During
prohibition the Volstead Act permitted the ‘male head of household’ to produce
up to two-hundred gallons of wine for his family’s use. That was pretty generous. Let’s run the math. There are roughly fifty weeks in a year so fifty
weeks spread across into two hundred gallons yields almost four gallons a week. There are five bottles in a gallon (before we
moved to 750 ml sized bottles, they were called fifths because they contained
one fifth of a gallon) so at five bottles per gallon and four gallons per week
means the volume of wine permitted for a home winemaker to produce was equal to
twenty bottles a week or just shy of three bottles per day. I’m feeling a bit tipsy
just thinking about it.
In the 1920s there
were two varieties that held great appeal amongst home winemakers; Zinfandel and Alicante Bouschet. In California Zinfandel was the local favorite.
But Zinfandel is thin skinned and does
not ship well, so if the produce had to travel Alicante Bouschet was the grape
of choice. Alicante has a very thick skin
and pulpy flesh which provides Alicante Bouschet the ability to survive a trans
continental train ride. Alicante has an
added bonus: it is a teinturier. Teinturier grapes are grapes whose flesh and
juice are red in color due to anthocyanin pigments accumulating within the pulp
of the grapes berry itself. In most
cases, anthocyanin pigments are confined to the outer skin tissue only, and the
juice of most dark-skinned grape varieties when harvested is clear. This means that upon crushing Alicante was
already halfway to becoming a hearty red wine.
Due to the demand for Alicante during Prohibition, it is not uncommon to
find it inter planted with Prohibition era Zinfandel here in the Sierra
Foothills.
