Two Brothers and the Pamphlets

The afternoon in nineteen thirty-three when Ernest and Julio Gallo decided to start a winery began, as best as subsequent accounts can establish, in the basement of the Modesto Public Library.

Prohibition had ended that year. The Eighteenth Amendment, which had been the law of the land since nineteen twenty, was repealed in December. For the previous decade, the Gallo family had been growing grapes on a farm outside Modesto and selling them to buyers in eastern states, where making wine at home remained legal through the Prohibition years. It was a business. It was not a winery.

Ernest and Julio Gallo wanted a winery. They had less than six thousand dollars between them, most of it borrowed by Ernest from his mother-in-law. What they did not have was any technical training in commercial wine production. California's winemaking tradition had been interrupted by thirteen years of Prohibition, and anyone who had known the craft in the old country or in the pre-Prohibition industry was not necessarily available to explain it to two young men from the San Joaquin Valley.

What they found in the library basement were pamphlets. University of California publications on fermentation and wine care, written before Prohibition by Professor Frederic T. Bioletti of the Department of Viticulture at Davis, sitting in the library stacks where they had been stored since no one had a practical reason to read them. Ernest retrieved them. He and Julio read them. Ernest later said: 'These old pamphlets probably saved us from going out of business our very first year.'

They produced one hundred seventy-seven thousand gallons of wine in their first year of operation. By nineteen ninety-three, E. and J. Gallo Winery held a twenty-five percent share of the American wine market. It remains the largest family-owned winery in the United States. It is still headquartered here, in Modesto, where it began.