Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series

Charles Crawford

RECOLLECTIONS OF A CAREER WITH THE GUWINERY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY, 1942-1989

With an Introduction by Maynard A. Amerine

An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser in 1989

Copyright @ 1990 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing .eading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the Levelopment of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is I modern research technique involving an interviewee and an informed mterviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is transcribed, .ightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. 3e resulting manuscript is typed in final form, indexed, bound with bhotographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at :he University of California, Berkeley, and other research collections for ;cholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended ;o present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a ;poken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as ;uch it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the University of California and Charles Crawford dated April 4, 1990. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Charles Crawford requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows : Charles Crawford, wRecollections of a Career with the Gallo Winery and the Development of the California Wine Industry, 1942-1989" an oral history conducted in 1989 by Ruth Teiser, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.

copy no. 2 Cataloging Information

CRAWFORD, Charles M. [b. 19181 Winemaker Recollections of a Career With the Gallo Winery and the Development of the California Wine Industry. 1942-1989, 1990, viii, 121 pp. Development of the Gallo winery from the 1930s through the 1980s: products and product development, equipment and processes, grapes and relationships with grape growers, the Gallo family, employees, the research laboratory, production and quality control; marketing; evolution of varietals; wine industry changes; thoughts on the future. Introduction by Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis.

Interviewed in 1989 by Ruth Teiser for the Wine Spectator California Winemen Series. The Regional Oral History, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Charles McNeil Crawford

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION, by Maynard A. Amerine

INTERVIEW HISTORY vii

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY viii

FAMILY Earlier Generations Brothers and Sister Children

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION, 1918-1942 High School University of California, Berkeley, 1936-1940 New York State Wineries, 1940-1942 Cornell University Considering a Job with Gallo New York State Scientists

THE GALLO WINE COMPANY, 1930s THROUGH 1950s World War I1 Wartime Products Prorate and Experimental Brandy Modesto Property and Operatings, Early 1940s ' Instituting Written Orders Italian Swiss Colony in the Fifties Grapes, Raisins, and Wine Contracts with Growers and Wineries Proprietary and Varietal Wines Winery Equipment and Processes Special Natural Wines

TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE OF THE WINE INSTITUTE, 1947-1974

GALL0 PEOPLE AND PRODUCTS Notable Employees The Research Laboratory Science and Human Factors in Wine Quality Introducing New Wines FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS OF THE 1940s Working with the Gallo Family Wartime Employees Bottling and Fermenting Facilities Surviving the 1946 Market Crisis

PROGRESS IN THE 1950s Tanks and Key Personnel

CONTROLS Production Control Compliance Quality Control

DEVELOPING GALLO BRANDY Preliminary Work, 1938-1967 Factors in Success

ADVANCES Overcoming Problems with Thunderbird Creating a Glass Factory Promotion and Advertising

WORKING WITH ERNEST AND JULIO GALLO From Production to Marketing Transferring Responsibilities Promoting Varietal Wines The Gallo Winery Laboratory Cooperation with Other Beverage Makers

AWARDS

VARIETAL WINES AND SHERRIES Their Evolution The Special Cellar

GALLO STAFF RESEARCH

GALLO CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNIVERSITIES

WINE INDUSTRY AFFAIRS SINCE THE 1940s Advances and Problems The Future of Wine in the United States

TAPE GUIDE APPENDIX I -- Memberships, Professional Organizations APPENDIX I1 -- Publications, In-House Reports and Public Presentations

APPENDIX I11 -- E. & J. Gallo Winery Research Publications

INDEX

PREFACE

The California wine industry oral history series, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1969 through the action and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The selection of those to be interviewed is made by a committee consisting of James D. Hart, director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery organization; Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis; the current chairman of the board of directors of the Wine Institute; Ruth Teiser, series project director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.

The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on California grape growing and wine making that has existed only in the memories of wine men. In some cases their recollections go back to the early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real paucity of information on the Prohibition years (1920-1933), although some commercial wine making did continue under supervision of the Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry in subsequent years (as yet treated analytically in few writings) will be of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his own point of view.

Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its collection of in many cases unique materials readily available for the purpose. The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, the director of The Bancroft Library.

Ruth Teiser Project Director The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series

September 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS

Interviews Completed by 1990

Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Leon D. Adams, California Wine Industrv Affairs: Recollections and Opinions, 1990

Maynard A. Amerine, The University of California and the State's Wine Industry, 1971

Maynard A. Amerine, Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies, 1988

Philo Biane, Wine Making in Southern California and Recollections of Fruit Industries. Inc., 1972

John B. Cella, The Cella Familv in the California Wine Industrv, 1986

Charles Crawford, Recollections of a Career with the Gallo Winerv and the Development of the California Wine Industrv. 1942-1989, 1990

Burke H. Critchfield, Carl F. Wente, and Andrew G. Frericks, The California Wine Industrv During the Depression, 1972

William V. Cruess, A Half Century of food and Wine Technoloqy, 1967

Jack and Jamie Peterman Davies, Rebuilding Schramsberg: The Creation of a California Cham~agneHouse, 1990

William A. Dieppe, Almaden is My Life, 1985

Alfred From, Marketing California Wine and Brandy, 1984

Louis Gomberg, Analytical Perspectives on the California Wine Industrv. 1935- 1990, 1990

Joseph E. Heitz, Creatine a Winerv in the Na~aValley, 1986

Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist- Views the California Wine Industry, 1974

Amandus N. Kasimatis, A Career in California Viticulture, 1988

Morris Katz, Paul Masson Winerv O~erationsand Management.- 1944-1988, 1990

Legh F. Knowles, Jr., Beaulieu Vineyards from Family to Cor~orateOwnershiz, 1990

Horace 0. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi, California Grape Products and Other Wine Enterprises, 1971

Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, Wine Making in the Napa Valley, 1973

Louis P. Martini, A Familv Winerv and the California Wine Industrv, 1984 Zleanor McCrea, Stonv Hill Vinevards: The Creation of a NaDa Vallev Estate Winerv, 1990

3tto E. Meyer, California Premium Wines and Brandv, 1973

gorbert C. Mirassou and Edmund A. Mirassou, The Evolution of a Santa Clara Vallev Winerv, 1986

Peter Mondavi, Advances in Technoloev and Production at Charles Kru~Winerv, 1946-1988, 1990

Robert Mondavi, Creativitv in the Wine Industry, 1985 gichael Moone, Management and Marketing at Beringer Vinevards and Wine World, Inc., 1990

Myron S. Nightingale, Making Wine in California. 1944-1987, 1988

Harold P. Olmo, Plant Genetics and New Grave Varieties, 1976

Cornelius Ough, Researches of an Enologist. University of California. Davis, 1950-1990, 1990

Antonio Perelli-Minetti,A Life in Wine Makine;, 1975

Louis A. Petri, The Petri Familv in the Wine Industrv, 1971

Jefferson E. Peyser, The Law and the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Lucius Powers, The Fresno Area and the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, Pers~ectiveson California Wines, 1976

Edmund A. Rossi, Italian Swiss Colonv and the Wine Industrv, 1971

Edmund A. Rossi, Jr., Italian Swiss Colonv. 1949-1989: Recollections of a Third-Generation California Winemaker, 1990

Arpaxat Setrakian, A. Setrakian. a Leader of the San Joaauin Vallev Grave Industrv, 1977

Elie Skofis, California Wine and Brandv Maker, 1988

Andre Tchelistcheff, Gra~es.Wine. and Ecoloey,-. 1983

Brother Timothy, The Christian Brothers as Wine Makers, 1974

Ernest A. Wente, Wine Making in the Livermore Vallev, 1971

Albert J. Winkler, Viticultural Research at UC Davis (1921-19711, 1973 v

INTRODUCTION -- Charles McNeil Ctawford

This interview differs in one aspect from most of the previous interviews in its generally personal and detailed introduction of his family and education. There follows a chronological account of his career in the wine industry. This is detailed as to the people he came in contact with through the last forty-three years. Either Crawford has a phenomenal memory for names, dates, and details, or he must keep a meticulous record of his day-to-day activities. It is truly a tour de force of memory, with many details of meetings with individuals and of industry activities. Historians of the California wine industry will long be grateful for these meticulous accounts of the development of the post-Repeal California grape and wine industry, and especially of the rise of the E. and J. Gallo wine empire.

Along the way he reveals his frank appraisal and appreciation of his family, teachers, colleagues in the Gallo winery, and industry leaders. This gives a much broader picture of the post-Repeal California wine industry than just that of the E. and J. Gallo winery.

Much of the interview focuses on the application of science to improving the efficiency of the operation of California wineries, particularly the Gallosf winery. From harvesting to crushing to aging and bottling, he turns his attention to improving the efficiency of operations. The stability and quality of the various types of wines come under his attention, not only of the established types but of new types (such as Thunderbird). Crawford emphasizes the importance of sensory evaluation of the wines, not only by him and his colleagues but also of the winery principals, Ernest and Julio Gallo, and of their production and marketing staffs. He writes, "This is part of the reason for our [i.e., Gallofs] success--continuity of quality. Not only in analysis but in flavor and aroma--tasting, tasting, tasting. "

Crawford is very perceptive about the different points of view of winemakers and wine marketers. Since he has served in both areas at -Gallo, he writes with considerable authority. He is right on the mark when he speaks of the "ridiculous and regressive" actions of the California legislature.

As a bibliophile, I am delighted that Crawford stresses the importance of a research library in the modern winery. Too many viticulturists and enologists think that what they learned in college is all they need to know for the rest of their lives.

A minor point: I wonder what significant "nutrients from the grape" are present in Thunderbird?

This is an interview that winemakers, marketers of wine, and writers, as well as historians of wine, should read carefully. They might learn how one winemaker became so valuable to his company, and how the California wine industry grew from next to nothing to a sensationally successful and large part of California agriculture.

Maynard A. Amerine

June 27, 1990 St. Helena, California INTERVIEW HISTORY -- Charles McNeil Crawford

The interview with Charles M. Crawford took place in his office at the Gallo winery headquarters in Modesto on two successive days, May 22 and 23, 1989. Previously he had been sent an outline of subjects for discussion. He gave a thoughtful account, speaking without notes, drawing upon his technical knowledge as well as the ability to communicate which he often uses in behalf of the winery and the wine industry at large.

Further questions were sent to Mr. Crawford at the beginning of the following year. Since his time did not allow another interview session immediately, he replied to them in writing on March 21, 1990. This material was added to the end of the interview transcript. When the complete transcript was sent to him, he went over it, asked his secretary to retype it, and sent the retyped text to us. It included no major changes, but some relevant details were inserted. Later he added a few corrections and a little more information. Our final copy was made directly from his secretary's copy and the corrections he made in it. Altogether, as an interviewee Mr. Crawford was outstandingly careful, conscientious, and cooperative.

Ruth Teiser Interviewer/Editor

July 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Regional Oral History Office viii University of California Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)

Your full name CHARLES McNEIL CRAWFORD

Date of birth 9/23/18 .Birthplace Antioch, California

Father's full name ROBERT ELMER CRAWFORD

Occupation Ent repeneur Birthplace Colusa, Californiz

Mother's full name ALICE HUST CRAWFORD

Occupation Teacher/Housewife . Birthplace Colton, ~alifornia

Your spouse SARAH KATHERINE CRAWFORD

Your children ROBERT McNEIL CRAWFORD JUDITH LEE CRAWFORD

Where did you grow up? Antioch, California

Present community Modesto, California

Education Bachelor of Science, U.C. Berkeley 1940; Master of Science, Cornell University 1941

Occupation(s) Vice President and Secretary, E. & J. GALLO WINERY

Areas of expertise Winemaking, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Engineering.

Other interests or activities Wine Industry Science (Wine Institute Technical Committee), Timber Culture (37 acres Redwood Forest, A1 CAI, Tennis, Sailing (Tahoe Yacht Club), Skiing (Alpine)

Organizations which you are active Wine Institute Committees; Americ

Society of Enology & Viticulture; Society of Professional Enginet Institute of Food Technology; Society of Wine Educators; America] Vineyard Foundation; Alpha Zeta Fraternity; Tahoe Yacht Club; The Museum Society. FAMILY

[Interview 1: 22 May 1989]{/{/l

Earlier Generat ions

Teiser: I'll ask you to begin with where and when you were born.

Crawford: I was born in Antioch, California, on September 23, 1918.

Teiser: Did you grow up there?

Crawford: I grew up in Antioch, went all through the school system there. I was very privileged because my mother had been a high school teacher in Antioch High School, and my aunt, Mabel Hust, her sister, was the vice-principal of Antioch High School. We lived on Tenth Street in Antioch, and my grandmother lived next door. She was widowed in 1918 when my grandfather died from the flu. Two of her daughters lived with her. One was a nurse and the other an ex-teacher. So I had .lots of teachers around me as I grew up. I learned a lot from those ladies [laughs], not only academically but in appreciation of the contribution of their knowledge to others. It was a wonderful thing to have. Such early experience marks you for life. As I grew up, every time I was about to be involved in the risky situations of childhood and adolescence, I could hear my mother's words: "Charles, I know you will always do the right thing," and I automatically tried to do so.

~e'tser: Were they university graduates?

%his symbol (#) indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes, see page 105. Crawford: Yes. My Aunt Ella Stiles graduated from Colusa State Normal in 1900. My mother, Alice [Hust], graduated from the University of California in 1906. My Aunt Mabel, my mother's sister, also graduated from the University of California in 1906. Their brother, Steven Grover Hust, graduated from UC in 1910. He became a professor at Cal. He retired, because he had stomach cancer, in 1917, but in spite of this he lived to be about eighty, but was eating nothing but a special gruel he had developed which he found would sustain his health. He didn't teach any more, but he became a professional photographer and scenario writer for Hollywood, including cowboy movies. He wrote a book that was a textbook in the California school system for about twenty years, called I Love You. California. He was quite an inspiration to me.

Teiser : What did he teach at Cal?

Crawford: He was assistant professor of English. When in Hollywood, he wrote a book about Aimee Semple McPherson. He called it From Heaven to Hustling. It was never published. Aimee bought the publishing rights and the text from him so he wouldn't publish it. [laughs]

Teiser : I wonder where it is now?

Crawford: I don't know; I think she buried it. He was a very interesting man and a provocative writer who greatly admired Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

My paternal grandmother was from Missouri. She was born in Hannibal, Missouri. Her name was Frances Ann Holt. Her parents died when she was eleven, and when she was twelve she came out from St. Louis, Missouri, with her uncle on a wagon train in 1862. When you asked me to do this memoir, I remembered trying to get my grandmother to write down all her experiences, and she said she had had a very uneventful life not worth writing about.

But she would talk about it to us when we were children. For example, I remember her saying she had to walk because she was twelve; that if she had been eleven she could have ridden in the wagon, but the twelve-year-olds had to walk along behind the wagon and pick up wood or buffalo chips--whatever they could use for the fire that night. They had two Indian attacks. She hated those Indians. She said they were thieves and vandals--they wanted to steal things; that was her picture of Indians--not too pretty, but something hard to forget. When I was about six years old I shot off a cap gun on her back porch, and before I could turn around she knocked me over the rail to the ground because it sounded like gunfire, which really upset her. That's when she told me about the wagon train attacks.

She got to Sacramento when she was thirteen and moved to Colusa. When she was fourteen she married a man named Stiles, who was a professor at Colusa State Normal College. The next year her husband went bear hunting and got killed by a bear. She had a daughter when she was fifteen, my Aunt Ella Stiles. And when she was sixteen she married my grandfather, Charles McNeil Crawford. She had four more children: my Aunt Grace; my father, Robert Elmer; my Uncle Francis Mott; and my Uncle James McNeil. And she adopted my Aunt Wilhelmina Hamilton, who became a nurse and who helped her and my grandfather raise all their children.

Teiser: What was your grandfather's occupation?

Crawford: He was a grain farmer in Colusa. He had been a gold miner when he came out here in the 1850s from New Brunswick, Canada. He mined gold in the area outside of Sacramento--the Grass Valley/ Nevada City area. When he got enough gold, I guess, he went into grain farming. He farmed with mules and wagons. He had about two hundred mules, so he farmed large areas of grain. My grandmother and he lived in Hickman, near Modesto in the hills, in the 1880s.

When I came out from New York to Modesto in 1942, my grandmother wrote me and told me I shouldn't live in Modesto because it was nothing but malaria and swamps, because that's how she remembered it from 1880. There were no dams, and all the rivers flooded in the spring. Modesto is near the confluence of three rivers (the Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, and the San Joaquin), and the Modesto area flooded every year, as there were no dams. Then the water would lie out in pockets throughout the area in the spring, and the mosquitoes would multiply. So they lived up above Hickman at a higher elevation because everybody lived up in the foothills in those days to avoid malaria.

