workers are issues the unions, agricultural producers, and the federal government have been struggling with since the 1920’s.
By the 1880s, fruit growers and shippers were marking the ends of their wooden shipping crates with colorful paper labels made possible by advances in lithographic printing. The labels identified the source of the fruit, while the designs, images, and names helped encourage brand recognition among buyers. California growers used such labels on grape crates until the 1950s, when printed labels on corrugated cardboard boxes replaced the old wooden crates.
This label for Zinfandel grapes, branded “Mont’Elisa Beauty” along with an image of a pretty young girl, was used by the Riolo Brothers, Italian Americans who packed and shipped grapes out of Roseville, California, near Sacramento. The label boasts that the grapes were not irrigated, indicating a traditional approach to vineyard management called “dry farming,” a practice that concentrates the flavors in fruit.
This Lumetron Colorimeter Model 400-A was introduced in the 1940s by the Photovolt Corporation in New York, NY. It was used for many years by the Russian-born enologist André Tchelistcheff, at his various winery laboratories in California’s Napa Valley. Tchelistcheff had a tremendous impact on the development of the modern American wine industry.
Housed in a wooden box, the electrically-powered instrument includes two filter holders, a test tube carrier, a meter, and detailed instructions inside the lid. The instrument’s six glass filters cover the color spectrum—red, yellow-green, blue, orange, blue-green, and violet. The test tube carrier and the filter holders have metal knobs for ease of removal and the carrier has two holes for tubes with metal plaques noting “BLANK” and “SAMPLE” affixed above and below the holes respectively.
An ad for this instrument, published in the May 23, 1947 issue of Science Magazine, touted its use as a highly accurate device for determining the acidity (or pH) of a sample. It could also be used for the chemical analysis of color and turbidity in a liquid. All of these applications—measuring the pH and analyzing color and turbidity—are important aspects of work in a winery laboratory. Acid levels influence the flavor and texture of wine, and changes in a sample’s color and clarity indicate changes in its sensory characteristics as well.
André Tchelistcheff was born in Moscow in 1901; he and his family fled the country at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. After receiving his degree in agricultural science at the University of Brno in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Paris, where he was employed at the Institute of National Agronomy outside the city. While there he was contacted in 1937 by Georges de Latour, of Napa Valley’s Beaulieu Vineyards (BV). Latour was searching for a highly qualified wine chemist to help improve the stability and quality of BV’s premium wines, which had recently suffered the disastrous effects of microbiological spoilage and volatile acidity.
When he arrived in Napa in 1938, just five years after the repeal of Prohibition, Tchelistcheff was struck by the primitive conditions of winegrowing and winemaking. It took him several years to improve the winemaking at BV by upgrading equipment and controlling fermentation processes. He also worked in the vineyards, with, in his words, “the voice of nature.” Tchelistcheff was committed to the idea of community and promoted the sharing of both technical data and philosophical musings among the people trying to rebuild the California wine industry. He also maintained close relationships with the scientists and scholars of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis.
After he left BV in 1973, Tchelistcheff became a consultant, serving dozens of California wineries old and new. He also played a key role in developing the modern wine industry in Washington State. In 1991 Tchelistcheff rejoined Beaulieu as consulting enologist. He died in the Napa Valley in 1994.
The Emergency Farm Labor Program, or the Bracero Program, brought laborers from Mexico to the United States on short-term contracts between 1942 and 1964. In the lettuce fields of Stanislaus and Imperial Counties in California, field laborers used small, square wheel barrows, called humps to pack and move boxes of lettuce. Each box held about twenty-four or thirty heads. This hump was used in the California fields of the Jerry Pepelis Packing Company from 1960 until 1964, when the Bracero Program ended. By then, humps were abandoned for more efficient, automated methods of harvesting.