Santa Clara County is one of the original counties of California formed at the time of statehood in 1850. Located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, stretching west to the Santa Cruz Mountains and easterly past San Jose to Alameda County, its southern boundary is near Gilroy — almost 840,000 acres perfect for wine growing. Between 1856 and 1887 the county’s grape acreage grew from 220 acres to nearly ten thousand. The early settlers bought land and created a modern eden of orchards, nurseries, ranches and vineyards in all sections of the fertile valley. By the mid-1880s the Santa Clara Valley was one of the leaders in the state’s production of high-quality table wines. Several revered wine figures were instrumental in the industry’s founding — Delmas, Lefranc, Masson, Stanford, Mirassou, Pellier. Yet the earliest vineyard keepers in this magnificent land were the padres at Mission Santa Clara de Asis founded January 1777, number eight in the Franciscan chain of twenty-one Alta California Missions.

My long search for the story of this treasured postcard has remained elusive and inconclusive. Sadly, the sender of this very rare and unusual wine exhibit postcard did not comment on the beautiful, elaborately decorated scene: a Chinese gentleman tending a well-set table display of Cresta Blanca wines in San Francisco’s prestigious Fairmont Hotel. My research noted several California wine promotion “exhibits” held at different City venues during the years 1910 to 1913 reported in the PW&SR, but no Cresta Blanca at the Fairmont. With the postcard being stamped with the “1915 P.P.I.E.” advertising cancel, it suggests the eye-catching exhibit was installed in the Fairmont Hotel as a pre-Exposition promotion, to perhaps even remain for the duration of the Fair? Here are my thoughts.

Andre Tchelistcheff considered Louis M. Martini — along with Herman Wente of Livermore Valley fame, and Laurence Marshall, pioneer in bringing winegrowing to Lodi — one of the three “apostles of the modern California wine industry.” Martini was a founder of the Wine Institute in 1934, who ten years later spearheaded the Napa Valley Vintners Assn. to be hailed as “the grand old man of Napa Valley wines.” His was the first winery to install mechanical refrigeration for white wine fermentation, introduce vintage labeling and emphasize varietal winemaking. The Martini brand and its full-line palette of wines equated with excellent value, and Louis Martini Winery became one of the most famous and beloved wineries in Napa Valley.

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.