My grandmother lived to be ninety-four, and she was a very alert person until she died. The biggest tragedy of her life was that her youngest son, ~eil' [James McNeil], was interned by the Japanese in the Philippines during the World War 11. He lived in Bugo on Mindanao and was president of the Philippine Packing Corporation, which was a subsidiary of Cal-Pack [California Packing Company]. The Japanese put him and his wife and his three children in the Santo Tomas prison camp in Manila for three years. His weight dropped from 210 pounds to 90 pounds in prison camp. He was let out of the prison camp in 1945, but my grandmother died before she knew that he was free. She wasn't ill, her mind was sound and alert, but she just died. She wore out, I guess. She grieved every day about Neil. She went to bed one night and never got up. A remarkable person.

Teiser: Your Uncle Neil survived, though?

Crawford: Oh, yes. He lived to be about eighty. He died while visiting in Chester, England, of a heart attack. He was a very interesting man. He loved to come to the winery periodically, as he was fascinated with Ernest and Julio and what they were accomplishing. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1917, the year before I was born. He played football at Cal. Upon graduation, he went directly to work for Cal-Pack in Hawaii, and later planted pineapple in the Philippine Islands and developed their entire operation on Mindanao.

My father's other sister, Grace Crawford wilding, lived in San Antonio most of her life. She lived to be ninety-nine years old. She drove a school bus in San Antonio until she was ninety. She flew alone to California to have Thanksgiving dinner with us when she was ninety-five. She was a delightful person to know.

Teiser: You come from a long-lived family.

Crawford: Yes. I hope it rubs off on me. My mother's younger brother, Charles Hust, was a major league baseball player. When he finished his baseball career he was catching for the Sacramento Senators. When he retired from baseball he started an auto parts business in Marysville, Hust Brothers, and was very successful. He became mayor of Marysville in the 1950s for two terms. I think he was my mother's favorite person. Although my grandfather was named Charles McNeil Crawford, which is the

'see California's Finest. The Historv of the Del Monte Corporation, copyright Del Monte Corporation 1982, pp. 63, 99-101, 116. same as mine, I think my mother named me after her brother rather than after my grandfather [laughs].

Brothers and Sister

Crawford: I had two brothers and a sister. I had a brother, Robert, who was a year older than I, who went to Cal and graduated in 1938 cum laude. He had a Rhodes scholarship and he was a Phi Beta Kappa. He was also an officer in ROTC Coast Artillery, so he was called up to be in the Army in '39, right after he graduated and had gone to work for Cal-Pack [California Packing Corporation]. He was an economics major, and he was in the main office in San Francisco. But he was sent to Alaska for five years during the war, up in Amakmak, one of the Aleutian Islands. When the war was over, he was a captain in the Coast Artillery. The Army sent him to General Staff School, but he didn't like the idea of an Army career, so he went back with Cal-Pack, which later became Del Monte [Corporation]. He worked for Del Monte for thirty-eight years before he retired. He passed away three years ago.

My younger brother, Merton, went to Cal, too. He didn't graduate because he was called up to the service and went to India in the infantry. When he got out, he and my father went into the lumber business. They built a lumber mill in Fields Landing (up near Arcata) and operated that for a number of years. Then there was an eighteen-month lumber strike and they had to give up the lumber business. My brother then moved to Tacoma, Washington, and went into the concrete block business. He's still in the Tacoma area and does secretarial work for business organizations.

My youngest sibling is my sister, Elinor, who is five years my junior. She went through Cal during the war in the accelerated period. She graduated from Cal in three years. She taught high school down in Turlock for a couple of years, and then she went to the University of Oregon and took a Ph.D. She then went to work for the University of Northern Iowa, which at that time was Iowa State Teachers College. She retired in 1982, but in 1985 she was the first woman elected to the Athletic Hall of Fame of the university system. She lives now in Sarasota, Florida, and takes periodic trips to different places in the world--sometimes by freighter. She is a member of the Mote Marine Laboratory and the Selby Gardens of Sarasota . Teiser: My, you have an active family.

Crawford: They've been an inspiration. It's hard to keep up with such active people. My older brother, Robert, was always at least a year ahead of me in school. I continually was asked by the teachers why I couldn't be like my brother. So you can see what a challenge it was. [laughs]

Teiser: I'm surprised you took it as a positive challenge.

Crawford: I always did, because I admired my brother greatly and I always tried to rise to the occasion. He played football in high school. He was a big man--six-foot four--and was proselytized for crew as soon as he got to Cal, and he rowed for three years.

With that sort of background, I was always interested in academia--because my mother, my aunt, my uncles, and my brother all went to Cal Berkeley. When I graduated from high school, there wasn't much of a chance of my going because of the Depression. My brother was going on a scholarship because he was a straight-A student, and was also earning his way as an accountant for a bus company. But I worked for a year and saved up enough to start to Cal in 1936. I worked all the time I was there, typing for Professor [Lee] Bonar of the Botany Department. I think I learned a lot of my life sciences typing scientific papers for Dr. Bonar.

Teiser: You mentioned that you had come to Modesto at some point.

Crawford: As I told you, my grandmother had written that I shouldn't live here, so I brought her down here and drove her around. She couldn't believe that this was the same area she had known in 1880. She just remembered it as open land and sagebrush. I drove her up around Hickman. She showed me where she remembered grain farming, but it is all in almond orchards there now. She couldn't see how they could grow almonds. I told her that since 1890 there has been irrigation in this area, and the irrigation has changed the climate and permitted fruit and nut crops. She said the temperature used to get up to 120 degrees here in the summertime when she lived here. We rarely see it over 100 now, so apparently the irrigation and the trees and foliage have changed this area's climate for the better.

It's interesting to talk to somebody who lived in that era. When she came to California when she was twelve years old, she came over the Carson Pass in the wagon train. When she was ninety-two, I drove her over the Carson Pass. She couldn't remember much of it. She just said that she remembered some people died on the way. She said that when you are twelve you don't remember too much about it. She remembered being on the trail; I guess she was a pretty strong young person, because she walked all the way from St. Louis in three months. [laughs]

Children

Teiser: I should ask you about your children.

Crawford: I have two children. My son, Robert, was born here in Modesto in September, 1942--six months after I came to work for the Gallo winery. The Gallos are very friendly people, and they really accepted sally1 and me into their family. We were at their homes on many weekends. We worked six days a week. In those days it was difficult to get everything done because there were no people available for work; everybody was going into the Army. On Sunday morning I'd meet Ernest and Julio out in the winery and we'd plan the coming week. Then Sally and I and the children would go out to Julio's or sometimes Ernest's home for dinner on Sunday afternoon.

In November, 1945, my daughter Judy was born--just after the winery had finally broken into national prominence. In the forties, Life magazine used to do a feature, "Life Goes to a Party." Ernest Gallo had met an advertising man, John Freiberg, who knew somebody who worked for Life magazine. He prevailed upon them to come to Modesto to do a "Life Goes to a Vintage Party" in the fall of 1945. It was a great break for the winery. The setting was at Ernest Gallo's home on Maze Road.

There was a tub where we wanted a Vintage Queen to crush grapes with her bare feet. Ernest asked John Freiberg to get a

l~arahKatherine Glover Crawford. Vintage Queen. He located a girl who was just getting on the Greyhound bus in Modesto. She was a beautiful girl, and he talked her out of the bus trip to be our Vintage Queen. She was a local girl, and her mother was a friend of the Gallos. She did a swimsuit test which qualified her for crushing grapes with her feet at the party.

Everything turned out just great for the Vintage Party in August, 1945. There were over 300 people present. I can remember it vividly because Sally was pregnant at the time, and my daughter was born in November, 1945. For one of the pictures in Life magazine they did a full page of me kissing the Vintage Queen, holding a bunch of grapes over her head. Sally was a little upset about that. [laughs]

Teiser: What is your daughter's name?

Crawford: My daughter's name is Judy. She went to UC Santa Barbara and majored in music. She became an entertainer, as she played the guitar and piano and sang. She sang for a country western group for a number of years, and then she started her own group in Reno and traveled the nightclub, hotel, and restaurant circuit all over the northwestern United States, from Oregon to Washington to Idaho to Montana and back to Reno. Finally she settled in Reno. She had enough entertainment contracts to be able to work just in Reno for several years.

In 1980 I built an apartment house in Aptos. Judy sold her house in Reno and moved to Aptos to supervise the construction. She lives in one of the apartments and supervises the redwood timber ranch there (Timber Ridge Ranch). She's now taking a Master's degree in music at San Jose. She still entertains now and then in the Santa Cruz area. Her great interest is Beethoven, and she does a Beethoven radio show in San Jose.

My son, Robert, went to Cal in '62. He worked at Modesto as a lab technician, and he worked in our Cucamonga winery as a lab assistant. He worked one season for Louis [P.] Martini on the crushers. Now he's a farmer up in Willits. He grows his own food, and he raises hogs and goats and makes and sells goat cheese. He's a musician; he teaches guitar. He's a professional storyteller, and he spends a lot of his time on radio and visiting schools, telling stories. He's a remarkable raconteur. Storytelling apparently has become a very important part of cultural life in California. His oldest son is twenty-six. He's a sailing instructor and teaches sailboarding and sells sailboats and boards.

My only granddaughter, Rose, is eleven, and my youngest grandson, Ian, is seven.

Teiser: You certainly have a vigorous family all the way through.

Crawford: I guess it's part of my background in Antioch. My grandfather moved there in 1900, and my two uncles attended Antioch High School and played football there.

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION, 1918-1942##

High School

Crawford: Antioch was a small, family town when I lived there--2,500 people--and I think I knew everybody in town. I graduated from high school in Antioch in January of 1935.

Teiser: What were your interests in high school?

Crawford: Everything! I think what I was trying to do was to learn everything I could about everything, and enjoy everything I could, and participate in everything I could. It gave me a great start in life. I was very small for my age, in contrast to my brother, Robert. I went to school too early, at age four, and I skipped three half grades. I was twelve when I went to high school and just sixteen when I graduated. I loved baseball, but Antioch High didn't have a team then, so I couldn't do much in sports. I played "C" basketball, which was the smallest fellows, and I ran in the "C" track for three years. Antioch, to my great regret, didn't field a baseball team, but I did belong to a pickup team and played sandlot baseball a great deal of the time.

My hobby was electronics and amateur radio. I had an amateur radio license, W6JTD. I got it when I was nine, and I kept it until I went to Cornell when I was twenty-one.

Teiser: Were you a ham operator?

Crawford: Yes, but I didn't spend too much time at it after going to college. Universitv of California. Berkelev. 1936-1940

Crawford: When I went to Cal I registered to be an electrical engineer. I was in electrical engineering for the first two years I was at Cal.

Teiser: How did you happen to change?

Crawford: I was an engineering major, but I knew a lot about making wine, because during Prohibition we made wine at home in Antioch. We had an orchard and a neighbor who had grapes out near Brentwood. We crushed grapes every year and made wine in our basement in Antioch from about 19.24 until I was in high school. Then my father set up in the nursery business in East Oakland, so we quit making wine in Antioch. But I learned a lot about wine from him. We had it on the table from the first time I can remember.

When I went to Cal I moved in with my brother, Robert, and his roommate, Wilbur Thomas. My brother was an economics major, and Wilbur Thomas was a food science major--Fruit Products--under [William V.] Cruess. Wilbur asked me to go up tq Hilgard Hall one evening to see if I could tell him what was wrong with his wine experiment. I discovered he'd put way too much sulfur dioxide in it and it wasn't fermenting. While I was telling him what he had done--he had put the decimal point in the wrong place and used ten times too much SO2--Professor Cruess came in. I was so interested in him and what he had to say, I think he proselytized me. When he told me that the year before UC had graduated seventy electrical engineers and only one of them got a job, but he had graduated six people in fruit products and they all got jobs, he got my interest in a hurry. [laughter]

Teiser: He was interesting bright young men, wasn't he?

Crawford: Oh, he was. He was a marvelous man with a great deal of personal magnetism. I took electives from him the next semester. I took his Fruit Products 212 course. He fascinated me and challenged me. So I transferred to agriculture and took food sciences and food chemistry. I graduated in what was called fruit products in the college of agriculture in 1940.

Teiser: It was a good time to be there. Crawford: It was an excellent time. Cruess, of course, was a very interesting man. He, with [Frederic T.] Bioletti, was the link between Professor Eugene Hilgard and modern winemaking. I believe Bioletti hired Cruess, and he joined the staff with Bioletti about 1912.' They were interested even at that time in sulfur dioxide and proper sanitation and winemaking procedures, and published on these subjects. I only met Bioletti once. He was very reticent; he didn't have anything to say, but he may have been ill. He died about the time I went to college.

Bioletti also hired [Albert J.] Winkler to lead the viticulture program at Davis. Of course, the people that Winkler and Cruess then hired are legend. Because when I was in Berkeley, Cruess had in his department Dr. Maynard Joslyn; Dr. Emil Mrak; Dr. Reese [H.] Vaughn, who had come out from Iowa; George Marsh; Cliff [Clifford L.] Medford; Claire Weast, who became research director and vice president of Tillie Lewis Foods for forty years. And Winkler hired Maynard Amerine at Davis, dramatically influencing the future of the California wine industry.

Professor Cruess had accumulated this group of fine scientists through his personality, more than anything else, although he was an outstanding scientist. Joslyn was an excellent food technologist. Or he could have been teaching enzyme chemistry, or physical chemistry, or many other esoteric things. He was a brilliant professor and a good teacher. He had a tremendous organized mind, and he liked Bill Cruess tremendously.

Teiser: I've been told by a couple of people that Joslyn had the finest scientific mind of anyone they knew who was related to the wine industry.

Crawford: Oh, yes, I share that feeling. He could come in and give a very intensely deep scientific lecture--afifty-minute lecture without a note, but everything was superbly organized. If you wrote down everything he said, you would find it would be classified under item A, sub 1; sub a, sub i--thewhole thing in perfect order. He had it completely classified in his mind-- with an introduction and a conclusion to every lecture that he

'see also William V. Cruess , A Half Century of Food and Wine Technoloev, an oral history interview conducted 1966, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1967. gave, which would relate the lecture to the real world. He was erudite on almost every phase of the food industry, from dehydration to evaporation, to fermentation, and to management. But he was particularly strong in the science behind food and wine--the physical chemistry, the organic chemistry, and the enzyme chemistry. He was a remarkable fellow and a challenging teacher.

In fact, I had a terrible time getting B grades from Joslyn. He'd give me a B+, but he wouldn't give me an A because he said I didn't work hard enough. He loved to tease me all the time. In fact, he told me that he didn't think I'd ever succeed unless I married the boss's daughter. When I was back at Cornell taking my Master's degree and had married my wife, Sally, he said, "Well, now you've blown it. I told you if you didn't marry the boss's daughter, you're never going to succeed." [laughs]

I'll say this, though: Joslyn taught me so much science [that] when I went to Cornell I thought it was going to be tough, but I had all A's from everyone that I took a course from, because they were all things that Joslyn had forced into my mind. I was really impressed with him,* and we remained close friends until he died.'

Teiser: Were you better prepared than your classmates?

Crawford: At Cornell I felt that I was, yes. Not all from Joslyn, however. The University of California always has had the best professors. I took my basic chemistry from Joel Hildebrand, who of course was one of the finest professors who ever existed. And then I took organic chemistry and analytical chemistry from [Walter C.] Blasdale, and I took physical chemistry from [Gerhard K.] Rollefson, who was marvelous and stretched your brain to the maximum.

Those were the days when UC was picking people to work for Ernest 0. Lawrence at the cyclotron up on the hill. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing. One of my friends who was in electrical engineering with me the first year never came back to electrical engineering after his first year, because he was so good in mathematics and physics that the physics department

'see also Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist Views the California Wine Jndustrv, an oral history conducted 1969 and 1973, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1974. chose him. He worked for Lawrence, and he was down at Almagordo later.

There were a lot of excellent professors at Berkeley, so I had a great scientific background. Not only because with two years of engineering and all the basics that I had to have-- and you had to have a B average to stay in--but when I transferred to agriculture I had to take all the basic life science courses. This included botany, genetics, zoology, soil science, plant pathology, entymology, horticulture, bacteriology, anatomy, etc. The college of agriculture covers a lot of interesting and absorbing facets. To me it was like a smorgasbord; I just loved it. So it was certainly serendipity that I met Professor Cruess. My roommate at Cal, Bill [William Wolfe] Wileman, was a plant pathologist. He became a naval pilot in 1942 and was killed at Guadalcanal in 1943.

Teiser: How did you happen to choose Cornell to go on to?

Crawford: Again, it was due to Professor Cruess. When I graduated in May, 1940, I was planning to go to the Philippines to work on their pineapple waste disposal from the packing plant in Mindanao. Charlie [Charles] Ash had been over there and interested me in that possibility. He was a scientist who worked for Cal-Pack since 1920. My uncle was the vice president of Philippine Packing in Mindanao, and he knew Charlie Ash well. Ash wanted to set up a distillery over there to distill waste from the pineapple to produce alcohol and vinegar. So I went to work for Cal-Pack at the East Oakland plant for Mr. Saxby after graduating from Berkeley in May, 1940, waiting until things opened up in the Philippines.

Cruess called me about two weeks after I went to work for Saxby and told me that there was this fellowship open at Cornell. Ralph Celmer, who had the fellowship previously, was leaving Cornell to work for Taylor Wine Company in Hammondsport [New York], and so it was open. Cruess said I was the only one qualified from his class to take it, and said I would have to decide at once if I wanted it. I said I'd like to do it, and said I would call him the next day.

