When the Rivers Ran Red: An Amazing Story of Courage and Triumph in America's Wine Country - Hardcover

Sosnowski, Vivienne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230605745 ISBN 13: 9780230605749

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Synopsis

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 – 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.

About this title

About the Author

Vivienne Sosnowski has been an editorial director of newspapers, including the Washington, D.C., Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner. A gifted photographer whose portraits of wine country pioneers were the genesis of this book, she divides her time between a home in the vineyard county of Sonoma and another in Vancouver, Canada.

Reviews

When the U.S. Constitution was amended in 1919 to ban alcoholic beverages across the nation, few places were as devastated as the Northern California counties of Sonoma and Napa. Immigrant families, many of them Italian, had established productive vineyards. True, they did not yet claim their wines equal to Europe’s finest bottlings, but they were patiently waiting for American public taste to mature. Now they faced utter ruin, compelled to dump vats of valuable aging wines into streets, sewers, and rivers. As the 1920s rolled forward, these vineyards were in some cases pulled up and the land turned to other crops. Often bunches of ripe fruit were quietly shipped away, the growers able to sell grapes but deprived of the final vinification of the juice. Sosnowski records in heavily researched detail the real effects of Prohibition on people who wished only to produce sound wine. --Mark Knoblauch

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A trickle of dark liquid began to flow, slowly at first; hesitating a little, then with a deep-throated roar it became a torrent so mighty it was as if the heavens themselves had been ripped open. When the deluge hit the ground the red liquid roiled into a fast-moving wave that churned up an angry froth. The small crowd of men, women and children who stood watching was stunned into silence. Then their eyebrows lifted in astonishment as thousands upon thousands of gallons of liquid began to stream past their feet. Moments later they gasped as the flood bubbling around them grew deeper and wilder. Instinctively they screeched a communal yell of terror and, in one great convulsion, whipped around and charged away, fathers and mothers pulling children almost out of their sweaters as they dragged them out of harm’s way. They turned to look back only when they felt they were far enough to gaze at the terrifying spectacle in safety.

As the ruby waves kept rolling past them, a vast dark stain spread wider and wider across the countryside. It soon poured into every ditch and depression in its path. Small puddles grew into red lakes. Before the deluge was over, it had poured for almost two days. But this first day was the one that took everyone by surprise.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0230605745
• ISBN 13: 9780230605749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256