The Promotional Strategy Of The California Wine Industry Was Tourism: Benito Dusi Was A San Luis Obispo County Believer

In order to save grain for producing food, President Woodrow Wilson introduced a temporary wartime prohibition in 1917 which led to a discussion in the United States on whether to prohibit the production of alcohol because grain was an essential ingredient in the production of whiskey. This led to a discussion about whether to prohibit the production of all alcoholic beverages, including wine.

The 18th Amendment was introduced in the United States Congress during December 1917. It stated the following.

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2. The Congress and the several states shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several states, as provided in the constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the states by the Congress.

Beginning in January and through December of 1918, only fifteen states had ratified the amendment; thirty-six, or three-fourths of the states needed to do so to pass the amendment nationwide. Between January 2nd and 9th, six more states did so. Between January 13th and 17th, nineteen states ratified the amendment. No one had predicted this result.

By 1919, California had become America’s leading winegrowing state, with over 1,000 wineries in operation. On January 16th, 1919, with the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, everything changed. This was the beginning of the Prohibition Era in America – 1920-1933. It was not illegal to drink. Any wine, beer, or spirits in the possession of an American in 1920 could be enjoyed and consumed at home. The 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act stipulated that individual states should enforce Prohibition according to their own laws. Local law enforcement in San Luis Obispo County was vigilant, harsh, and terrifying. People were arrested, jailed and paid large fines for making and selling wine.

Amendment 21 to the Constitution repealed the 18th Amendment, which had established the nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. At the time of the enactment of the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933, California began the task of rebuilding the industry. But how did they go about this?

The Wine Institute

The former Grape Growers League of California and the Wine Producers Association united as the Wine Institute in 1934. Since their founding, shortly after the end of Prohibition, the Wine Institute has advocated for the California wine industry through growth and prosperity. They are the only U.S. organization championing wine at the state, federal and international levels.

Here is a photo taken of the First Annual Conference which was called,
“Wine Industry and Related Interests of California,” on June 8, 1934, at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California
Photograph found at the Wine Institute website, 2024.

Hotel Del Monte

The first conference of the newly organized Wine Institute was held at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey on June 8, 1934.

The Hotel Del Monte was the third resort built and dedicated in 1926 at this location. The first two resorts had been destroyed by fires. The architects of the third hotel were Lewis Parsons Hobart (1/4/1873 – 10/19/1954) and Clarence A. Tantau (1884 – 1943).

Hobart was educated at University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome and the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He played a role in the rebuilding of the San Francisco Bay Area following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Several of his buildings are listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Tantau was a San Francisco Bay Area architect for nearly 30 years. His practice was primarily residential in the Monterey Peninsula, Oakland, Berkeley, Pebble Beach, and Santa Cruz. He is known for his Spanish-style architecture.

Illustration Found at Naval Postgraduate School website, 2024

Preserving Sales At Wineries

By 1935, the Wine Institute advocated legislation that wineries in California had to be licensed and bonded to resume production and tastings of the wines they created which allowed for winery retail sales and tourism. This was important to the follow up activities of the organization in the upcoming years.

In fact, at the Wine Industry Conference of Vintners and Allied Interests held in 1935, one speaker suggested that “visitors be invited to the wineries and vineyards, so they may be imbued with the love of wine and learn to know it.”

In 1936, the newly formed California Wine Advisory Board began an institution-wide advertising campaign targeted directly at American consumers. The campaign sought to educate them about the types and uses of wine and cultivate the wine market.

The Wine Institute began this education campaign with instructional booklets, classes, and local tasting events on wine types and their uses, on the assumption that informed salespersons would choose to stock table wines and persuade the buying public to purchase these products.

Cover of Wine Institute booklet No. 1
The Wine Industry:
The Story of Wine
The Industry Today
The Language of Wine

Cover of Wine Institute booklet No. 2
Wine Growing and Wine Types

Wine Recognized As An Agricultural Product

The Wine Institute was commissioned in 1938 to promote California wines. The California Department of Agriculture recognized wine as an agricultural product. The vintners of the Wine Institute recruited a member of the California legislature to sponsor a bill giving the wine industry unique exemptions to the national system. This allowed and became crucial for the development of wine tourism.

A legal category of “farm wineries,” wine producers, unlike beer or spirit producers, were exempt from having to use separately licensed wholesalers to reach consumer markets in the state of California. In other words, wineries could sell their farm products directly to retail stores, restaurants, and consumers just like any other farmer.

This wine farm exemption allowed wineries to exert greater control over the distribution and marketing of their products, which was a great achievement. This capability was not given to any other alcohol producer in the nation. California wine producers could develop products for niche markets. Because of this empowerment, producers began to take an active role in reviving the lost table wine market that had been lost with Prohibition.

Leon David Adams (2/1/1905 – 9/12/1995)

The “seminal wine historian in the United States in the twentieth century”, a title given to him by the New York Times. He was born in Boston, attended the University of California, Berkeley, and lived in California thereafter.

Leon was a journalist, historian, wine advocate, fisherman, and author. As the Bureau Chief for McClatchy Newspapers in San Francisco he received his training in writing and reporting.

Additionally, and importantly for the wine industry, Adams helped organize and then led the Wine Institute from 1938-1954 with an agenda to advocate for farm winery laws which were to help grape growers open wineries and sell their wines through wholesale and retail.