I first talked to Saxby, who was a good friend of Cruess. He said by all means to do it. I told him the only thing was that I had to leave right away. I had to be back there the next week because D. K. Tressler, head of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, was leaving on sabbatical shortly. Saxby told me he would pay me for the rest of the week if I came in the next day to review his plant from one end to the other and make recommendations. This was the East Oakland plant where they packed fruit cocktail. So he and I spent a day going over the plant, and I gave him all the recommendations I had. He seemed impressed, but said if he spent all the money to accomplish my recommendations, he would be in deep trouble.

New York State Wineries. 1940-1942

Crawford: I took the rest of my pay, sold all my books and my car, bought a ticket, asked Sally to marry me in August, and got on the train and went to New York.

Sally was still in her second year at Cal in journalism. She had a job in Pittsburg at the Johns-Manville plant. We decided we would get married after I got settled back there and she had earned enough money to get back there. I went back in June and started work right away, because the fellowship that I had involved doing consulting work for eight New York State wineries. Cornell University had a patented process for making sherry wine out of Concord grapes. Dr. Tressler took me to each New York State vinery to show me what he was doing.

Teiser: What did the sherry taste like?

Crawford: It was good, very nutty. The process made good sherry from Concords and Niagara grapes. It was a process that had been patented by Dr. D. K. Tressler, who was head of the experiment station in New York. He was a compatriot of Joslyn. He and Joslyn later published a lot of books together on food technology. In fact, he, and later Joslyn, bought the Avi Publishing Company and they published books under Avi.

Teiser: Did Joslyn have an interest in that?

Crawford: Yes, as I understood it.

Teiser: I remember Avi published the first post-war Cruess book, Technolopv of Winemaking, by Amerine and Cruess.1

l1960. Other editions have been published since. Crawford: That's right. Cruess ori inally published The Princivles and Practices of Vine Making. That was Avi, too, before Tressler owned it.

Teiser: Were the wineries that you were consulting with notable New York State wineries?

Crawford: Yes. When I first got there, D. K. Tressler drove me around to each winery to introduce me to the winery owner and to the winemaker, so that I could consult with them on the process. Some of them were just putting the process in, some of them had it and didn't have it running yet. It was Taylor Wine Company of Hammondsport; Great Western, which is still there--but it's the same company as Taylor now; Urbana Wine Company; Putnam Wine Company; Will Widmer Wine Company in Bath; Skaneateles Winery, which was one lake over. Do you know the Finger Lakes? Skaneateles Lake is on the east side of Cayuga Lake. Virginia Dare had a winery at Penn Yan, New York, and I went there. Then there was a little winery at ~anandai~ua.~It's a big winery now, but at that time it was just a little winery under a name I don't recall. They were considering the sherry process, so I visited them once.

Then D. K. Tressler went on sabbatical leave, and I started working with these wineries and started doing my thesis research on yeast until school started in October at Cornell. Sally came back in August, and we went to Winchester, Virginia, and got married. Ralph Celmer was our best man. Then she worked at Montgomery Ward in Geneva, where the experiment station is, until school started, when we moved to Ithaca. I took my graduate course work there, and I shared instructing a class in elementary bacteriology.

Every weekend I either drove to Geneva to work on the experimental work for my thesis, or I drove to one of the participating wineries to visit them, because I tried to visit each winery at least once a month. Upstate New York is like driving through the Sierras in the wintertime, so everybody thought I was out of my mind. I had to use chains on the highways and carry a shovel and a bucket of ashes [laughs], but I had a great time. I met a lot of wonderful people and made many good friends.

%he first edition was published in 1934, the second in 1947.

*NOW Canandaigua Industries. Will Widmer already had varietal wines at that time. He didn8t believe in bottling anything but varietal wines. He had all the New York State varietals like Delaware, Catawba, Ives, Isabella, Elvira, and many others. I think he was ahead of the California wine industry in putting out varietal wines, because he already had vintaged varietal wines in 1938. A wonderful guy. He had gone to Switzerland to learn how to make wine, and then he and his brother modernized their family winery.

Teiser: He was using American varieties?

Crawford: Yes. The only one that he didn8t consider an American varietal name was his Riesling. He made it from a grape known as Missouri Riesling. Actually, I believe it was an American grape, or possibly a hybrid, but they called it Riesling. Delaware was the best varietal that they made and was very much in demand.

I met Clarence Taylor and Greyton Taylor of Taylor Wine Company and worked with them. They were stimulating people. Greyton8s son, Walter Taylor, was a little boy then. I met him years later at Bully Hill, but he didn't remember me until we talked about the old days at Taylor.

Charles Fournier became a very close friend of mine. He was a wonderful person and an excellent winemaker and taster.

I also met Charles Champlain, who owned Great Western Wine Company then. He was a little bit out of sync with the modern technology of winemaking. He had some sanitary problems due to the Fresno mold which had come from some California dessert wine he purchased. I worked with him and with Professor Otto Rahn from the bacteriology department at Cornell, and we got him straightened out by using more sulfur dioxide than he was accustomed to.

Putnam Wine Company was an interesting, small wine company in Hammondsport, New York. I guess he went out of business when he died, as I never heard of it since I left New York.

Teiser: What did the New York wineries do? Did they specialize in anything?

Crawford: They made New York State wine, but they also imported spirits from California and made port and sherry--the dessert wines that were popular in those days. In those days, 80 percent of the wine sold in this country was dessert wines--port, sherry, muscatel, white port, tokay--and only 20 percent or less-- probably 15 percent--were table wines. The New York State wineries, I must say, were trying to hold the fort on table wines. They were still trying to push table wines back there when California had gone over 80 percent to dessert wines.

And they were making good champagne in New York, from Delaware and Catawba. Charles Fournier made excellent champagne. In fact, several years before I was there Charles had testified in Washington when they were trying to decide whether we could label sparkling wine as "champagnew in this country. He brought samples of his champagne and a Great Western champagne, and the Senate committee tasted the champagnes--his champagnes against the French Champagne--and they decided, based on quality, there was no reason that American sparkling wine shouldn't be called champagne. That is the reason today we can still label sparkling wine "champagne." There were people from California testifying, too, but if you read the testimony of the hearing you'll find that Charles Fournier predominated.

Taiaer: What happened to the sherry process?

Crawford: I think some New York wineries used it for many years. I presume Taylor still uses it if they still make sherry in New York. It was successful but, of course, sherry sales have gone way down from what they were then. They had to pay a cent a gallon to Cornell for any sherry that they made using that process, and it supported the fellowship that I was on that Ralph Celmer had previously.

Teiser : He left to become--?

Crawford: He left to become winemaker-chemist at Taylor Wine Company. In those days they called it wwinemaker-chemistw--nottoo acceptable today. [laughs] When I came here I was offered the job of winemaker - chemist.

Cornell University

Crawford: I worked with those wineries, and, as I took my classwork at Cornell, I was very fortunate because I had some excellent professors there. I must say that I feel happy that I was able to get into the University of California as well as Cornell University at that time, becavse they had some remarkable professors.

My biochemistry professor at Cornell was J. B. Sumner. J. B. Sumner had won the Nobel prize for crystallizing the enzyme ure.ase a few years before. There's a long story about that. [R.] Willstiitter, who was the leading enzyme chemist in the world at the time, was in Germany at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Willstltter claimed that an enzyme was not an entity of its own, but was a part of a protein. J. B. Sumner maintained that an enzyme was an entity. At that time, in the literature there was a lot of backbiting between Willstltter and Sumner. So when Sumner crystallized urease, it was a great coup.

He loved to tell the story to his students, because the war was just heating up in Europe. J. B. Sumner never let that rest--the fact that he crystallized urease and received the Nobel prize for it, in spite of Willstltter. I don't think he gave one lecture where he didn't say something about it, or at least take a couple of digs at the German professors.

Part of your biochemistry course at Cornell was to crystallize urease. Each student had to do it. You had to crystallize urease, also concanavalin A (enzyme from the jack bean), and another enzyme to prove they were crystalline, pure substances .

J. B. Sumner had only one arm, but he was one of the most capable laboratory bench scientists in spite of his handicap. He had a teaching assistant, Dr. Dounce, who, I was told, went on to the atom bomb project because he was such an excellent physicist as well as a biochemist.

Then I had Professor Otto Rahn as my major bacteriology professor and on my board for my Master's degree. Otto Rahn was a leading physiology of bacteria scientist in those days-- a good scientist and a real character! I had on my committee Carl Pederson, who was a leading bacteriologist in the dairy bacteriology world as well as on fermented meats, who passed away last year. So I got exposure to all kinds of things that I hadn't gotten involved with before, because they didn't have dairy science at Cal Berkeley; and they didn't have courses on fermented meats and meat packing which were available at Cornell. Teiser: HOG long were you there, then?

Crawford: I started my fellowship in June, 1940; I got my Master's degree in September, 1941. I had the opportunity to go on and take a Ph.D. at Cornell or at the University of Wisconsin on a fellowship, but December 7, 1941 [laughs], changed everything. I was classified as a student, of course, and a student was 2-A; I was classified 3-A because I was married. That meant I was going to be called up shortly. I went to work at Urbana Wine company for Charles Fournier in October 1941 as a winemaker-chemist.

On Pearl Harbor Day, Charles Fournier and I were hiking with our wives up the gorge above Hammondsport. Mildred Fournier got tired, and Charles thought he'd go back, but Sally and I hiked up further. When we came down, Charles was running up to tell us about Pearl Harbor. We walked back, and he said, "You know, there are two boys sitting on your porch waiting to see you." I couldn't figure what they wanted. It turned out to be two students--Walter Schatz and George Schweitzer--who lived in the same apartment house in Ithaca the previous spring, who wanted to know whether they should immediately join the Army or not. [laughs] They were very upset and wanted advice. I advised them to stay in school as long as they could. Later I learned they were both drafted, and I have never heard from them again.

Charles and I talked as we had dinner together that night. I told him I probably would have to go back to California, because I would be drafted and my wife could live with her family, because we didn't have any money to stay in New York if I went in the service. I told him I was going to start looking to see if I couldn't find something in California.

We came out here in December, 1941, for Christmas to be with our families. I visited a number of wineries and talked to them about the possibility of going to work for them. One I remember was Ed Rossi [Sr.] at Italian Swiss Colony. He said he'd think about it and let me know, but he didn't have anything at the time. Actually, I wasn't pressing. I was just finding out what the opportunities were.

I talked to a number of other people. I talked to the people that I knew in the industry. I talked to Herman Wente to see what he would recommend. Of course, I knew Cruess, and he knew I was looking for something. I talked to Louis [M.] Martini, because he knew me, as I had met him down at the University with Louis P. Martini, one of my schoolmates. I let them know that I was probably going to be moving back to California; that I had gone to work for Charles Fournier; and I was waiting to go ahead with my Ph.D. degree.

Considerinn a Job with Gallo

Crawford: When I went back to Hammondsport, Sally read an ad in the Wine Review (which is now Wines & Vines). It was a blind ad for winemaker-chemist. I answered the ad, and I got in touch with Ernest Gallo. He offered me a job by mail.

Teiser : [laughs] Is that the way it happened? I thought there was going to be a terribly exciting story about how you got a job here.

Crawford: No, I just wrote to him and told him the circumstances--that I was going to have to be moving to California, that I couldn't guarantee that I would be able to stay with him because I was eligible to be drafted as a student.

I had applied to the Navy for a commission because I had a degree in food science, and also I knew the International Morse Code thirty words a minute, which is fast for the Navy, as they only required fifteen words per minute. I could type 120 words a minute. They offered me a commission, but I couldn't pass the physical because I wore glasses and I had some problems with my back. So I couldn't get into the Navy in 1942.

Ernest Gallo offered me a job, and I talked to Charles Fournier. He didn't know anything of Gallo wines, although they did sell bulk wines back East. I told Mr. Stuart Underhill, owner of Urbana Wine Company, that I was going to leave and come back out here. He also owned the Painted Post Gazette in Corning, New York, as he was a newspaper publisher. He didn't know anything of the Gallo Wine Company. I talked to Clarence Taylor, and he said he'd heard of Gallo wines--that they'd submitted samples to him for purchase--but he never had bought any of their wines.

I called up Cruess to find out what he recommended, and he said, "Well, Charlie, I met the Gallos once." He said he didn't know too much about them, but that they did ask him more questions than anybody ever did before or since at any one time. He said that he thought if went to work for Ernest Gallo, I'd never be bored! [laughs] I must say that he knew what he was talking about.

Teiser: That was rather brave of you. You knew the industry, and you knew there were much better-established wineries here, and that probably you could have gotten a job with others. It was quite a brave decision to go with a little company that most people didn't know about.

Crawford: It wasn't so little. It's surprising to a lot of people. The capacity here was five million gallons when I went to work here. So relatively it wasn't little. They had a successful business growing.

Teiser : It was all bulk?

Crawford: Well, they shipped bulk from Modesto and bottled elsewhere. They had a bottling plant in Los Angeles, and they had one in New Orleans. Then they bottled in New York through another company.

Teiser : A bottler?

Crawford: Yes.

I really wasn't thinking of the wine business in the long future at that time. I was looking more at getting a Ph.D. first. I remember going to see Carl Pederson, who had been on my committee, to see what his recommendation was. He said his advice to me would be to go to work in industry as long as I could, because then if I decided to take my Ph.D. I'd have more of a practical approach. So he was all in favor of my going to work, and it was good advice.

Nev York State Scientists

Crawford: I had a very interesting group of people at the Experiment Station in New York, and at Cornell. Charles Tressler, who was D. K. Tressler's nephew, was back there. He became a scientist in Washington, D. C. Jim Moyer was a good friend. I knew Peter De Bye, a physical chemistry professor at Cornell, who went fishing with Sally and me from time to time. He was a Nobel prize winner, and had gotten out of Germany just in time--he and his wife and his son. His son, Peter Paul De Bye, and Peter's wife were close friends of ours, and we went tenting together in the summer. Sally and Marian De Bye worked at the same hat shop in Ithaca.

Also, I met Frederick W. Tanner at Cornell. He was a graduate student getting his Ph.D. while I was getting my Master's. Fred Tanner's father headed the department of bacteriology at the University of Illinois. Fred and Marian Tanner corresponded with us for many years.

Teiser: You did have an interesting group of people.

Crawford: Yes. I didn't want to leave New York; that was where I was going to live the rest of my life. Upstate New York is a beautiful place, known as the Switzerland of America, and I would have been very happy just to stay on the Cornell campus or at the Experiment Station and be a professor there.

Teiser: You were thinking in terms of an academic life?

Crawford: Well, I was enjoying myself there, and the life was appealing. I can't say I'm not enjoying myself here, too, as the challenge has been great and Ernest and Julio are wonderful to work with. I guess you adapt yourself to fit whatever you're doing at the time, provided the circumstances are appealing. THE GALLO WINE COMPANY, 1930s THROUGH 1950s

World War 11 Wartime Products

Teiser: Did you have some qualms early on about taking the job at Gallo?

Crawford: You were around in 1942; you know what it was like. Because of the war, there were a lot of uncertainties!

I couldn't make any permanent plans. I did mention to Ernest Gallo that I wanted to do some defense work if I could. One of his letters that he wrote to me was that they were already making cream of tartar and calcium tartrate, and they were thinking about industrial alcohol. So when I came out here we talked about that, and we did do that.

Teiser: You did make industrial alcohol?

Crawford: Yes. By 1943 we were making industrial alcohol here in Modesto. In fact, we designed and built a plant where we could make grain alcohol from wheat, because they said that insect- infested wheat would be available to us to use as a raw material. So we designed and built a pressure cooker, a yeast room, a lauter tub, and all the things necessary to make our grain alcohol. We got the plant approved as an industrial alcohol plant about the end of the grape season of 1942, so by January of 1943 we were about ready to go. We started from scratch in March of 1942, so we did a lot, particularly without any high priorities. We built equipment out of junk. We bought all kinds of stuff to build that plant.

Then when we were ready to run, they couldn't deliver us any wheat, but they delivered us molasses. We made millions of gallons of industrial alcohol out of molasses for the butyl rubber program. And we continued to make calcium tartrate until 1945, which was sold to the Defense Plant Corporation.

So we were in war work. But I kept getting called up for the Army; about every six months I took a physical and didn't pass it. I'd get classified 2-B, which I think was "on the ready," but you had to pass another physical. Finally, in January of 1944, they classified me 4-F. They didn't want me to take any more physicals, as I couldn't qualify.

That was really something, though. You asked if I had any qualms. Every time you went to take your physical to go in the Army, you had to close all your affairs up, take care of everything, get on the bus; and if you passed the physical, you went in. You didn't go back home again; you went in that day. So you went with a suitcase, ready to stay if you passed the physical. I came back on that bus three times by myself, because I have a deformity of my spine that they didn't want to take a chance on. I've never had any trouble with it, but they told me that I could have. In fact, that was a serendipity, because if I hadn't learned that I might have seriously hurt my back. I took exercises from a doctor for about five years, learning exercises to strengthen the muscles in my back to take care of that deformity of the spine. And I've never had any trouble with it, but I have been very careful all my life with lifting and carrying heavy weights on my shoulders.

