When Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma was founded in Sonoma Valley in 1823, the small pueblo that grew up around it became the cradle of Sonoma County wine making. Gen. Mariano Vallejo, the esteemed young commandant of San Francisco Presidio who was sent with his troops to Sonoma in 1834, laid out the town and was an able leader. He planted a small vineyard, and his early efforts and success in grape growing and winemaking soon attracted other winegrowers. A melting pot of early settlers — Spanish, Italian, German, English, Irish, Swiss, Australian, and Hungarian — came and planted vines and made wines. By the mid-1870s, the majority of Sonoma County’s seventy-five wineries were located in the area. To this day, vineyards flank the town, covering the gentle slopes that fan south and east toward the Carneros District and San Francisco Bay. On this premium wine-growing land some of California’s finest red and white wines are produced, and a cluster of the prettiest vintage wine country postcards preserve the story of historic Rhine Farm, founded in 1858 by two treasured pioneer winegrowing families, Dresel and Gundlach.
Rhine Farm, Sonoma Co. Awarded 1st Prize, St. Louis Expo -1904
Emil Dresel (1820-1869), born in the Rhineland, and Jacob Gundlach (1818-1894), son of a Bavarian winegrowing family, were both in their early thirties when they came to San Francisco in 1851. Two years later, Dresel, an accomplished architect, was a partner in the lithography firm Kuchel & Dresel. A year later, Gundlach was the proprietor of the Bavaria Brewery. In 1858, the two men, along with partners Charles Kuchel and John Lutgens, purchased four hundred acres of land about one mile southeast of Agoston Haraszthy’s Buena Vista wine property, established a few months earlier. Dresel made a quick trip to his German homeland to get cuttings that launched the renowned Rieslings and Traminers of Rhine Farm.
Rhine Farm, Sonoma, The Home & Vineyard Of Carl Dresel – 1906
When Emil Dresel died in 1869, his older brother Julius inherited his share of Rhine Farm. At the early date of 1878, Julius Dresel was one of the first to import resistant rootstock from the Mississippi Valley when phylloxera appeared in Sonoma County. Dresel and Gundlach were the area’s pioneers in grafting their European vines to resistant native roots, vines that produced high-quality grapes for one hundred years until the vineyard was replanted in 1969. At the time of our 1906 postcard, Julius’ son Carl Dresel (1851-1932), now married to Rose Gundlach, had been running the business since 1891 and continued to do so until Prohibition. Even before his 1904 St. Louis Exposition triumphs, Carl Dresel was recognized for his dedicated study of grape culture and wine making, producing annually 75,000 to 80,000 gallons of white and red wines, appreciated by connoisseurs worldwide as the purest and the finest in the land. ** Also noteworthy is the producer of this cleverly captioned, quite rare, postcard. William O. Hocker, editor & publisher of the local Sonoma weekly Expositor from 1885 to 1912, was applauded for printing a series of historically significant b/w postcards that documented local life and landmarks of Sonoma Valley during the “Golden Age” of postcards, 1901–1915. This one is a treasured winner.
Bacchus Vineyards, Rhine Farm, Sonoma – c1908
An early, magnificently hand-colored postcard view of Rhine Farm celebrated the birth of Bacchus Vineyards. In 1875, Jacob Gundlach and Julius Dresel amicably dissolved their partnership. During the previous year, Gundlach’s daughter, Francisca, married Charles Bundschu (1842-1910), a native of Mannheim and college graduate who came to California in 1862. Gundlach took young Bundschu as a partner in forming a new company, J. Gundlach & Co. Bacchus Wines, and adopted a trademark featuring Bacchus-on-a-Barrel saluting their wines of highest quality. Upon the death of Jacob Gundlach in 1894, Gundlach-Bundschu Wine Co. was incorporated, with offices and giant wine vaults for aging and bottling in San Francisco. The wines grown on Rhine Farm, sent in large wine puncheons to their block-long S. F. cellars for finishing, were being acclaimed around the world. The 1906 Earthquake and its ensuing fires were not so kind. The Gundlach-Bundschu wine depot lost one million gallons of wine, and the fires destroyed three family homes in the city. The wine industry lost a total of fifteen million gallons in their San Francisco wine depots.
J. Gundlach & Co. Wine Merchants & Vineyard Proprietors – 1895
To this wine historian’s great delight, there are several pages of these canceled 1890s’ engraved envelopes sent by J. Gundlach & Co. to fellow wine-man Ferdinand Albertz in Cloverdale. A few other envelopes, equally cherished, are from Dresel & Co. Sadly, no contents have ever surfaced. But the Bacchus image is wonderful to see, and Mr. Albertz provides a compelling wine story: In 1886, “the ambitious young Dane,” as wine historian Ernest Peninou tells it, acquired the former Joshua Moulton vineyard and winery at Cloverdale in the north end of the county. By 1896, he had enlarged the winery to 600,000 gallons and produced superior wines awarded medals in 1893 at Chicago and 1895 at Bordeaux (coincidentally, the years of my Gundlach envelopes!). In 1897, he organized Moulton Hill Vineyard Co. with stockholders Henry Lachman and Percy Morgan, founders of the C.W.A. three years earlier. Albertz began construction of his four-story winery “castle,” the lower story of stone, the upper ones of wood. He and his family lived and entertained there, but financial problems never allowed the completion of his grandiose project. In 1900, when fire destroyed his original winery, he rebuilt it in time for the next, and sadly last, vintage. Bankruptcy took his Moulton Hill Vineyard estate. Mr. Albertz remained involved in the wine industry, for a while in Washington, DC, until his death in 1923 at age sixty-six. Peninou continues: During the Prohibition years, some out-of-town “businessmen” bought the gloomy, unoccupied “castle” winery. They removed the upper stories and converted the lower stone-walled floor into a boiler room, creating the largest unregistered distillery in Sonoma County, if not all of California. Federal agents eventually seized the facility, and by the 1950s, only the ruins of the lower story remained to preserve the site of what was successfully Cloverdale’s largest winery, largest private residence, and largest source of bathtub gin. Ruins of Moulton Hill winery are supposedly still visible today in the Clover Springs housing development.
