Chinese Laborers and the Landscape They Created
Near St. Helena, California
The vine rows you are passing along this corridor did not always look this way. Before the eighteen sixties, Napa Valley was oak woodland and grassland interspersed with native chaparral, the landscape the Wappo had managed for millennia. The transformation into something that resembled a French wine region required someone to clear thousands of acres of native vegetation by hand.
That work was done primarily by Chinese laborers.
Beginning in the eighteen sixties, Chinese workers were recruited through labor contractors to clear the original vineyard acreage of Napa and Sonoma counties. They grubbed out the native oak and manzanita and chamise by hand, using axes and mattocks, creating the vine rows that define the valley landscape today. Charles Krug's early operations relied substantially on this workforce, as did most of the other major wineries being established in the same period.
The pay was less than what white workers received for comparable labor. The law prohibited Chinese workers from owning the land they cleared. The Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two stopped new Chinese immigration to the United States, restricting the supply of the labor that had done so much of the physical work of building California agriculture. In the same decade, anti-Chinese violence swept through California towns. There were incidents in Sonoma County.
The workers who cleared the physical landscape of Wine Country were, in substantial numbers, the same workforce the industry then legally expelled and the law then excluded. The vine rows they created are still here. Their names are not on any label.
This is, according to the documentary record, what happened. The specific names of the Chinese contractors, the specific wages paid, the specific conditions of that labor are gaps that archival research has not yet fully filled. What the historical record establishes is the pattern: Chinese workers built this landscape, and neither the law nor the industry found a way to let them stay.