Prorate and Ex~erimentalBrandy

Teiser: With all that experience in distilling, in making industrial alcohol, I'm surprised that Gallo didn't get into brandy earlier.

Crawford: Well, you know, they considered it. They worked with it. In 1938 they made a lot of brandy because that was a prorate year, and they built a brandy warehouse. They had an eleven- thousand-barrel brandy storage warehouse here. When I came here it was full of prorate brandy. There was some whiskey in it, but it was mostly all prorate brandy. Almost all of the prorate brandy was sold in barrels to others, as the prorate brandy was not of the best quality.

The first year I was here we distilled some spirits. We distilled zante currants and sold it as neutral spirits. We distilled figs and sold that as neutral spirits. Then we distilled commercial brandy and barrelled it down. We were going to sell that as commercial brandy, but grapes became extremely scarce during the war. The raisin grapes--Thompson Seedless--went to the war effort, and the Muscats also were made into raisins. The wine market kept increasing every year, and so each year there wouldn't be enough grapes to make brandy, so no program was considered.

We did bottle some brandy--some private brandy for the Gallo family. I think they bottled a thousand cases about 1945 or '46 in Los Angeles. It was some of their prorate brandy that they distilled in 1938.

Teiser: As I remember, for the prorate, if you made wine you had to make brandy. You had to set aside some--

Crawford: Oh, yes, that was a set-aside program. I guess it saved the industry. My God, grapes were down to five dollars a ton in 1938. But it was a serendipity, in a way. In those days, you couldn't keep your brandy in barrels over eight years. If you kept it in barrels over eight years, you had to taxpay it. And, of course, the taxes were relatively high on brandy. But by 1943, there was such a shortage of spirits that Schenley, National Distillers, and Seagrams all moved out here. I think the distillers bought at least twelve wineries and started making what they could out of grapes. That was reason enough for us not to get into the brandy business, because we were trying to make as much wine as we could. So, really, we didn't get into it at that time. But they did bottle that thousand cases. It was interesting brandy, with the Gallo black label. It was used personally by Ernest and Julio, and was used as gifts to their friends for a number of years.

One reason we didn't follow up on it was because Ernest and Julio were mostly interested in table wine. When they first started, they made nothing but table wine for their first couple of years. Then they had to get into distilling to produce dessert wine. When they moved over here in 1935 from their original winery on 11th and D streets, they put in a 53- inch continuous still, and then they put in another 53-inch still. When I came here, they had two 53-inch continuous stills and one pot still, and they were making a little pot still brandy for blending. In fact, the brandy we made in '42 and barrelled down was partially distilled in a pot still, like the French brandies. It was very good! Teiser: What happened to the pot still?

Crawford: It collapsed finally. It was sold to them by Oscar Krenz, and it wasn't very well built, as it was a very thin-walled still. A couple of times it caved in and we hammered it out again, but finally it collapsed beyond repair. [laughter] So we got rid of that. We used the copper for building other still constituents and for repairs.

podesto Pro~ertvand merations. Earlv 1940s

Teiser: When you came here in '42, were they in this location?

Crawford: Yes, on Fairbanks Avenue. Well, not where this building is. This was bottom land over here, along Dry Creek (Beard Brook).

Teiser: What was there on the property then?

Crawford: That road that goes past here was called Fairbanks Avenue. Between Fairbanks Avenue and this creek here, it was all bottom land, like that is down there below the administration building. It was vineyards and floodland. But on the bluff on the other side, on Fairbanks Avenue, that's where the winery was. In 1935 they bought this property from the Beards--the Beard Land and Investment Company, the people who own the M&ET [Modesto and Empire Traction Company] Railroad.

This used to be Modesto Colony out here; everything on this side of the creek from town was Modesto Colony. It was founded by the Beards about 1880, for development. They were real estate people looking wau ahead. They were thinking of this as an industrial tract, which it is today. So George Beard, seeing the Gallos starting out, set aside some property for them. Part of it was a dry yard, and part of it had been sold to Pacific Can Company. But the rest of it was just empty land. It was surrounded by Dave Arata's vineyards. This was vineyard down in here where the administration building sits, and it went all the way around and up the south side of the winery property.

George Beard and Walter Beard were close friends of the Gallos. That winery that they first started out in was a M&ET building that they rented from the Beards. Then they moved here in 1935, and by the time I got here in 1942 they had a very modem, up-to-date winery for the day. They had about five million gallons of cooperage; they had thirty-eight closed-top concrete fermenting tanks. The style of that day was to have the two troughs on each side of the aisle, and the sumps at one end of the fermenting room. The entire fermenting room was integrated into the crushers at one end, with copper tubing around the top as must lines. It was the style of fermenting room that every winery in California had at that time .

Teiser: They had wood cooperage for fermenting at 11th and D Streets?

Crawford: Yes, they had wood cooperage. Here are some old pictures and an article I found. It says, "Modesto to get winery. Work Is now underway." That's 1933.

Teiser : I've never seen this article. Ten thousand gallons!

Crawford: Ten thousand gallon redwood tanks.

Teiser : Fifteen of them.

Crawford: Yes, but they all may not have been in service during that first crush.

Teiser: Somewhere I read--maybe in a speech of yours--that they started off doing all the work by themselves, with the help of their families.

Crawford: Yes. Mostly it was Ernest and Julio. I think they just did everything. I think Mrs. Ernest Gallo used to work in the office taking care of the telephone, answering letters, and things like that. Then they had a field man who worked in the vineyards with them at the Repeal of prohibition, Jess Jenkins, who became their truck driver. And they had Max Kane, who was their plant superintendent and who had worked elsewhere in the wine industry. He was plant superintendent here when I came.

And they had Art Petracci here, who was a cooper who had worked for Louis Martini down in Kingsberg, too. I think Louis sold Kingsberg in 1940; so Art Petracci had come up here in 1940 or 1941. Art Petracci was an excellent cooper. ,There are lots of interesting stories I could tell you about Art, but I won't, other than to say he contributed to the organization in an important way. [looking at photos] There's the winery in January, 1943, to give you an idea that it wasn't a small winery. Those are sixty-thousand-gallon refrigeration tanks with frost all over the outside of them.

Teiser: That was very advanced. Who is that standing there?

Crawford: That's me. Here's a newspaper picture from when we got married back East.

This is last New Year's Eve--Sally and I and the friends that we ski with. They threw a New Year's Eve party celebrating our joint seventieth birthdays. Her birthday was in April and mine was last September.

Here'sa picture of some people you know. One is Dick [Richard G.] Peterson. He took his Ph.D. under Dr. Joslyn. When he got his Ph.D., he came to work for me and was here eight years before he went to BV [Beaulieu Vineyards]. He was great to work with.

Teiser: What were your first duties when you came to work for Callo?

Crawford: I came here in March, 1942, and met Ernest. He talked about quality. He wanted to improve the quality of his wine, so my first duty was to work on what they were doing and try to improve the quality of their wines, and to take charge of the laboratory. They had had a man in their laboratory for many years, Lester Collins. Lester Collins had died and they had been trying to get a competent successor. Dr. [A. Dinsmoor] Webb was here until he went back to UC Davis to get his doctorate. He worked as a winemaker one grape season, I think in 1940.

Then they had a Frenchman here in 1941, by the name of George Dolague, who wasn't capable of functioning in such a large operation. He apparently had worked in a small winery in France somewhere, but just couldn't handle such a large challenge, so he didn't work out.

So they were getting along without a winemaker when I was hired. They had a technician who worked in the laboratory, named Vern Terrill. He had learned a little bit from Lester Collins and worked for Max Kane, but he didn't have academic training. They did have a chemist here, Ormond Bretherick, who worked for Tartar, Incorporated. He did not work for the winery. Ormond was a graduate of the University of California in chemistry. He had been with the American Cream of Tartar Company, and then he had come here. So he helped keep the laboratory going, supervising the lab tech who did some of their analyses.

But he was not a winemaker; he was a tartrate chemist, and a good one. There was a real problem, because to measure tartrates you have to use glacial acetic acid. You know what vinegar smells like; the winery laboratory was permeated with acetic acid from his testing for tartrate purity. When I came here, I insisted Ormond move his evaporator outside into another room and keep the door closed, so we could smell and taste wines.

Ormond worked here until 1944, and then he left for another job. The University of California came through in a lot of ways for Gallo, because a few years after that--about in 1947--Norman Braskat, a Cruess, UC Berkeley graduate of 1934, came to work here. In fact, it must have been about the time Ormond left, because he knew Norman Braskat; they had both been at Cal at the same time. I hired Norman Braskat to be plant superintendent here, and he was very good in training and developing personnel through job training practices learned in the service.

We've had so many good people work for me here over the years that it has made it easy for me to help the company grow.

Teiser: Thiscompanyseemstohaveatalentforpickinggoodpeople.

Crawford: Yes. Norman had been a colonel in the Army, and he had been in chemical warfare. But his strong forte was teaching people, so I got him to write job descriptions for every job we had in the winery and put them into operation. He had been winemaker- chemist for Roma Wine Company before the war, and his experience was important in building our organization.

Teiser: Were you, in effect, in charge of production?

Crawford: Yes. You asked me what I did when I first came here: I was supposed to be winemaker-chemist; I was supposed to see that all the wines were analyzed properly, that we improved the quality of the wines, that we followed all the laws and regulations of the State Department of Public Health and of the ATU (as it was then--Alcohol Tax Unit) and of the Food and Drug Administration. That was basically it. Also, Ernest knew that I had been involved with the sherry process, and he wanted to know if he could improve his sherry making.

My problem here in the beginning was that nothing was organized on paper. They had grown up doing everything hands- on in their winery with verbal orders. In other words, they started small and they just grew by telling their workmen what to do, but with no written instructions. They had expanded to the point where they were busily buying the American Vineyard in Livingston, which was a big vineyard--I think two thousand acres--thathad dehydrators and Thompson Seedless grapes, and so forth. Julio was so busy outside of the winery with vineyards and so forth, that Ernest was trying to carry the whole load of the winery.

All I could see was that things needed to be done in establishing organized work orders and job training, and I just started to do it. I just happened to be here at the right time, because they needed somebody to do all these things. They didn't have a personnel department. One of the first things I did was to form a personnel department and hire somebody to run it, so that we could screen people. Because we were talking about bottling, it was necessary to ask, "How are we going to bottle? We have to hire people, and we have to train them." So we established a personnel department. Our first personnel director was Millicent Gehlert, one of the daughters of an old Modesto family which Julio had known, and we hired Beverly Winfree, who I had known in Antioch, as Millicent's secretary.

Then as soon as they got to trust me a little bit more, Julio let me establish a purchasing department. First, I had to do all the purchasing and approve each major purchase with Julio. But he couldn't be involved in the day-to-day purchasing, so I did all the purchasing and all the training of new people and the hiring of people. So I hired John Wilson from Montgomery Ward to do clerical work for our storeroom and purchasing, and within six months Julio appointed him purchasing agent for Gallo, and he stayed on until his retirement just a few years ago. Instituting Written Orders

Crawford: When I first arrived, all wine was shipped in bulk, so we had just a basic crew of people here. There was Max Kane as superintendent; Red [Tony] Vierra as Max's assistant; and Red Vierra's cousin, John Ramos. John Ramos didn't know how to read English, but he could read Portuguese. When we set up written orders, we had to teach him how to read English.

Teiser: How did you know these things? You'd been in a number of wineries in New York State, but--

Crawford: I've always worked somewhere. I helped my dad and uncle plant forty acres of apricots when I was eight. From the time I was twelve years old I worked part time in the Hickmott Cannery in Antioch. Everything done was carefully based on written orders. They didn't do anything solely verbally; there was

always a written order. I worked as a checker, I worked in the ' cook room, I worked in the shipping, I worked in the receiving of asparagus and the shad and whatever else we packed. So I had worked in a cannery where everything was on written orders and knew the importance of it in a food industry.

Then, from the time I was a sophomore at Cal, in all my summer and winter spare time I worked at the Great Western Electro-Chemical Company in Pittsburgh, California, which is now Dow Chemical. Mr. Shedler, who owned that Great Western Electro-Chemical Company, had a very creative chemist that he had hired from Germany. They had nine departments there. They made sulfur dioxide, potassium metabisulfite, chlorinated hydrocarbons, xanthates for gold mining, caustic soda, and other different industrial chemicals. So I learned that verbal orders were not acceptable in an industrial chemical plant. You not only gave written orders, but written instructions on safety equipment, clothing, etc.

So when I walked into the winery and saw them doing things verbally, I felt something should be done about it, and I did, in spite of some resistance from the old-timers.

Teiser: Who was giving the instructions?

Crawford: Max Kane, the cellar superintendent. Max Kane had a wonderful mind. He farmed (grapes, I believe) until he died this year. Max could remember every tank. I think there were 180 tanks in that winery, and he knew what was in each tank--what kind of wine it was, how much was in there, and he knew in his mind approximately what the alcohol and sugar of that wine was. He carried that all around in his head. The only record system he had was an inventory that was taken at the end of each month, and he worked from that. He didn't have any wine movement records or lot numbers for each wine; instead, he updated the wine inventory sheets by tank.

Italian Swiss Colonv in the Fifties

Crawford: This wasn't just unique to Gallo. Italian Swiss Colony worked the same way--by tank rather than lot number. In fact, we made an offer to buy Italian Swiss Colony in the '50s, one of the things that surprised me when I went through all their winery records and their wines, was that they were still keeping their records by tank rather than by lot, which was very unwieldy and lacked continuity. It is necessary to establish lot numbers for the wines rather than to follow the wine through tank numbers, and by using a Kardex or similar system continuity of gallonage, analysis and activity can be maintained.

Teiser: Let me ask you something in this context. I have had it said to me off the record that when the Gallo people were considering buying Italian Swiss Colony, they sent their people up and looked over it very carefully and found out everything about it. Is that correct?

Crawford: We sure did. There were a lot of problems. We found warehouses full of unusable merchandise [laughs] and tanks of unsalable wine.

Teiser: Two people have said to me, "They sacrificed their--"whatever sum you had pledged to hold it until you decided whether to buy it or not--"butthey certainly got their money's worth in learning about how wine was made."

Crawford: Oh, boy! [laughs] What we learned was that Italian Swiss Colony was in trouble. National Distillers didn't understand the wine business then. They had not been able to change the operation of that winery the way they had hoped to. They had a lot of problems. Paul Heck was in charge when I went over their inventory. Paul was very upset with National Distillers' management because he couldn't do anything without getting permission from their national headquarters, and they were too slow to let him know what he could and couldn't do in a timely manner . We had a thirty-day option and went through all their premises. They also owned Shewan-Jones Winery.' We had to go through all their inventory as well. I knew Lee Jones, and he became a good friend. Lee was quite creative. He had been a storekeeper-gauger and a government inspector, and he knew how to make wine. He was one of the more progressive vintners in this industry at Repeal. E. H. Brown was his chief winemaker. I'm sure Myron [Nightingale] told you about him.'

Teiser : Yes.

Crawford: We all had a great deal of respect for E. M. Brown and Lee Jones. In 1932, Lee Jones, a year before wine could be sold, made 3.2 percent wines. The trouble was, they all spoiled in the bottle due to lack of preservative techniques. He was able to do it because he had a big icehouse there in Lodi. I first met Lee Jones with Cruess. I used to go on field trips with Cruess in 1938, '39, and '40. I met people like Lee Jones, Herman Wente and Ernest Wente, the Concannons, the Rossis, "Sox" [Arpaxat] Setrakian. Cruess seemed to know everybody in the food and wine industries.

Grapes. Raisins, and Wines

Teiser: What was Setrakian doing at that point? He had his co-op, didn't he?

Crawford: Yes. But his main interest was grapes and raisins.

Teiser : That was in the forties?

Crawford: Yes.

Teiser: What was your impression of him?

'~ou~htby National Distillers in 1939. l~eeMyron S . Nightingale, Hakine Wine in California. 1944-1987, an oral history interview conducted in 1987, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1988. Crawford: He was a very interesting man. He certainly had the growers' best interests at heart. I do think that as far as the wine industry was concerned, he probably was a detriment to the development of the table wine industry in California because they [the growers] pushed raisin grapes--ThompsonSeedless-- and dessert wines so hard.

I can remember one meeting at the Wine Institute where the wine industry was deciding what to do to develop another marketing order. As you know, the price of grapes and wine was so depressed for so many years. This must have been somewhere in the early fifties or late forties. I had been chairman of the Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee in that year. I believe it was in '47. I had to give a report to the board of directors of Wine Institute. The Technical Advisory Committee--the scientists and the winemakers--felt that one solution might be to declare Thompson Seedless a "non-wine grapen and thus prohibit wine to be made from Thompson Seedless. Well, I thought Sox setrakianl was going to have a stroke, he got so red in the face. He was a real champion for the Central California grape growers.