Gundlach And Dresel Wineries, Rhine Farm – c1890
In this old photo view of Rhine Farm taken before the turn of the century, the Jacob Gundlach Winery is in the foreground, constructed of local stone quarried from the hill in the background. The white building seen in the right rear is the Dresel Winery. In 1859, the first pre-phylloxera vineyard plantings by the four partners – Dresel, Kuchel, Gundlach, and Lutgens – consisted of 60,000 vines. Rhine Farm specialized in premium white German varieties, their prized Riesling, along with Traminer, Kleinberger, Semillon, and Sauvignon Blanc. Award-winning reds were also produced from their Marsanne, Petite Sirah, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon vines. It is noted that the first Rhine Farm vintage was in 1861, with all wines bottled at the winery, which by 1869 had a capacity of 250,000 gallons.
Gundlach-Bundschu Wine Company, Successor To J. Gundlach – 1894
When Charles Bundschu joined J. Gundlach Co, he began a prosperous forty-two-year career and established one of the finest family names in California wine history. A keen businessman and beloved orator, he was an outspoken advocate of wine quality. His years at the helm of Gundlach-Bundschu reflected his poetic love of literature, the arts, and the theatre. He founded the Bacchus Club, a wine and literary group at Rhine Farm whose members toasted the yearly harvest in song, poetry, and prose. In 1896, the first Vintage Festival play pageant was held to great raves and became an annual celebration. In the City, Charles and his wife, Francisca, were prominent members of the German Community and listed in the annual San Francisco Social Register. He delighted in beautiful 19th-century advertising like the above, whose playful ancient wine putti present the eloquent back message extolling the virtues of Rhine Farm wines.
California Rodensteiner, Traminer, Bacchus Vineyards, Sonoma – c1900
This beautiful early label was created by Gundlach-Bundschu Bacchus Wines for one of their special, prized German varietals brought from their home country in 1859. The same label design was used for their Cabinet Riesling, a reserve, superior quality light white wine. A Fun Wine Fact: In 1967, Maynard Amerine of U.C. Davis Department of Viticulture & Enology fame, and close friend of wine historian-author Ernest Peninou, wrote Ernest about the Rodensteiner Traminer label: “I knew that varietal labels had been used at an early date in California, but I think your copy of the Gundlach-Bundschu ‘Traminer Grape’ label is probably the oldest I have seen for that variety.”
Dresel Winery, Sonoma, Cal. Kleinberger Wine Label – c1905
While Gundlach-Bundschu Wine Co. chose Bacchus-on-a-Barrel as a trademark image, the Dresel family selected an image of a California bear standing on a pedestal, squeezing juice from a large grape cluster into a giant wine glass cradled in his arm. The figure adorned Dresel labels, envelopes, advertisements, and the like. The Dresel wine label is magically simple and worthy. Stamped in red in the upper left corner is “Grand Prize. Highest Award at St. Louis.” This was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and World’s Fair held in 1904 in St. Louis, where Dresel & Co. was honored with one of the four Grand Prizes awarded by the wine jury. Gundlach-Bundschu proudly won a Gold. Charles Bundschu himself headed the Executive Committee that put together the “Golden Wine Exhibit of California” in the Temple of Viticulture, for which the Commission was given a Grand Prize for the “magnificent … most classic and artistic exhibit in the building.”
Gundlach-Bundschu Winery, Bonded Winery No. 64 – 1980s
The only modern postcard of the original stone winery celebrates its 130-year history in the same location, owned by the same family. Following the devastations of the 1906 S.F. Earthquake, Gundlach-Bundschu refashioned itself as a modest estate winery known for its excellent wines. The company made a brilliant showing at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (reds, whites, Sherry, and Port categories), where five wines won a Medal of Honor, ten others won a Gold Medal, two more took a Silver, while their Chateau Gundlach was awarded a Grand Prize. The steadfast wine cellar and most of its vines survived Prohibition and carried forward into a new era. In 1991, under the direction of fifth-generation Jim Bundschu, production averaged 90,000 cases annually, and ten thousand square feet of wine caves, designed to house up to 1,800 barrels of wine, were added to maintain a naturally constant temperature and humidity for their vintages. Masterfully, in 1997, all of the original Rhine Farm lands once again formed a contiguous estate vineyard. And the historic story continues. But they often spell it Rhinefarm.
References
Ernest Peninou & Gail Unzelman. History of the Sonoma Viticultural District, 1998.
Pacific Wine, Brewing & Spirit Review, San Francisco. 1915
From The Archives
Jacob Gundlach. Bavaria Brewery. Vallejo St between Dupont & Stockton, S.F. c1854. Drawn by Kuchel & Dresel. Print by Britton & Rey
