The Cucamonga Valley was once America's largest wine-producing region, crafting quality vintages decades before Napa and Sonoma. Secondo Guasti, an ambitious and enterprising Italian immigrant, established the region's first vineyard in 1901, and others soon followed. Wineries like the Vai Brothers, Padre, Galleano, Brookside and more made the valley the epicenter of a burgeoning industry. Not even Prohibition could halt production. While domestic breweries and distilleries shuttered, Cucamonga's brandy and sherry continued to be legally made for culinary and medicinal purposes. Yet by the late 1970s, harvests had dwindled and vineyards vanished. Urbanization, vine disease and property taxes effectively ended production. Today, local vintners and wine enthusiasts are reviving the region's proud heritage. Authors George M. Walker and John Peragine uncork a legacy too delectable to die.

From its eighteenth-century beginnings, the Santa Barbara wine industry achieved success by embracing a “wine by design” model. In this process farmers, winemakers, and entrepreneurs overcome roadblocks like diseases, government policies and regulations, and environmental concerns by utilizing the latest technological advances coupled with agribusiness capitalism. As the American demand for premium wine grapes intensified in the late twentieth century, the Northern California wine industry rapidly grew its boutique and innovative local designer winemaking to increase profit to meet demand and compete on a global scale. Set in the context of the regional, national, and global wine community, this story illuminates a regional story of how the Santa Barbara wine industry found solutions to current market conditions while utilizing local traditions to develop a new version of local wine terroir. An accomplishment that allowed them to compete in the global marketplace yet develop highly specialized wine that is unique to the region. By employing leading-edge technology and entrepreneurship, the California Central Coast region of Santa Barbara became a model for the American vision of agricultural innovation and an integral part of the international wine trade, developing a personalized version of local wine terroir.

Iowa has a history with grapevines that goes back more than a century. New York lawyer Hiram Barney obtained a tract of land in southeast Iowa as part of the Half-Breed program following the American Indian Wars and created the White Elk Winery. German settlers in Amana tended community vineyards for communal wines. Before Prohibition, the Council Bluffs Grape Growers Association grew grapes and shipped them eastward by the ton. In the early 1900s, the state was among the nation's top producers of grapes. Pesticides, weather and government subsidies ended the time of the vines of the prairie until their recent return. Author John N. Peragine details the rise, fall and resurgence of the industry in the Hawkeye State.

The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

Noted California historian rips the oh-so-laid-back label off the California wine trade to show the violent and obsessive world underneath

California's Napa Valley is one of the world's premier wine regions today, but this has not always been true. James T. Lapsley's entertaining history explains how a collective vision of excellence among winemakers and a keen sense of promotion transformed the region and its wines following the repeal of Prohibition. Focusing on the formative years of Napa's fine winemaking, 1934 to 1967, Lapsley concludes with a chapter on the wine boom of the 1970s, placing it in a social context and explaining the role of Napa vineyards in the beverage's growing popularity. Names familiar to wine drinkers appear throughout these pages—Beaulieu, Beringer, Charles Krug, Christian Brothers, Inglenook, Louis Martini—and the colorful stories behind the names give this book a personal dimension. As strong-willed, competitive winemakers found ways to work cooperatively, both in sharing knowledge and technology and in promoting their region, the result was an unprecedented improvement in wine quality that brought with it a new reputation for the Napa Valley. In The Silverado Squatters, Robert Louis Stevenson refers to wine as "bottled poetry," and although Stevenson's reference was to the elite vineyards of France, his words are appropriate for Napa wines today. Their success, as Lapsley makes clear, is due to much more than the beneficence of sun and soil. Craft, vision, and determination have played a part too, and for that, wine drinkers the world over are grateful. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.