But you are familiar with how we made wine in those days. Everybody gives you their versions in their memoirs. My memory of the wine industry in those days was that winemakers couldn't buy grapes for wine until the raisins were laid, because the raisin growers set the price for grapes. So the wineries waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, they would lay the raisins and a price would be set. The winemaker would get grapes after they were past maturity. It was a real problem, because winemakers couldn't get good grapes before they were over-ripe. The only way one could get good grapes was to pay an extremely high price early in the season, which caused marketing problems.

I've always been grateful that Julio and Ernest had the foresight to buy grapes at the right time, regardless of price. Some people put Julio down for being a tough buyer, but he buys good grapes and insists on quality. And it made my job as a winemaker easy, because when you've got good grapes it's pretty hard to make bad wine. So I'm very happy to see what has

'see also Arpaxat Setrakian, Bruno Bisceglia, and Robert Setrakian, A. Setrakian, an oral history interview conducted in 1971, 1974, and 1976, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1977. happened in the past twenty years in this industry, with the accent on varietal grapes and keeping the Thompson Seedless where they belong--as fresh fruit and as raisins.

Now everybody is crushing early varietal white grapes in August. Sometimes we are crushing by the last week in July. I can remember the crush starting in the early days of October, and the wineries still crushing Emperors at Christmas.

Teiser: Louis Petri said he made high-proof early in the season so that he wouldn't have to carry it over for the fortified wines until the next season.2

Crawford: Well, Louis Petri was thinking about the dollar, but he wasn't thinking about the quality. Because quality wine is made from early grapes, not made late in the season. I can see why he would say that. Because everybody wanted to conserve cooperage, and they used to think "proof gallons" and how to get more per ton of grapes. Leo Berti published the Berti formula in the forties to determine the number of gallons available per ton of grapes. If you should talk to a winemaker today about proof gallons per ton, he wouldn't understand, because he is interested in proper maturity, not alcohol yield! Our whole industry was based on proof gallons per ton in the forties and fifties. Until the middle sixties, people still stayed with that old standard--that dessert wine was worth twice as much as table wine because of the proof gallon equivalence. If dessert wine was a dollar a gallon, table wine was fifty cents a gallon, because there was twice as much alcohol potential in the dessert wine. The change in thinking about this didn't take place for a long time.

Now, the Gallos were always interested in making quality wine. They wanted to plant good grapes. One of the first things they did here, as soon as the war was over, was to start planting varietal grapes and experimenting with them. They established an experimental vineyard in Livingston. Paul Osteraas, a viticulturist, came to work in '46, and we started planting an experimental vineyard. We had at least four hundred clonal selections that we planted in that vineyard, working in conjunction with the University of California. We got cuttings out of their experimental plots, and we got

2p. 19, Louis A. Petri, The .Petri Family in the Wine Industry, an oral history interview conducted in 1969, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1971. cuttings elsewhere. We grew a row of each one of these different clonal selections, and we made them into wine after the vines came into bearing. Paul Osteraas studied all the viticultural characteristics of those vines, and I set up an experimental winery here within our winery to make wine from each row of grapes. We called it the research annex, and there we made those experimental grapes into wine and tasted them every year for twenty years.

Contracts with Growers and Wineries##

Crawford: This experimental vineyard was the basis of the plantings that were done later on for our long-term grower contracts. When we did prove out a variety--for example, Chenin blanc proved out after the first four years of those grapes being in bearing, it continued to be an excellent selection over all the years from 1947 to 1967, and it yielded well in the experimental vineyard as well. So we started planting Chenin blanc in our vineyard, and it was one of the first varieties recommended to growers in the San Joaquin Valley for our long-term contracts in 1968. French Colombard also proved out very well and was established in"our contracts.

Zinfandel we knew was valuable, but we attempted to test different clones of the Zinfandel to try to eliminate the "second crop." We tested Zinfandel on its own roots, on 1613, on Salt Creek, and on Dog Ridge rootstocks, and found that the flavor of the Zinfandel was best on its own roots rather than on these rootstocks.

We also studied grapes in the Napa Valley and in Northern Sonoma. We had a long-term contract with the Napa Valley Cooperative Winery, with the Frei Brothers Winery, and with Sonoma County Cooperative Winery.

Experimental vineyard-winery work is still ongoing at Gallo Winery of Sonoma in the Dry Creek Northern Sonoma viticultural area, as well as at our vineyards at Livingston.

Teiser : When did those contracts start?

Crawford: The Napa Valley Co-op, as I remember, started in 1951, on a formal basis where we had an evergreen contract. The Frei [Brothers] contract was a verbal contract that Julio and Louis Frei had had before I was here. I went up with Julio to visit with Louis Frei in 1943 to talk about the wines he was going to make, so we could plan for them in our overall production. That's when I first met Louis Frei. I don't think he ever had a written agreement with Julio. I believe there may have one later on when Andrew Frei took over. But their relationship went back to about 1938.

Then we had a long-term contract with the [smaller] St. Helena Cooperative Winery, which later became the Markham Winery. They were just on the verge of bankruptcy about 1952 when Julio made a contract with them in 1952. I think they had only crushed about six hundred tons. Eventually we got the crush up to about three thousand tons. Those tanks that are in that picture there,l which are all frosted up, were involved later at St. Helena Co-op. When we went to all concrete and steel at Modesto, we gave six 60,000 tanks to St. Helena Cooperative Winery. Frank Stefanich took them down here and stacked them, recoopered them, hauled them up to St. Helena, and erected them for the Co-op. And it got them going in volume. The last time I was in the winery, they were still there. [laughs]

Anyway, we planted these varietal grapes in our own vineyard, and then in 1967 Ernest and Julio decided to come out with long-term contracts for the growers. That was the initiation of the long-term contract concept. In 1968 they offered growers a fifteen-year contract if he would agree to plant the variety that the Gallos wanted planted in the area, and if the grower would grow them according to their rules so that they would deliver grapes that were at maturity, and that the grapes were not over-cropped, and viticultural practices were followed so that the grapes weren't mildewed.

I think that's how Julio got this reputation of being tough, because he insisted that those growers follow that contract. But Ernest and Julio also guaranteed they would pay more than the market price to any grower who would perform according to their contract. This helped start the big planting boom in the early seventies. Pro~rietarvand Varietal Wines

Teiser: Were these growers mainly in the Central Valley?

Crawford: Yes, but in the North Coast, too. We were always interested in North Coast grapes. For example, in making Hearty Burgundy we needed North Coast grapes. We started that early on. We first started Paisano, and then we developed Hearty Burgundy. We needed North Coast grapes to do both.

Teiser: I remember Dr. Joslyn saying in an informal conversation that Paisano was almost all North Coast Zinfandel.

Crawford: That's basically right.

Teiser: Do you still make it?

Crawford: We still have Paisano. I think it's under Carlo Rossi label now. It's always been a very successful anytime wine.

We worked on a lot of proprietary wines. We had one we called Galloette in 1947. It didn't go anywhere. It was a Concord wine--a kosher style wine. Manischewitz was popular in those days. But we weren't successful with that. But Hearty Burgundy was another story--that's when we really had to get into the North Coast.

Then we came out with our Chablis Blanc. Hearty Burgundy and Chablis Blanc were so successful they held us out of going into a varietal program for fifteen years, because of the supply of grapes.

Teiser: Hearty Burgundy recel;ved a lot of popular acclaim.

Crawford: Yes. Hearty Burgundy is still a very popular wine--one of the most popular red wines in America. We don't sell it in gallon jugs any more, only in 750 ml bottles. It's an excellent wine and being well received in a cork finish. It helped greatly to contribute to our growth.

When I came here, as I said, this winery was making five million gallons of wine. I would estimate that we've increased on an average of 10 percent per year ever since. Roughly, from 1942 to 1989, on a 10-percent-per-yeargrowth, I think you could estimate our original five million gallons approaching 300,000,000 gallons. We now have 335,000,000 gallons of cooperage.

So the Hearty Burgundy grew, the Chablis Blanc grew, and although we wanted to go into a varietal program, we had to use all the varietal grapes in the Hearty Burgundy and the Chablis because we wanted to maintain quality.

In 1972, Ernest and Julio made the decision they would not crush any more Thompson Seedless grapes. It's too bad the industry didn't take our Technical Advisory Committee more seriously in 1947 when we recommended that, because California growers would then have planted varietal wine grapes on their own much earlier.

We really didn't get our program going in varietals until about 1973.

Teiser: Have you kept to that no Thompson Seedless crushing?

Crawford: We haven't crushed any Thompson Seedless for wine since 1972. It costs more money, but make better wine to eliminate Thompson Seedless.

With reference to that experimental vineyard that Paul Osteraas and Julio worked so long and hard on and from which we made wines, Maynard Amerine used to come to visit his mother in Modesto each year at Christmas. The week before Christmas he would come out to the winery to taste the varietal wines from our experimental vineyards with us. We'd talk about which ones we should keep and which vines we were going to eliminate. For example, Chardonnay grew very nicely down in Livingston; it produced a good crop. But the wine didn't taste like Chardonnay. It was a nice, clean wine, but it*s character wasn*t Chardonnay. So we gave up on growing Chardonnay here. We did recommend it to North Coast growers.

In those days Napa Valley Co-op was not too interested in planting new varieties, as times had been bad for a long time. Carignane and Zinfandel were their big red varieties, and their whites were Palomino and Sauvignon vert. They didn*t want to plant other varieties because nobody would pay them any more money, and other varieties wouldn*t yield as well. The clone of Chardonnay that was available in 1962 would only produce about one ton per acre of grapes. Today*s clone produces four or five tons to the acre, I guess [Harold P.1 Olmo was the one who finally selected that clone, which makes a big difference.

Of course, Chardonnay now--you know what the situation is in quantity and price.

Teiser: How long will it's popularity last?

Crawford: The future of the California industry is dependent upon continuing the top varietals. After all, look at France. Historically, Chardonnay has been the basis of French Chablis in northern France, it's the basis of the finest white wines of Burgundy and blanc de blancs Champagne. It's been the queen of the white grapes in France and has become the best of California's varietals.

Teiser: So it's here to stay?

Crawford: Oh, yes. I just think it's too bad it took this industry so long to get into it. Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc will be the leaders over all other California white varietals.

Teiser: Speaking of these long-term contracts, did Gallo later have some with the southern end of Monterey County? That big vineyard--was it Southdown or McCarthy Land Company when Gallo started buying from it? Was that on contract, or did they just buy a lot?

Crawford: I think they had year-to-year contracts. Julio worked pretty closely with them, but I don't know too much about that. We still get a lot of grapes from that area. A good percentage of all the Monterey grapes come over the hill to our Livingston winery to be crushed for our varietal program. We crush about 40 percent of the grapes from Sonoma County at the Gallo Cellars of Sonoma (Frei Winery). Napa Valley Co-op still makes red wine for us.

Teiser: They had a contract--do they still?

Crawford: We still have a contract with them for red wine. I don't keep up with that, as I haven't been in the production department for ten years now. Winerv Eaui~mentand Processes

Crawford: We were talking about what I did here. As I said, the Gallos had a modern winery here when I arrived. I remember the first time I went through the winery I was surprised to see that they had a De Lava1 centrifuge in their process cellar, which was very forward thinking--althoughit was not capable of doing the job for the winery. Still, every year from 1942 we tested another centrifuge, until finally Westphalia perfected a centrifuge that would reliably work for us. Each year we offered to buy one, provided it would perform to our specifications. Augie Peitzman persevered in putting centrifuges in here, testing them, and taking them away every year for improvements. Augie Peitzman is an interesting man and very personable. Finally he succeeded in selling us a centrifuge that was reliable, which set the standard for the whole industry!

There are a few fundamental things that have happened in this industry that have made our wine industry as good as or better than the rest of the world. One of them is fermenting cold. I remember the Technical Advisory Committee of the Wine Institute discussing the possibilities of cold fermentation, but to be able to accomplish it was an economic problem, as equipment was expensive and unreliable, and in order to accomplish it one had to have a yeast that would ferment while it was cold. So practical cold fermentation wasn't really perfected until the late fifties, although it was known to be very important years before. We fermented all of the wines from our experimental vineyard cold (55 degrees Fahrenheit) from 1947 on.

Centrifuge is another thing; without it we never would have the quality that exists today, particularly in white wines, because if you centrifuge the pulp out of the white juice before fermenting it, then you get a clean, flavorful wine that isn't subject to all the flavor problems of the past.

Teiser: When were the yeasts perfected?

Crawford: Well, it's an ongoing thing. You know, Professor Emil Mrak was a renowned yeast scientist before he before he became chancellor of the University of California at Davis, and he had publications on yeast. He brought yeast specialist Herman Phaff into Berkeley and later to Davis. When I went to Cornell I did my thesis on yeast, based upon what I learned from him. Mrak sent me a translation of the Die Anaskos~orogenenhefen-- the non-sporogenous yeast--inDecember, 1940, when I was back at Cornell, as a Christmas gift. That Christmas I also received a very welcome Christmas card from Louis [P.] Martini, just before he went into the service [laughs]. That's all I heard from anybody at Cal, and I was a little homesick. Oh, I also got a Christmas card from Bill Cruess, and Maynard Joslyn came to visit me when I was back there in early 1941.

Emil Mrak worked on yeast at Berkeley, and then Cruess hired Herman Phaff to assist Emil. When Mrak became chancellor he left all his work in the hands of Herman Phaff, who has become a world-renowned yeast zymologist. He gave the annual honorary lecture to ASEV [American Society for Enology & Viticulture] a number of years ago.

Teiser: Cruess himself was a zymologist originally, wasn't he?

Crawford: I think so, yes. Cruess was into everything; he had a very inquiring mind. Cruess used to come and visit us here about once a month until he died, just to see what was going on. He never could leave anything alone; he always had to work with it and follow up. He was a wonderful person. Sally and I went with Louis and Liz [Elizabeth] Martini to Marie Cruess's 99th birthday party this last Valentine's day before her death. It was a wonderful reunion for us all.

When we were at Berkeley, Cruess might give a midterm exam where he'd have all the questions on the assigned reading instead of on his recent lectures, and everybody would be really upset because they weren't warned. Cruess would always say that one had to be prepared for every eventuality. Then he would have a party up at his house in the Berkeley hills on Saturday night, and all was forgiven. Marie Cruess would make hot dogs or whatever college students liked. Once in a while we'd have steak, but not very often. Marie was a marvelous person, an accomplished artist,and a strikingly beautiful lady. At the Valentine's Day party, she still remembered those parties in Berkeley, and she was still beautiful.

S~ecialNatural Wines

Teiser: I want to be sure to ask you, wherever it fits in, about the development of the flavored wines in the fifties. Crawford: The government regulations were vitally important on that. The Alcohol Tax Unit, of course, was an offshoot of the Prohibition era. When Prohibition was repealed, most of the revenuers became government inspectors, and they set up very stringent regulations. Until we could change some of those regulations, there were a lot of things we couldn't do. For example, in distilling we were required to have our stills in a double- walled building. And all of the tanks in the winery had to be in an enclosed building. All the brandy tanks had to be in a double-walled building with no windows, and so forth. We spent many years trying to change the regulations, first for industrial alcohol and then for wine. When we first went into it we had some regulations changed on an emergency basis so we could go into industrial alcohol.

We also kept changing them for wine as well. We finally got the walls off the distilleries, so you could have a free- standing still outside. We got the requirement for surrounding walls taken out of the regulation so we could put the tanks outside, as we were planning for 600,000-gallon tanks which were too large for a building. We had to get those regulations changed, and we succeeded!

One of the restricting regulations prevented the development of American flavored wines. You could make vermouth or aperitifs in the bitter European style, but you couldn't make a fruit-flavored wine. It either had to be bitter or it wasn't approved. Working with Wine Institute, we tried to get the regulations changed. In 1955 they had a hearing on the F.A.A. labeling regulations. At our insistence, the government added to the vermouth part of the regulation a product called "special natural wine." Both vermouth and aperitifs had to be bitter, but the new regulations said we could make a flavored wine that was not bitter, to be called "special natural wine." Of course, that's what started all the flavored wine products, which ended up with wine coolers.

Teiser: When did the alcohol content requirements come down?

Crawford: Federally, wine could be 7 percent alcohol from Repeal, when the regulations were first written. But the State of California had a minimum of 10.5 percent alcohol for table wines. In California, grapes have at least 20 percent sugar, which yields about 11 percent alcohol. So a wine at 7 percent alcohol wasn't practical, and the growers insisted on minimum alcohol contents for California table wines. Crawford: So the State of California, at the insistence of the growers, established a minimum of 10.5 percent alcohol for table wine, and it wasn't practical anyway to bottle a wine under 10.5 percent alcohol in those days because of the possibility of spoilage bacteria. Remember, many wineries' cooperage were well past maturity and very subject to spoilage. It just wasn't practical to bottle a wine at less than 10.5 percent alcohol and keep it stable until sold. We didn't have sterile filtration to protect the product from spoilage.

It was a big breakthrough when the industry got sterile filtration. Sterile filtration started here at Gallo with Brad [R. Bradford] Webb when he was working here. He had a very inquiring mind. In our bacteriological laboratory we used little Millipore filters--littleone-inch filters that you used to germ-proof filter laboratory media without pasteurizing it or sterilizing it in an autoclave.

