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.

Arriving in California in 1852 from his home state of New York, Leland Stanford (1824–1893) was an attorney, storekeeper, Justice of the Peace, organizer of the Sacramento Library Association, industrialist, and philanthropist.
He established a major University, was a Republican Party politician, 8th Governor of California, one of the “Big Four” who built the transcontinental railroad, and U. S. Senator from 1885 until his death in 1893. He also founded three California wineries.

Since the 1850s, a myriad of irrigation canals, or ditches to the farmers, have been vital to agrarian pursuits in the many thousands of acres of diverse agricultural richness of California’s Great Central Valley — whether cotton fields, olive orchards, fruit trees, grains & rice, or vineyards.

Welcome to our first Wine Country Story of the New Year where we visit one of the most exciting promotional campaigns in the history of the California wine industry. It is called National Wine Week, and beautiful artistic Poster Stamps are the stars of the story.

Life’s trials do make us grieve and pine, Yet one transcends the rule —
When honest drinkers test honest wine In cellars deep and cool.
When from the spout it runs like gold Our pulses leap and rise.
We praise the vintage pure and old And crown it with a prize.

As you approach the upper end of Napa Valley, an alabaster-white monastery-like structure comes into view sitting atop a wooded knoll rising from the valley floor two miles south of Calistoga. This is Sterling Vineyards Winery, called the most spectacular winery in America when it was completed in 1973. It was the biggest new winegrowing venture in Napa County, with a six-million-dollar investment in the future of premium table wines.

“Pioneer California Winemaker, lavish host, astute businessman, celebrated judge of fine wines, Paul Masson made his name famous by producing champagnes and table wines which held their own anywhere. Gourmet, bon vivant, raconteur, connoisseur, with an ardent eye for a handsome woman, flamboyant at times and eccentric at others, thrifty in the Gallic tradition, he transplanted much of his native Burgundy to his adopted California … a great Californian, a great gentleman and a great wine grower. ” — John Melville.

Since the young days of Napa Valley wine country, St. Helena has been the bustling hub of Upper Valley. The many wineries of our historical lore began planting vineyards and building beautiful stone wineries around the 1880s. The phenomenon of picture postcards celebrating the wonders of the Valley didn’t come along until the turn of the century in the very early 1900s. In Calistoga, ten miles north of St. Helena, master photographer I. C. Adams
(1874–1960) had arrived in Calistoga as a young boy in 1882. A well-loved figure in Calistoga history, he was not only a successful photographer (1903–1950), but “a celebrated musician, historian, philosopher, poet, and more.” His real-photo postcards of the Geysers, Mt. St. Helena, surrounding vineyards and local wineries are wine country treasures. And in St. Helena, there was Joe Galewsky, photographer, publisher and purveyor of local postcards.

On February 20, 1915, after five years of preliminaries and the expenditure of $50,000,000, the gates of the Panama- Pacific International Exposition (P.P.I.E.) were opened for its nearly ten-month celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal and its boost to West Coast trade, and to showcase the City’s wholesome recovery from the 1906 earthquake. This magnificent fair was constructed on a 636-acre, two-and-a-half-mile waterfront site along the northern shore of S.F. Bay, between the Presidio at the Golden Gate and Fort Mason-Van Ness Avenue on the east,
the area now known as the Marina District. Two-hundred and fifty thousand revelers attended opening day. By the end of the fair in early December, nearly 19 million people had visited the P.P.I.E.

MOST PEOPLE DO NOT automatically connect winegrowing with Contra Costa County in the East Bay region of San Francisco Bay like they might do with Napa or Sonoma counties. But there is fine wine history here, and some lovely postcard views and stories to highlight and preserve it. Grapes and wine loomed large in the landscape beginning in the early 1850s. Interestingly, in 1856 Napa County recorded 33 acres in grape acreage. Contra Costa County had 110 acres; in 1860 seven wineries produced some 2300 gallons of wine. At the time of the 1912 postcard below, the vineyard acreage was 8175 acres, and by 1916, just before Prohibition, wine acreage had grown to 8895 acres. Sadly, the Dry years and urban growth set the total acres in the 1970s at 900 acres, and dropping.

Valley of the Moon. When we who live here see the moon rising over the Mayacmas Mountains, we understand why the Indian tribes thought there were many moons in the Valley. Standing out with surprising bigness, apparently never twice in the same place, the moon appears and disappears behind the different peaks, or it may come from behind a clump of trees or over a large live oak, but seemingly, always from a different direction. The Valley of the Moon is not large. It measures about 10 miles across its
base in the south at Sonoma City, bordering San Pablo Bay. Triangular in shape, the distance to the apex to the north near Santa Rosa is about 15 miles. This valley of rich variety provides our country with some of its very best grapes and extra-fine wines. — Gen. Hap Arnold, Ret., Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, from his Valley of the Moon ranch, 1948.

During the 19th century of California wine country history, there were a handful of women running wineries, all much respected and all widows whose husbands had been winery owners, e.g. Stuart, Warfield, Hood, Weinberger. We will plan a future visit with these noted ladies and their award-winning wine careers. Our present wine country postcard story was inspired by the fascinating book, Women Winemakers. Personal Odysseys by Lucia & John Gilbert, published in 2020. Lucia is a noted scholar of women’s career pathways in male-dominated fields whose recent research focuses on the progress and prospects of women winemakers in California and internationally. Our vintage tour will feature a selection of these amazing, and esteemed, post-Prohibition wine women.

When California attained statehood in 1850 and established the County of San Luis Obispo, grape growing and wine making already had been actively pursued a short few years after 1772. This is the founding date of Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, the fifth Mission of the twenty-one established in Alta California by the Franciscans between 1769 and 1823. The San Luis Obispo wine industry was born at the Mission. Today, in 2024, the celebration of grapes and wine is firmly entrenched in this premier Central Coast wine country with 35,000 acres planted to vineyards and a total of sixteen different American Viticultural Appellations and Sub-Appellations.

Around the time of our amazing postcard visit to Sutter Home Winery in 1908, St. Helena was the bustling hub of the Upper Napa Valley and its wine industry. It was 60 miles north of San Francisco, and lauded as an ideal place to live with a climate where fruits of all kinds grow in abundance.