By 1940, just five years after his work regarding visitors being invited to wineries and vineyards, Adams summarized the important role winery tourism could play in promoting sales, stating that “wine tastes best at the vineyard.” So not only did he believe consumers could develop a taste for table wine he also recognized the need to educate everyone in the pleasures of good table wine to encourage them to supply these products to the consumer market.

In 1954, with the departure of Leon Adams from the Wine Institute it was reported that 250,000 visitors annually to California wineries as tasting rooms grew in number as travel destinations. The industry’s direct consumer sales appeals were aided by the growing popularity of automobile tourism.

Leon Adams was a very close friend of Max Goldman (1910-2004), of York Mountain Winery in San Luis Obispo County. As an author, Leon Adams wrote two seminal books: the Common Sense Book of Wine, published in 1958, and Wines of America, published in 1973. In the late 1970s Leon Adams came to visit his friend, Goldman, and spoke about his book. The Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo County has a newspaper article referring to this visit in our “Goldman Archives”. Some consider this book, Wines of America, as the “most thorough work on the subject,” specifically regarding the California wine industry.

Empower Consumers Sense Of Taste And Experience Of Place

The Wine Institute was all in on educating with their handbooks and pamphlets. They believed that growing their market depended upon consumer education. They also believed that one of the best ways to do this was to encourage consumers to acquire direct knowledge and experience of winery sites of production. After all, wasn’t this so much better than encountering a mass-produced bottle on a store shelf?

One of the great marketing tools they used was a Wine Study Course, which developed from the publication of the Wine Handbooks. This strategy of the wine industry involved tourism but, at the same time, informed the vintners and winegrowers to be educated using these wine handbooks.

That leads us right to the discovery that Benito Dusi was a believer and participant in the Wine Institute’s educational programs and handbooks for growing the wine market in California. Recently, while visiting the historic tasting room of Benito Dusi we discovered the original questionnaires and handwritten answers on the first three Wine Institute Wine Handbooks.

This historic place (home, vineyard, tasting room) of Benito Dusi is in Paso Robles, California and the Dusi family offers tours of the site including the artifacts, wine bottles/labels, equipment, and archival papers/photographs. Check their website for details at https://www.jdusiwines.com/events-and-news/.

Benito Dusi Was A San Luis Obispo Believer!

Benito Dusi (1933 – 2019), third son of Sylvester and Caterina (née Gazzaroli) Dusi grew up in Templeton, California on his parents ranch and vineyard which they had purchased in 1925. He was born just as Prohibition was ending and helped in the rebirth of the wine industry in California.

This was the first vineyard in San Luis Obispo County to be recognized as the designated vineyard on a wine label. The Dusi Vineyard, now known as the Benito Dusi Vineyard, was planted in 1926 and has been identified by the Historic Vineyard Society (HSV) established in 2011 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of California’s historic vineyards.

Max Goldman, Suzanne Goldman, Steve Goldman. 1970s.

Empower Consumers Sense Of Taste And Experience Of Place

Benito Dusi Was A San Luis Obispo Believer!

By the age of six Benito was working in the vineyards and continued to do so while his two older brothers were fighting overseas in WWII. In early 1951, Benito was drafted into the Army to serve in Korea. When he returned to Paso Robles in 1953 the wine industry had changed. The market price of Zinfandel grapes declined dramatically and for the first time the Dusi family were not able to sell all their grapes. So what did he do?

Sylvester Dusi made the decision to make wine from his surplus crops. He made a list of equipment he needed and sent Benito to San Jose and San Francisco to purchase it. The first harvest was made under the Sylvester Dusi label. Benito was the winemaker. The decision was made to open the first tasting room on California 101 and the second label was under the Dusi name. Benito Dusi continued to do winemaking. The Ranch became a gathering place for neighbors and military men from the nearby Army Base to gather on Saturday afternoon

By the mid 1950s Benito used the grapes his father offered him to make his own wine and sold it in gallon glass jugs from the tasting room. He created a tasting room in the vineyard, behind his parents house. This tasting room is the first tasting room in San Luis Obispo County on 101.

It was in this building where we discovered the Wine Institute Study Guides dated 1955 which Benito had sent for, completed, and returned after reading the Wine Handbooks. This knowledge helped him to market his Benito Dusi Wines to the public. He sold wines out of his tasting room for several years.

Current Highlights As Of The May 2024 Annual Washington D.C. Meeting

With 6,200 wineries, California is responsible for 81% of the U.S. wine production and more than 95% of wine exports. California is the world’s fourth-largest wine-producing region. California wineries have a significant impact on the U.S. economy, generating $170 billion in annual economic activity, supporting more than 1.1 million jobs, and paying $59.9 billion in wages annually and $21.9 billion in taxes.

Sources

Found online 7/29/2024
Business History Conference, 2015. All rights reserved. URL: http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/Dyer_BEHO_Final%20Draft.pdf
Stephanie Dyer is an associate professor of American History and Political Economy at Sonoma State University, California. ©

Found online 7/30/2024
https://wineindustryadvisor.com/2024/05/29/wine-institute-highlights-critical-issues-facing-wine-sector/

https://wineinstitute.org/