Brad kept saying, "Why can't someone make these big enough to filter our wine to the bottling room?" So we asked John Bush, who owned Millipore Corporation. John Bush was Vannevar Bush's son. Vannevar Bush had been [F. D.] Roosevelt's scientific advisor. He was a remarkable individual. I don't think we would have won the war without him,

Anyway, when the war was over we had access to all the German patents. One of the German patents was a device to filter gasoline for jet fuel to make buzz bombs. John Bush got the idea that it would be great to use in bacteriology, so he adapted the German patent to make bacteriological filters. A Millipore filter was used to filter the serum used for the first vaccinations for infantile paralysis. But they were small, and they had not been able to make them big enough to filter wine in volume.

As Brad suggested, however, John Bush went to work on it, and he developed successful twelve-inch Millipore germ-proof pads. So the wine industry finally got access to sterile filtration through that. It was long after Brad left Gallo, but I still credit Brad with developing the idea originally.

Teiser: Did California change its law?

Crawford: California changed its law, so now you can bottle wines down to 7 percent alcohol, and coolers down to 0.5 percent alcohol. In 1980 or '81, the federal government changed their concept of what they call rectification. Ever since Prohibition we operated under a stipulation that if a wine was not natural it was rectified, and you had to pay a rectification tax on it. Wine coolers are technically rectified wines, because sugar syrup and flavors are added to grape wine. If you made a wine cooler prior to BATF changing that regulation, the wine cooler would have to pay a rectification tax and it would have been labeled a "rectified wine. "

When they changed that regulation it made wine coolers possible, under 7 percent alcohol. But wine coolers were radically different, and are not labeled B.A.T.F.; they're labeled under F.D.A. because they weren't spelled out in the B.A.T.F. (F.A.A.) regulations I mentioned as amended in 1955. There's no definition of a wine cooler yet in the federal alcohol labeling regulations.

That's why we see a coolers made out of beer, similar to wine coolers. White Mountain Cooler is made out of a malt base, not wine. If you call it a wine cooler, it has to be made out of wine. But you have to use sugar and water, because grapes ferment too high in alcohol to make a 5 percent alcohol product. If you look at a wine cooler label, it tells you what it's made of, under the FDA labeling regulations. Most state [that it contains] water and wine with "other natural flavors."

I hope that answers your question as to the alcohol content.

THE TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE OF THE WINE INSTITUTE, 1947-1974

Crawford: Over these many years there are a lot of people who have put a lot of thought into improvement of wine quality, starting with people like E. M. Brown, and the Wine Institute Technical Advisory Committee, and people like Ted Kite and Elie Skofis. Dale Mills, who was at Italian Swiss Colony, used to talk about making a wine one could drink like beer.

The history of the Technical Advisory Committee is interesting. Maury Turbovsky was one of the UC Berkeley old- timers in this industry who left it for other fields but made his mark. The Technical Advisory Committee at the Wine Institute was formed in 1944 because of Maury Turbovsky and the big argument he had with Bob ~ibson' over the responsibilities of a winemaker. Maury felt that a winemaker should be paid more and have more responsibility than a janitor or a general winery worker, so Maury decided he was going to form a wine masters' union, like the brewmasters.

I first met Maury when he came through Modesto to see Ormond Bretherick, to get him to go to a meeting in Fresno to form a winemasters' union. Ormondsaid, "Forget it, Maury. I'm not the winemaker; I don't want any part of a union." [laughs] So Maury went down to Fresno and met with a group of winemakers who met monthly at Twining Laboratory. Most of the technical people in this industry were in the Fresno area in those days. Paul Richert and [Edgar] Red Wilkins of Coast Laboratories and Twining Laboratories were leaders in the group. They met once a month, talked about wine, tasted wine, and played poker. So Maury Turbovsky went down and tried to get them to form a winemasters' union. Ted called me and told me what Maury was trying to do. I said, "Yes, I heard him talking to Ormond, but we felt it was wrong."

'Owner of Gibson Wine Company, Elk Grove, California and Covington, Kentucky. Ted said he thought we should do something about it, so we decided to call Leon Adams of Wine Institute and tell him what Maury was doing. Leon got excited. He was running Wine Institute then, under Harry Caddow, and he felt it was a bad idea. Leon called Maury and got him down to San Francisco, where he talked Maury into the idea of a Technical Advisory Committee for Wine Institute. So Maury became the first chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee. All the winemakers and technicians then used to meet in San Francisco about twice a year to discuss all the technical problems of the industry.

Teiser: So that was what happened!

Crawford: We did that from 1947 until 1974, I believe. When it became necessary for the industry to have a public member on Wine Advisory Board, we gave it up. Are you familiar with that?

Teiser : Yes, that ended in '75. Crawford: That's when they decided they'd drop the Wine Advisory Board, and since the Technical Advisory Committee was financed through the Wine Advisory Board budget, it was terminated and we founded what we call the Wine Institute Technical Committee, which has only ten members.

The W.I.T.S. Seminar, sponsored by Wines & Vines, has filled the gap left by abandoning the Technical Advisory Committee.

Teiser : I have here a list of TAC members. It came from the Wine Institute files, and I don't know who made it or when it was made. But these were the members for a time.

Crawford: [reading list] This must have been in the late forties or early fifties--withJohn Matchett, that was before the fifties. John Matchett was a chemist who was trying to use ion exchange to cold stabilize wines, and it never would work to his satisfaction, as he couldn't get a good ion exchange resin. It was probably 1948 or '49 that he published on the use of ion exchange. Edgar Wilkins--that was Red Wilkins, whom I was talking about at Twining Laboratories. Paul Richert was down at Fresno in those days, too. He was Walt [Wal'terS. ] Richert's older brother. Norman Braskat used to call them Big Rick and Little Rick. Here's Emil Cherski. He was the chemist for Fruit Industries. I remember his often repeated statement, "From the bottom of my heart, I know we can make better wine."

E. M. Brown, Dino Barengo--he lives in Reno now, but he used to have the Barengo winery. And here's Hod [Harold W.] Berg, Cruess. Hod Berg was at Cresta Blanca in those days. Here's Allen Pool; he was at Bear Creek Winery in Lodi. Lawrence Quaccia was at Guild Winery in Lodi. Brother [F. J.] Reinkey was at the Novitiate of Los Gatos. Robert Mondavi, Frank Pilone--Frank was down in Cucamonga with Vai Brothers. His son is Gordon Pilone, Ph.D., who is now in New Zealand, but he was at Christian Brothers for a number of years. Frank contributed a lot to the production techniques of California sparkling wines.

Andre Tchelistcheff, then at BV; Peter Mondavi of Krug; Lyman Cash--hewas the winemaker-chemist at Italian Swiss Colony, and then he came to work here at Gallo in the early fifties. He was here about fifteen years and then retired. Phillip Posson--hemight be a good candidate for you to do [an oral history]. He was with Sierra Wine Company. He's retired now, but I think he still consults for them. He has a lot of knowledge about our industry, and a good, dry humor.

A1 Pirrone is also a guy that you might think about sometime. He and his father owned the Pirrone winery here in Salida, and then he and his brother had it for many years. A1 still has the winery. He doesn't run it anymore; he's retired now. He was in our grower relations department under Julio for a number of years.

Teiser: Do they make bulk wine?

Crawford: No, the winery no longer operates. They did make bulk wines for us, and they bottled wines. I believe they were bottling wines in Salida before we bottled here in Modesto. They finally started selling all their wines to us in bulk, and then they quit making wine.

A1 worked here for Julio for at least ten years as his chief viticulturist. A1 went to UC Davis. He was a roommate of Marciel Ibarra. He was the Mexican winemaker who had his own winery, and later worked for Pedro Domecq in Mexico until he died. So A1 has lots of stories. He's very well known in this industry as a winemaker as well as a viticulturist from the industry. That's why I would suggest A1 as a candidate for an oral history, You do have professional viticulturists, like [A. M.] Kazimatis, but I don't think you have any private viticulturists. 1

Teiser : That's true.

'~mon~those interviewed by the Regional Oral History Office. GALLO PEOPLE AND PRODUCTS

Notable E~D~oY~~S

Crawford: Anyway, for the record, when I first came here I was winemaker- chemist, and then I was production manager. I became production manager in 1944 or '45, and then I became vice president in 1954. I was vice president and secretary in charge of production from 1954 on. We had lots of good people here. Joe Heitz worked for me here for less than a year in the late forties. Then he went on to Guild and eventually ended up at BV before he bought [Leon] Brendel out and started his own winery. Brad Webb worked here, of course, for a number of years. He contributed a lot to the company. There was an article put out, "The Gallo Graduates," by Richard Paul Hinckle, which lists a good group of people who succeeded elsewhere after they left us.

Teiser: Yes, I guess it was good to have on one's resume.

Crawford: [laughs] Well, they all speak well of us, and I think we have mutually learned from one another along the way, but, as Julio likes to say, "We still have the best here," because we still have some of the finest winemakers in California here. Dr. George Thoukis has been with us since 1960. He's in charge of winemaking under Julio. We still have Spir [Spirito] Ballatore here. Ballatore Spumante is named after him. He came to work here in 1947 or 1948. Don Sanford came to work for here in 1950 as a winemaker. Don now is superintendent of our brandy operation and is retiring in 1990. Don Vosti, Ph.D., worked with me early on as a winemaker and then assistant cellar superintendent. He helped me build the lot number system that we still use for our wines. Don went on to become research director for American Can Company. Guido Croce is in charge of our table wines, and Peter Vella (of the Ripon family winery) has been here for years.

The Research Laboratory

Teiser: Did you yourself establish the research laboratory?

Crawford: Yes--with the encouragement of Ernest, who told me more than once that "research is like savings; if you wait, it's too late!" I established a research wing of our laboratory; we didn't have a research laboratory building at that time. Don Vosti was in charge of our research at that time. Others who contributed to our research were Ralph Celmer, Dimitri Tchelistcheff, Robert Boughilet, Karl Popper, Richard Peterson, Arthur Caputi, Jr., George Thoukis, Tom Wong, and many more.

Gallo research has-resulted in over thirty patents in the U.S. and overseas. These cover many subjects, including frozen and dehydrated wine yeast; fibrous cellulase acetate (to replace asbestos); carbon dioxide analytical technique; low alcohol wine process; champagne stoppers; automatic microbiological sampler; bottle cork extractor; ion exchange process; berry and fruit treating process; grape harvesters; bottle design; and others I can't recall. The patenting of such developments opens them up for use by others in the industry.

Then when we bought the Las Palmas Winery in Fresno from the Cribaris in 1955, we tried to operate down there with people from Fresno, but we had difficulty establishing the Gallo style. So we finally sent Norman Braskat down there. He trained people and remained plant superintendent until he died. Bob Slayton, one of the employees we inherited from Cribari who Norman Braskat trained well, is now vice president in charge of our Fresno and Livingston wineries.

Teiser: You've always had a big laboratory staff?

Crawford: Yes. Well, it's the nucleus of our operation. There were two things I established as soon as I started: one was a good laboratory, and the other was a good library. We have an excellent library. In 1942 I contributed all my books and began collecting literature on the food industry as well as the wine industry. We've established our research based upon that library. Cruess taught me that you don't do research until you look the subject up in the literature first. And Joslyn reinforced that, because he spent most of his spare time reading Chemical Abstracts. He could quote you letter and verse from most of the scientific literature of his day on food and wine.

Teiser: What was the immediate impetus for starting the research lab? Was there anything special?

Crawford: Ernest Gallo told me he wanted to improve his wines. He wanted to make the best wine that could be made and sell it at a reasonable price. That's quite a challenge, because it challenges you not to just make a good wine, but you've got to make it at a reasonable price. So you had to figure both aspects, because research is necessary. Every time you make a proposal to make a wine better, you've got to be able to establish how much it's going to cost to do it--to be sure it is economically feasible.

One of the decisions we made to guide us in research was that we didn't want to change anything drastically. As Julio always said, "You want to make things come naturally." If you're going to make an improvement of your wine, you don't do it all at once. You do it a little bit at a time so you don't give your consumer any surprises. That has been a basic tenet. And without a research laboratory you can't very well control changes, because you have to know what the basis is behind a wine tasting differently, or why it smells different. If you don't know the biochemistry and the microbiology behind it, then you can get some unpleasant surprises. But if you know the theory behind it, you've got a possible chance of making a desirable improvement. It isn't easy.

Since 1951, the Gallo Winery has published over fifty scientific papers reporting technical information useful to the wine industry and regarding many subjects, such as clarification techniques, laboratory analyses, color of white wine, browning problems, and general subjects. I will give you a list of these if you want to include them. l

We have a mass spectrometer and we can take flavors and odors down to the sub-molecular size--to fractions of molecules--and determine what might be causing differences.

l~eeAppendix 111. But the final decision is still dependent upon the palate of the winemaker. Wine is an extremely complex beverage. That's one of the things we have to understand when we're in this business--that it's different from other alcoholic beverages. It's different from a brewed, extracted, cooked product like a beer. It's different from a distilled condensate--like a spirit. Wine is the fermented juice of sound, ripe grapes with nothing added that doesn't occur either from the grapes or from the fermentation that remains in the wine. That is a big mouthful, when you say it's the fermented juice of sound, ripe grapes--the fact that they're sound, the fact that they're ripe, the fact that there's nothing added that remains in the wine that isn't natural to wine. Even sulfur dioxide occurs naturally during fermentation. So we know that we have a natural product. Wine is different biochemically, physiologically, and socially.

Science and Human Factors in Wine Quality

Crawford: The infinite variety of wine that we can make--the nuances of color, the aroma, the bouquet, the flavor, and the texture-- are all controllable through knowledge--through research and through studies in the vineyard because of all the different clonal selections that contribute.

With all the science that you have, unless the transformation from the vineyard to the wine bottle is attended by a winemaker who has the basic knowledge required, the chances of achieving a consistently excellent wine are very poor, regardless of the grape-growing area or regardless of the clone selected. If that individual who is doing it doesn't know his business and doesn't know what's behind it, he won't have continuity of quality, nor will he achieve outstanding wines.

Knowledgeable tasting and application of scientific principles to winemaking are really the basis of continuity of quality. Quality is dependent upon smell and taste, not just on laboratory equipment. Both Ernest and Julio have outstanding palates. They taste every day in their own groups-- Julio for production, blending, and bottling; and Ernest with his salesmen, so that his marketing people know the product they're selling compared to the competition. He tries to challenge them all the time to taste their product and taste the competition's, to assure themselves that "Gallo" means quality wine!

If a salesman is told that his wine is the best quality, he might believe it or he might not. But if he's actually tasted his products against those wines he's competing with, and he knows he's got the best product, he's going to be a lot better salesman. So both Ernest and Julio have always contributed their knowledge to their staffs. Julio has trained many top California winemakers to be able to duplicate his perspective of quality, as well as members of the Gallo family, by tasting with them repeatedly for many years.

We've established our winemaking operation as we grew, on a basis that we wanted to stay small, even though the overall umbrella got big. That's an anomaly we did by differentiation of our winemaking facilities into groups. Just like the University of California has many small colleges in it, and those colleges have individual classes within them, we have an overall table wine department, we have specialists for Cabernet Sauvignon, specialists for Chardonnay, specialists for each of the other varietals, and for our other wines.

The winemakers work in teams, because we crush at four different wineries and have a team of winemakers at the crusher at each winery all during grape season. The winemakers are there at the crusher all the time the grapes are being crushed and they monitor the whole operation.

Introducinn New Wines

Teiser: How about feedback from the public, from test marketing, and whatever?

Crawford: The marketing department does that, and they do have taste panels. They test not only taste and flavor, but labels, packaging, and even advertising material. Before we start a new program, they test it. We have a special research department that specializes in market research.

Teiser: It seems to me I remember a very dry rose that was test marketed and then pulled off. Crawford: We did an experimental program on rose with Phil Filipello, who was with the University of California after he left Dino Barengo in Lodi. Leon Adams was consulting with us at that time. He edited The Gallo Wine Press.

It was about 1960 that we did that vin rose test that you're talking about with UC Davis and the Technical Advisory Committee. The industry was trying to find out whether a dry rose or a sweet rose was better. The dry was considered to be 1 percent reducing sugar, and the sweet was considered to be 3 percent.

Phil set up the taste project, and the University handled it. We bottled the wines. We bottled identical product at 3 percent sweetness and at 1 percent sweetness. It was made from Grenache and was bottled under two different labels. First it was distributed door-to-door in Davis and Woodland for in-home tasting. Then they sent a questionnaire around to find out which one was preferred. Finally, it was put on the market in a number of stores in Woodland and Davis to compare sales results to home tasting. The consumer chose the 3 percent product about three to one over the 1 percent. The results were published, and that's when the whole industry went to 3 percent sweetness on roses.

Teiser: I remember the dry; I liked it. [laughs]

Crawford: We felt that same thing. We sold the 1 percent rose in San Francisco, and we sold the 3 percent rose in Los Angeles in the same package. After a year, the complaints and/or comments we got from the trade showed us that the 3 percent was what most people liked, even though you and I liked the 1 percent.

