Their Signature Calling

Abstract

Acloser look at California’s winegrowing provides an insight as to the positive difference a supportive social and economic environment can make for all concerned. Although a few Italian immigrant winegrowers were in business from the earliest pioneer days—Andrea Arata, for instance, planted his Amador County vineyard in 1853, a San Jose resident named Splivalo acquired a vineyard and winery there in the late 1850s, and a cer- tain G. Migliavacca set up as a winemaker in Napa in 1866—only in the 1880s did the industry begin to sense their weight as a group.³ “A large num- ber of Italians find employment in vineyards in town and vicinity,” pro- claimed the Star, a Napa Valley newspaper, for instance, in April 1880.⁴ The last 20 years of the century saw two events drawing more of these group members into winemaking: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, creating a hostile environment for the state’s Chinese, and the phylloxera, which had by the 1890s caught up with California as well. Immigrants replacing the rapidly shrinking Chinese labor pool remained to supplant vineyard own- ers undone by the pest. Too discouraged to start over again, such proprietors would simply sell the land to their Italian farmhands and move back to San Francisco.⁵

There are probably few Italian American families that do not make their own wine; but the wine they make, as a rule, can be endured only by stomachs toughened by a racial experience of hardship dating back to the Punic Wars.

Elmer Davis, 1928¹

When I was a teen ager this business of making wine was not popular like it is today. In fact, many people looked down on the Italian families because they made wine. Now they send their sons and daughters to UC Davis to become wine makers.

Robert Mondavi²