Author: Gail Unzelman

One of California Wine Country’s most popular Pre-Prohibition promotional postcard images ever used was actually, a fakery. Almost fifty years ago, when my collecting of California wine postcards began, one of the first cards I found was a hand-colored California generic featuring the image of an unidentified mustachioed vineyard master harvesting giant clusters of grapes from a single vine.

From early on, California wineries have welcomed visitors to come and sample their wines, tour the cellars, and learn about wine, its culture, and how it is made. And perhaps buy a jug or a bottle or two to take home. Postcards showing an interior view of a winery cellar or tasting room are more rare and we acknowledge them for recording this chapter of wine country history. On our tour we will visit several historic winery tasting rooms — variously called the sample room, tasting hall, tasting bar, visitor center, reception room, or tasting lounge.

Ambitious, and determined from an early age to establish a career in the California wine trade, young Hanoverian Theodore Gier (1860-1931) sailed in 1881 from his native Germany to America. Two years later he was settled in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco, to become one of the most successful, and powerful, wine men in pre-Prohibition California. Gier, “of slight frame and of uncommon nervous tension” was a public-spirited and progressive citizen, a recognized business leader whose ownership interests included a bar and saloon, bank founder, real estate developer, resort owner, and city philanthropist. His huge Oakland-based wine and liquor operations, wholesale & retail, counted five locations in Oakland, along with numerous vineyards and wineries in Napa County and the Livermore Valley. In 1910 Gier incorporated as the Theodore Gier Vineyard & Wine Co., with a capitalization of two million dollars. In a few years, the company had annual sales of just over three hundred thousand gallons of wine.

The Suscol Hills to the east of Napa Valley constitute a natural boundary between Napa and Solano County. About five miles south of the city of Napa, Jameson Canyon forms a break in the hills and leads into the lower end of Solano County’s Green Valley, so named by early settlers for the abundance of a wild grass that remained green throughout the dry summers.

Directly in the middle of the vast Central Valley is the San Joaquin Valley, a viticultural wonderland for growing and the production of raisins, or dried grapes. Today, on almost 100,000 acres in an area within a 60-mile radius of Fresno, raisin growers produce 100% of the U.S. raisins. Our postcard story is set here in Fresno — a major city and economic hub in the San Joaquin Valley, the largest city in the greater Central Valley, and “The Raisin Capital of the World.” Many of the following accounts of our postcard storytellers are borrowed from the 1891 published jewel, California Homes & Industries. Fresno Illustrated.