Leon wrote all of these [The Gallo Wine Press]. Here's Ernest Gallo's statement on corporate philosophy. Here's Nick Franzen, manager of our Gallo Glass Company at that time. There's John Wilson, whom I previously mentioned, our purchasing agent. Here's Legh Knowles, in marketing. He came to us from Ohio. He is an interesting fellow who became president of BV before retiring. That's what's great about this wine industry; there are so many wonderful people in it.

Teiser: And there certainly is a big variety. FURTHER RECOUECTIONS OF THE 1940s

[Interview 2: 23 May 1989]##

Workinn with the Gallo Family

Crawford: In 1944, when I was finally classified 2-A in the draft and the Army was going to call me, I remember they gave me a going away party, and they gave me this gold Rolex watch, as it seemed I was surely going to go in the service that time.

Teiser: And then you came back on the bus.

Crawford: I came back on the bus, with my gold watch, which I've treasured for forty-five years. When I had my fortieth anniversary here, they had a party for me and gave me another gold watch with a diamond. Bob Gallo had arranged for the watch. When they presented the watch, I took this watch off and put the other watch on, and I passed the old Rolex to Bob. He said, "We didn't give you that!" I said, "No, you didn't; you were only sixteen years old when Ernest and Julio gave it to me." [laughs] The Gallo family have been wonderful to me for forty-seven years now.

They seemed very appreciative of the fact that I joined in everything that they wanted to do. They went along with my suggestions for a personnel department, for quality control, and the laboratory. Wartime Em~lovees

Crawford: We couldn't hire men during the war, so we hired junior college and high school women, who weren't going to be drafted, and taught them individual jobs. They didn't know the whole picture, but they could do those individual analyses in the laboratory and take samples out in the winery as well as men, so we kept operating during the war.

Teiser: Have some of them stayed on?

'Crawford: Not in the laboratory, but on our bottling line some stayed until they retired. Some of the young women learned to be supervisors when we gave management and supervisory training.

Bottling and Fermenting Facilities

Crawford: When I first arrived here, as I told you, we didn't bottle here at all, but it was being planned. Julio very strongly felt , that if you put the wine in the bottle yourself, then you know it's going to be all right. If you ship it in bulk to somebody else, you cannot build a brand because of loss of continuity. There were at least twelve hundred independent bottlers in the United States that wineries shipped to in bulk, and it was very competitive, with a small profit margin. Sight draft shipments were common because of finances. Cash flow was extremely tight in the early days.

So in late 1942 Ernest obtained a bottling line from New York, had it shipped it out here, and hired a mechanic who had been working on that'bottling line to come here with it. In late '42, right after the vintage, they started putting the bottling line in, right below the laboratory stairs. We put it right next to where the laboratory was so we could establish quality control.

Some of the young men that we hired in 1943 stayed here their whole career.

Then Ernest got another bottling line, and a third--all used equipment that took a great deal of maintenance. We had to use rewashed bottles because there was no glass available to the wine industry at all, due to the war. It was pretty grim. The rewashed bottles of different colors and shapes came in wooden cases, and we repacked them in cardboard after bottling.

Finally the war came to a close, and in 1945 we were able to start doing some things like putting in some new equipment and starting to build a new bottling room separate from the winery. All of our previous building had been supervised by Ernest and Julio. They didn't contract building; instead they hired a master carpenter, Audrey James.

In 1945 we decided to start building concrete wine tanks because materials had become available, so Julio called Audrey James back to the winery. We were able to get reinforcing steel; and they had kept the form lumber and construction equipment which they had used to build the concrete fermenting room in 1938.

We designed and built a new fermenting room in 1945, and we started building a bottling building in 1945 also. Audrey James got a building contractor's license in Sacramento because the unions wouldn't let us hire carpenters unless we had a contractor's license. I later got registered as a chemical engineer by the State of California. So we designed tanks and the bottling building. We poured the bottling tanks at the end, and then we built a 300-x-150-foot bottling room adjacent to the tanks.

In 1945 we were buying glass from Owens-Illinois [Glass Company], because the government started letting them make glass and wine bottles. Owens-Illinois engineering department helped us to design a very modem bottling room. We decided we would emphasize sanitation so we could work toward sterile bottling our wines, so we built a "clean" room under filtered air pressure. We made it large enough for six bottling lines, and we installed four new bottling lines in the bottling room in 1946. We put all the filters and heaters above the U- shaped bottling lines^ so that all wine movement operations were up above on a cement platform above the concrete tanks at the end of the room.

Crawford: That bottling room became a prototype for many bottling rooms The Guild [Wineries and Distilleries] sent Lawrence Quaccia down to study our bottling room and build one like it up at Lodi . We kept the cases outside of the bottling room. The glass would be taken out of the case outside the room so if there were any carton dust, it couldn't come in. The bottles then came through an aperture in the wall into the bottling line and into the filler, into the capper, into the labeler, and then on outside for the casing in.

, Teiser: You are describing a contemporary bottling room.

Crawford: Today we have the same style of room, only we have fourteen lines and we run them twenty-four hours a day. That was something we started in 1946. Ernest and Julio were farmers, and most farmers believe in working from sun-up to sundown and then shutting down until the next morning. In 1946 we went on a 24-hour operation to amortize the equipment. I lived less than a mile away from the winery, and it was my responsibility to establish adequate quality control to protect our quality at night as well as in the daytime.

Teiser: That must not have left you much time.

Crawford: [laughs] Oh, boy, I was here night and day the first year. And Julio was here, too, many a night. We had run the stills all night during the wartime period, so it was a good introduction to around-the-clock operations, but with far less people. Many nights, after dinner, Julio and his wife, Aileen, would come in to see what we were doing, as he believed in giving everything his personal attention.

We wanted to use forklift trucks in our new warehouse, but we needed some experience. One of the people I had hired six months ahead, when planning our new operation, was a young man named Bert Smithcamp, who had been a forklift operator and in forklift maintenance in the Army. He was available six months before we were going to start our bottling room. I couldn't tell him to wait six months, as we would have lost him, so we hired him to work wherever we could use him--washing tanks or doing general winery work--until we started our new warehouse. When we were ready to buy our forklift trucks, Bert knew the best ones to buy. We set that original warehouse up in a modern system that is still the model which we follow.

Bert was in charge of transportation in our warehouse for years. When we built our glass factory in 1956, it was a mile away from the winery. Bert developed a wagon train system that runs back and forth between our glass factory and our bottling room. It carries empty cases up, full cases back, twenty-four hours a day. Bert passed away several years ago, but we still remember his contributions. After we had run that for a year or so, we found it to be successful, but we got the idea that maybe there was a better way. So we got bids from food equipment companies such as Cleveland Tramrail, Food Machinery and two or three other conveying companies. They never could come up with anything that was comparable in function or in price to what Bert had designed.

Teiser: What year did you start production in the glass factory?

Crawford: We started operating in 1957.

A lot of things happened in a very few years. I came here nine years after the Gallos started. Nine years after I came here, we were bottling all of our wines here and stopped bulk shipments. We had contracts with about eight outside wineries to produce wine for us, and we were building tanks and personnel--growing constantly. It was fifteen years from the time I came here until the time we started producing glass.

Survivinn the 1946 Market Crisis

Teiser: I should ask if you remember Lewis Rosenstiel's maneuver to try to buy up all the grapes in California?

Crawford: That was 1946. I certainly do remember that. It was the year we opened our new bottling room, and we had spent a lot of money and planned to bottle a lot of wine, because money didn't come easy in those days. Yes, Rosenstiel [of Schenley Industries] started buying grapes that season, anticipating a big sales year. I remember we were in our new bottling room. Ernest had taken a trip to New York, and he came back to California and told me he wanted to meet with everybody in a group that worked in the bottling room and talk to them.

We had everybody there, and he brought a grape box into our bottling room. We must have had about 120 employees at that time. Ernest got up on the grape box and gave a very serious talk. He said we were going to go through the toughest year that they had ever had since he and hie brother had been ' in the bus'iness. He didn't know whether they were going to be

'see also pp . 78 - 79. able to survive financially or not because of the exorbitant price for grapes which Rosenstiel had established. He asked everyone to feel that this was their winery--to try to do everything that they could do to make everything work efficiently and properly. Otherwise we were not going to be able to survive.

I couldn't really understand it at that time. Ernest has a sixth sense--like a crystal ball--and in my opinion he's a genius, because he is able to look into the future and predict what is going to happen. He was able to foresee that the high price of grapes was leading to disaster.

In order to counteract the situation, Ernest decided to stop crushing grapes and to sell wine at once, to sell most of our wine inventory. Dessert wine had gone up to $1.40 a gallon; normally dessert wine had been 30 cents a gallon. We were still making our new sherry, and he wanted to ship it. I said, "Ernest, I can't ship it until it's finished." And he told me, "Well, we've got to ship it, so rush it along." So we rushed it through and shipped it in tank cars.

We were growing Mission grapes then in Livingston in our vineyards, which had not been picked yet. Ernest sold our Mission grapes to Cribaris at the peak price in 1946. We were short of inventory, and I could not project bottling past the following July. I asked Ernest, "What are we going to do?" He said, "Don't worry about it. We'll buy wine soon!" Well, the results are history. Rosenstiel saw his high-priced wine drop from $1.40 per gallon to under 40 cents per gallon. It was the blow that finally put Schenley out of the wine business.

I don't think the Cribaris ever recovered, because in 1955 they sold us their Las Palmas Winery and started over again as a member of Guild. The beginning of their problem was that 1946 crush and the high price of grapes. By March, 1947, the price of dessert wine had dropped to 30 cents a gallon, and you could buy all the inventory you wanted. So we survived and were able to continue to bottle.

Teiser: Did you buy any wine?

Crawford: We bought enough to keep bottling and then, fortunately, the following year the '47 crush was early. We started crushing grapes in late August and were able to process enough wine to keep going. But it wasn't easy. Teiser : Close tolerances.

Crawford: Yes. As a production manager, I did all the production planning, from grapes to shipping. I just couldn't believe what was happening, and couldn't do any realistic planning from November 1946 to March 1947. After that, we hired a young man, Tony Imbesi, who had just come out from New Jersey to do our bottling production planning (and he still works here). He and I worked out a new warehouse inventory system. It gave us a perpetual warehouse inventory, and we bottled toward that inventory and shipped from it. We then tied this in to the winery operation for the wine supply and to the vineyards for grape supply . Using that, we based our next year's operation on the crush that we anticipated for the fall. Julio would estimate in July what grapes we should get from each area. From this we planned what we were going to produce from the grapes, how and where we were going to crush them, and where we were going to store the wine. Sometimes we'd start building tanks in June, because we knew we needed those tanks in September for the anticipated crush.

PROGRESS IN THE 1950s

Tanks and Rev Personnel

Crawford: We built concrete tanks until they became obsolete. We had lots of problems with concrete. The first paper I gave to the American Society of Enologists in 1951 was on clarification of wines because of the calcium derived from concrete tanks reacting with grape tartrates. To prevent that, we lined them with micro-crystalline wax. It's a type of paraffin. When the new concrete tank was still smooth, you could heat the micro- crystalline wax, spray it on hot, and then use a flame to burn it into the concrete. This sealed the walls, and the concrete could not release calcium and other elements into the wine. Most concrete tanks that were built after the mid-fifties were all coated with micro-crystalline wax.

That gets into another story, and I would like to complete our discussion of bottling. As we expanded our warehousing and our bottling operation, we had to continually expand our personnel. Among the people we interviewed was Manuel Soares, who had been with Hunt Foods in San Leandro. He came to Modesto because he heard we were hiring people. He knocked on the window of my office one Saturday afternoon, as the front door of the winery was locked. I introduced Ma1 to Julio on Monday. Julio liked him, so he left Hunts. Ma1 brought Art Lewis with him from Hunts. Art Lewis is still with the company, but Ma1 retired about twenty years ago because his back was bad. He made great contributions to the organization and operation of the bottling room. The Gallos have a knack for choosing those people who will function at the speed that we wanted to do things, and with the decisiveness that we needed to do things. Ma1 Soares was one of those capable people. Another was Audrey James, whom I mentioned before in concrete construction, who did all our building until we gave up concrete and started building steel and stainless steel tanks. That is an interesting story because a great deal of innovation was necessary. Our spirits storage tanks from 1938 on were 20,000-gallon steel tanks. In 1946 we built five small steel tanks to store grape concentrate. We had put in a grape concentrator that was a Mojonnier--a reverse-cycle evaporator which evaporated grape juice at a very low temperature. We were trying to make food grade grape concentrate which was not cooked and didn't turn brown. Because there were no tank coatings that would stand grape juice in those days, we had coated these tanks with asphalt emulsion, and they performed well for several years. Then we thought we should investigate bigger steel tanks. We had eliminated most of our redwood tanks because they unfavorably changed the flavor of wine, and we were having problems with concrete also.

Julio and I visited Phil Crum at Cella Winery down at WahToKe. Phil had put in a 50-thousand gallon steel tank to store his concentrate after he had seen our 20,000-gallon tanks. Phil told us how it was working for him, so we decided we were going to go into larger steel tanks. In 1955 we contracted with Pittsburgh-Des Moines to build us five 200,000- gallon tanks. At the same time, we worked with Bishropic Coating Company to put baked phenolic coating on the inside, and we worked with insulating people to put insulating urethane on the outside so that we would be able to keep the temperature down to a low degree in those outdoor tanks.

The technology of steel tanks, coating, construction, and insulation were all new to us, but fortunately we had a man in charge of our maintenance department who was knowledgeable on the basic engineering required and who was able to pull it all together. His name was Art Caputi! I would like to digress a little here, and then get back to the steel tanks. 1

One of the serendipities of this business is that one good person you hire leads to another good person. When we moved to that bottling room in 1946, we wanted to put ,in a quality control system that we could really depend on. We hired a quality control specialist named Helen Bulger. She had established quality control for Tillie Lewis foods in Stockton. She was an older woman, and she was very particular, persistent, and extremely capable. Helen had taught cooking

'See page 70. before she went into quality control, and she felt a food plant should be as clean and as organized as her kitchen. She soon learned about wine, and then she was boss of quality in our bottling room for eight years. She was a strong woman; she would not put up with exceptions by production people. There were a lot of hard feelings at times, but eventually she got our bottling production people to think quality the way she did.

After Helen had been here about a year, she talked to me about the Caputi family. There were three brothers who were all top-notch mechanics. They had come out to build the Pacific Can Company, which was right next door, and then had gone into the canneries. Art Caputi was a master mechanic, and he had been the one who built and installed all the equipment in the can factory. Helen first introduced me to Art's brother, Armando, because we were looking for mechanics for our winery shop. Julio and I had purchased the entire machine shop from El Solyo ranch in Patterson when it closed down. We had some lathes, machine shop equipment, and electrical repair equipment. We had several older mechanics, but we needed some younger people to keep up with our machinery design and maintenance and to do lathe and machine work.

So we hired Armando Caputi. He then told his brother, Emil, how he liked it here. Emil was a lathe operator and a machinist, and he then came to work for us. Nepotism has some drawbacks, but in those days you couldn't be that particular, as it was hard to get good people. After Emil and Armando were here for a time, Art Caputi had started a machine shop in Modesto, but wasn't satisfied with it. So Helen Bulger brought Art to meet me. He liked the winery challenge, he liked Julio, and Julio liked him. Art stayed here until he died. It's hard to describe how capable he was. With a college education, he probably would have been one of this country's outstanding engineers. His conceptual and spatial visualization was brilliant. He was able to convey his concepts to our mechanic staff and to supervise their work so that we could develop new and unique equipment not available to industry.

A lot of our success in this winery depended on people like that who came here and were able to help us build. Art's son, Art Caputi, Jr., came to work for us in 1951 while still in school. He had graduated from Cal and was going to Stanford at the time, and he's been with us ever since. He's in charge of our theoretical research here now, and works mostly with Wine Institute and FDA on the Technical Committee on current industry scientific problems. He's done a marvelous job as a scientist here and for Wine Institute.

So we have had families here--compatible with the Gallo family. It's a family winery in more ways than one!

After Art Caputi came here, he brought Pete Grosso over from Riverbank Cannery, where Pete had been warehouse superintendent. Pete was a likeable man who knew the details of warehousing thoroughly, so Julio liked him and hired him. All the modern growth in our warehousing from then on was under Pete Grosso, until he retired about five years ago. Pete's daughter, Patty, works here now as a legal secretary.

Anyway, there's a family tradition here of people who have stayed, and their progeny who are now contributing. It means a lot, because the Gallos make their people feel as if they're part of the family as well as the company. CONTROLS

Production Control##

Crawford: Getting back to your question on my job here: production control is the thread that keeps the winery functioning efficiently, but, as you know, our industry is very closely supervised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (in the early days it was known as the A.T.U.--Alcohol Tax Unit). It is necessary to keep government forms that are tied in with day-to-day operations. If you crush grapes, there must be a government form that has the grape tonnage posted to it every day, tied in with the fermentors. In the early days it had to be done out in the winery where the actual operation was going on.

I established a laboratory annex in our fermenting room the first season I was here. There we were able to do simple analyses needed, and also to keep up the form 701, which is the record of grapes that arrived and wine withdrawn from fermentors. At the same time, I established that the form 15 for distillation be maintained out in the laboratory annex. This was the record of the material distilled, the alcohol content of that material, and then the spirits produced each day. It had to be broken down into twenty-four hour periods, and it had to be posted every day. Each time a government inspector came to the winery, whether once a month or every day, they would always audit these two forms. Compliance

Crawford: So after the first crush I ended up being in charge of the government forms. That's how I got into the responsibility of government compliance that I've had every since, although I am now guided by our attorneys, and the day-to-day compliance is directed by Paul Thorpe, an ex-government inspector. Most attorneys don't have the practical knowledge needed to apply regulations out in the winery itself. I did it myself for many years, and then in 1952 I hired Ed Dithridge, who had been one of the government inspectors, as my assistant. Ed stayed until he retired. Ed Dithridge was a very methodical person and set up all the details of our present compliance department.

When Ed retired, winemaker Don Sanford took over. (I mention Don Sanford because now he's our brandy superintendent.) After several years, Don Sanford decided that he didn't have enough interest in government regulations, so we hired Paul Thorpe and trained him to take that job. Paul still works for me in compliance--in charge of all Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms functions.

There is a close connection between compliance and quality control, because they are both involved with government agencies and their laws and regulations.

Oualitv Control

Crawford: We have always tried.to maintain continuity in our quality control. When Helen Bulger left, I hired Mannie Jaffe. He was one of the UC Berkeley winemakers who had been in this industry for a number of years. Mannie had started his own laboratory to produce fructose, and it hadn't worked out economically, so he came to work for Gallo. He then became a winemaker for us until he died. Mannie was one of the creative people who helped us develop many new products.

When Mannie became a winemaker, we hired Jack Drasbek, who was a food technologist from Oregon State, to be in charge of quality control, and he stayed with us for twenty years. Later Phil Drew, who had been with Gerber Foods for sixteen years, and then with Welch's Grape Juice for five or six years, joined our quality control department in the late sixties. He)s still in charge of quality control now, reporting to Jim Coleman, Julio's son-in-law.

So we have a very sound quality control department that is headed up by the best in the field. We've built around people like Phil Drew, because he even anticipates when there might be a problem from outside the industry--where something is coming up that will require changes in quality control procedures. He still checks with me at times, because I keep up with the scientific literature--reading Chemical Abstracts, Food Chemical News, Food Enaineerin~,,Plant Enaineerin~;,and many other journals to keep up with day-to-day developments in the food and beverage industry. By keeping abreast of modern quality control procedures, we have achieved the best in continuity and quality of product and packaging.

One of the developments tied into quality of wine was the development of stainless steel tanks when stainless steel became cheap enough to be able to build wine tanks. At one time, a stainless steel wine tank would cost twenty times more than coated steel tanks, Also, stainless steel has gone through a metamorphosis from 302 to 304 to 316 (varying amounts of chromium and molybdenum) over the years, and its cost is now practical. When we tried to use stainless steel in the forties and early fifties, the technology of stainless steel was inadequate. Stainless steel, particularly at the welds, would pinhole from the acidity of the wine and from the sulfur dioxide. The producers finally worked out a stainless steel that had the right balance of chromium and malybdenum to be resistent, but still they didn't have a welding material that would resist wine. So you could put plates of stainless steel together, but where they welded they would pinhole. Finally the heliarc method of stainless steel welding was developed, which worked for wine. I must say that Leon Peters of Valley Foundry and Machine Works was persistent on producing stainless steel tanks. He kept the industry apprised of the problems and prevented mistakes we could have made if he hadn't already made those mistakes himself and advised us. Leon Peters and his brother, Pete, and his staff contributed a lot to this industry. And one of our ex-employees, Bill Detwiler, was a leader for Valley Foundry for many years.

DEVELOPING GALL0 BRANDY

Preliminarv Work. 1938-1967

Teiser: Perhaps I should ask you to carry a little further the brandy story.

Crawford: I told you that they had made the '38 prorate brandy, and then we made some '42 brandy. Then we really didn't make anything other than experimental brandy for a number of years. We thought about going into the brandy business in the late fifties. We hired a researcher named A1 Simco, who was a brandy expert, to study the congenerics of commercial brandy and continuous stills compared to pot stills, but we delayed going into commercial production for a long time after that.

We had developed some proprietary techniques on how to make a still run in a certain way so that it didn't fluctuate. We first got interested in that when we were making industrial alcohol. l Julio and I didn' t want to sit up all night checking on the still operators, so we tried to figure out how to automatically control our still operations to avoid losses of alcohol in the stillage and to have charts which recorded every function of the stills.

In 1945 I learned that there was a plant that had been built in Oregon to make industrial alcohol out of wood pulp, It had failed, and in 1945 it went on the auction block. Julio and I flew up to Oregon, and we bought all the distilling control instruments from that plant. We couldn't buy new instruments at that time, as we didn't have a priority. But we

'see pp. 24-27. could buy them at a government auction. So we fully instrumented our stills in 1945.

It's funny, when we start reminiscing I seem to just ramble on. I hope you weed out the extraneous material.

Teiser: There doesn't seem to be any.

Crawford: When Seagram came into the wine industry, our distilling here in California was very primitive compared to Seagram. They had [Frederick] Willkie in charge of Seagram distillation procedures--Wendel Willkie's brother. Seagram sent out a number of people to work in the wine industry because they wanted to modernize their operations. One of the people they sent out was Jim [James] Riddell, who left Seagram and started the Vie-Del winery. I believe Fred Vieth was also an ex- Seagram man.

One of the young men they sent out was Bill Schonkweiler. He had been trained in the Seagram operation, and he was a knowledgeable distillation scientist. Bill joined us and helped us establish a proprietary way of controlling the continuous stills that was entirely different, and we found that we could control the congenerics and make brandy that has most of the characteristics of French brandy in a continuous still.

In doing that, we developed a lot of knowledge which we applied in later years to our commercial brandy development, and we also attracted the interest of R. L. Nowlin, who had been general manager for Oscar Krenz (still a manufacturer). [shows paper] I got this in 1944 from Bill Schonkweiler: "Published by Division of Education, Joseph Seagram & Sons, Louisville, Kentucky." It was a series of lectures given for a course at Purdue University. It goes into distillation very thoroughly, showing equipment, theoretical operations with the McCabe Thiel diagrams, how they function, the efficiency of still operation, the theoretical operation of each plate in the still, and so forth. This is information was not yet available at Davis or Berkeley, and it wasn't available in the common literature, as it was proprietary before 1944.

Using this, with Bill Schonkweiler's ingenuity and later with R. L. Nowlin's input, we developed intricate controls for our stills which were invaluable when we decided to produce commercial brandy. We tested Gallo brandy from 1949 to 1953 in a small way. Factors in Success

Crawford: The first large-scale brandy we put in the market was called Eden Roc Brandy, in 1967. It was accepted very well by connoisseurs, but did not achieve general acceptance under the name Eden Roc.

Later, in 1971, we reintroduced Gallo brandy. It didn't do too well. Apparently consumers didn't look at Gallo as a brandy, but as wine. Then the marketing department came up with the idea of calling our brandy "E6J," and in 1975 developed the package that we use today. The thing that sold our brandy was the marketing expertise coupled with the quality of the product. Most producers in those days added sweetening and/or flavoring to their brandy. The brandy we introduced had been aged longer than any popular brand in the market, and the age, coupled with a balance of congenerics and low fuse1 oil, made E6J desirable to most brandy consumers, including the French cognac, believe me.

So we succeeded with quality and marketing expertise, and it put us ahead of all California brandies. About 1984, five years after we started selling E6J Brandy nationwide, we reached the same sales volume as Christian Brothers, and our sales continue to increase.

Teiser: Wasn't there a period when you were using brandy that Setrakian made?

Crawford: Bob Setrakian bottled for us when we first started with commercial brandy. He distilled and aged brandy, and we bought some of the brandy that he had aged. We supplemented that with brandy that we had made in our distillery in Fresno. We also supplemented it with a lot of brandy that we bought from Guild winery, Schenley, and others who had built up a surplus of aged brandy. We selected the style we wanted by sampling their warehouses, and we bought aged brandy that we used for basic blending with younger brandies which we produced.

We now produce and age all our own brandy. We have three warehouses here in Modesto full of barrels. We went into commercial brandy very cautiously, but with the guidance of the experience of others in the industry. You don't do anything completely by yourself in this industry. That's what's so exhilarating about the California wine industry. Even though there is strong competition, we still do work together and help one another on common problems.

That's pretty much what happened on our brandy. We still have probably the best continuity of quality of any brandy.

There are a number of higher alcohols that make up what's called fuse1 oil, and the relationship of those higher alcohols to one another is one of the contributors to the flavor of a spirit. That is part of the reason for our success--continuity of quality. Not only in analysis, but in flavor and aroma-- tasting, tasting, tasting.

I think probably one of thekbig successes of Ernest and Julio was that when they really got over the hump--when they weren't struggling day by day, trying to make it--they didn't move to San Francisco and build an office up there while allowing their winery down here to run with personal supervision, as many of their past competitors did. Ernest said, "We're staying here; our management is going to stay at this winery." And Julio said, "My vineyards are here, and I'm staying here." This is probably one of the most important decisions they ever made--thatthey were going to stay at their winery and continue to pay attention to that product. Some others, who moved to San Francisco, didn't make it. And now many industries are contemplating moving from the Bay Area to the Central Valley!

Teiser: I'm sure they had many, many offers to sell, too.

Crawford: I don't know too much about that, except what I read in the papers. I think Seagram tried to buy Gallo. I think Ernest years ago once jokingly said that he would agree to that provided they change their name to Gallo. [laughter] Teiser: I wonder what the new acquisition of Christian roth hers' is going to do to the brandy picture? Crawford: I think it's good for the industry and will assure the Christian Brothers that their schools will be perpetuated at the level of excellence they have maintained. Teiser: It's stronger competition?

'1n May, 1989, Heublein, Inc., a division of Grand Metropolitan PLC of England, acquired The Christian Brothers' Mont La Salle Vineyards. Crawford: I think so. I would hope that they maintain the brand, due to its historical significance. You never know what a big company's going to do. Heublein's had lots of experience with spirits, but they've never been able to compete with Christian Brothers brandy. I'm sure that the brothers have set it up so that they continue their teaching ideal, which is what they started making wine and spirits for. I don't know how the brothers feel about it. I was a little shocked to hear of them selling it. [Brother] Timothy [Diener] is retired now, and I think maybe it was time for them to change. Timothy's whole life was in it. He started out in Martinez when the old Christian Brothers' operation was there. When I was in Antioch, the Christian Brothers had a winery in Martinez, which was the county seat of Contra Costa County. They have added a very commendable chapter to the history of California wines.

The Digardi family had a winery in Martinez when the Christian Brothers were there. When Ernie Digardi's father died, I believe the winery went out of business. Ernie worked for me for a while, and then he went off to another winery. I haven't heard from him for years.

ADVANCES

Overcominn Problems with Thunderbird

Crawford: We were talking about what happened in the fifties. We talked about 1955, when we were legally able to make special natural wines, and we first came out with Thunderbird. It is a very light-colored flavored wine which was not bitter, so it could appeal to the American public as an "American aperitif." Thunderbird was a very interesting product, appealing to a varied segment of the population. It was a bit of a bad name among some people because it has been chosen by some alcohol abusers as a cheap source of alcohol, because it's 18 percent alcohol.

Teiser: I found a bottle of it in a very exclusive London wine shop, along with the sherries and ports.

Crawford: Yes, they like it in London and elsewhere--such as Scotland. Thunderbird is a good mixer for fruit drinks. Those who like vodka and tonic, or vodka and grapefruit juice, also use Thunderbird for mixing, and it supplies the nutrients from the grapes as well as the alcohol. So the consumer gets a little bit more for the money, and it is flavorful as well.

When we first developed Thunderbird, we tried to keep it as close in color and flavor to natural white grape juice as possible. At that time we made Thunderbird out of Thompson Seedless. We had to pick the grapes before they turned amber on the vine, so we crushed Thompson Seedless early for Thunderbird to get a very light color. In fact, the color was so light that some of the competition complained about it to the B.A.T.F. B.A.T.F. were very interested in this new concept, and sent a representative out from Washington to spend the grape season of 1957 here at the winery. They were interested in how we were making Thunderbird so light in color. They learned that we were drawing the juice off from the grapes before it had a chance to contact the skins, and then chilled the juice to avoid oxidation and blanketed the juice with an inert gas. This technology was very useful to us when we started producing varietal white table wines. We stripped the juice with nitrogen to get all the oxygen out, and kept the sulfur dioxide high enough to keep the oxygen from getting back in until fermentation began. It kept the color very pale and made the product interesting to the consumer.

Other wineries wanted to do the same thing, starting with amber-colored Thompson Seedless wine treated with decolorizing carbon. Some treated their wine with more carbon than the government permitted, which required a reassessment of regulations. The B.A.T.F. inspected others as well as Gallo. Finally, a meeting was held of all the wineries in the Central Valley that made wines of that style. Mr. Serr and Mr. Alkire came out (Serr was head of the B.A.T.F. in Washington). We finally reached an agreement as to the maximum amount of carbon that could be used for clarifying white wine, and it was incorporated into the regulations. As I remember, it was nine pounds of carbon per thousand gallons of wine. It's still a rule of thumb as being the maximum amount of carbon used for decolorizing all white wines.

Crawford: But flavored wines were not the Gallo's primary objective. Their objective has always been to sell good table wines. These other things were done because of consumer demand and because the opportunity was there at that time. One of the tenets in business related to research is to try to find a void in the market that needs filling, and then fill it before others do. That's what our marketing group and our research department has always tried to do.

Quality problems arose because we had this very light- colored product bottled in clear glass. Consumers would take it on a picnic and set it out in the sun while they were waterskiing or playing ball. They'd come back, and it became "light struck" and developed an off-odor from sunlight. Have you heard of that in beer and in other foods? For example, because 7-Up is clear, if it is in a clear glass bottle and put it out in the sun, it develops a chemical odor. There's a reaction that takes place with the lemon-lime flavor and the acids in there. We then'decided we needed colored glass in our bottles, so we went to our glass supplier. At that time we were buying glass from three glass companies. None would put out a colored glass for us for wine bottles. Most of the industry wanted clear glass for foods and beverages, so that's all they would make.

We were already planning to go into the glass business, because Louis Petri had the [S.S.] Aneelo Petri shipping wine very cheaply to the East Coast. We didn't want to do that, so we had decided to build a glass factory to reduce costs in that way.

Creating a Glass Factorv

Crawford: We studied glass factories all over the western United States, and located people who could build a glass factory. Because of the sunlight problem on white wine, we decided that if we were going to make glass, we'd make glass that would protect our wine. Our laboratory worked with Hartford Empire, a research organization for the entire glass industry. We developed a way in our laboratory of making glass to have ultraviolet light protection for our wines. So when we started making glass, instead of making clear glass we made what we called "Flavor Guard" glass.

Flavor Guard was an example of our vice president of marketing Howard Williams's wonderful uses of language applied to products. Howard was president of Guild Winery. He had previously been in the advertising business. When he started expanding our operation here, Howard came to work for Ernest as our chief marketing executive. He was an extremely creative, artistic man with a flare for language. For example, the name "Hearty Burgundy" was Howard's idea. We had previously had a product that we called Pastoso E Scelto, which was Italian for "heavy and full-bodied." It was called Burgundy Pastoso E Scelto. Howard said, "What does that mean?" Then he thought, "That doesn't make sense; nobody understands that. Let's call it 'Hearty'." And, of course, history has shown he was right. :eiser: I should ask you a little more about the glass plant. l Do I remember that you had trouble getting equipment--that it was very tightly held?

;rawford: Yes. It was almost a monopoly. We had to break that monopoly in order to get equipment to put in our glass factory. The glass industry was very opposed to us. They tried to stop us at every step of the way. They predicted that we'd never get into operation. But we did get into operation, and as soon as we were functioning the price of glass in California dropped about 20 percent to all wineries. They felt they'd teach us a lesson, and it really demonstrated how much money they were taking out of the grape industry. So it was good for the entire industry for Gallo to go into the glass business.

We didn't know for sure that we could use up all the glass that we were making, and we thought we might have to sell some. But we were growing so fast that by the time the first year had gone by we had used all the glass that we had made and purchased more. We had to put in another furnace in two years. Now we have five furnaces, and we still don't sell any glass; we still buy glass.

Teiser: Do you make all "Flavor Guard"?

Crawford: Not any more. We make clear, and we still make some green glass. But we were able to approach that problem from a different direction, so we don't have the problem any more of getting light-struck wine. The science of organic materials is such that were able to change winemaking techniques and eliminate that problem.

Promotion and Advertising

Crawford: When I first came to work for Ernest, he was bottling in Los Angeles. Everything was in clear glass, and they had a slogan: "See its clearness, taste its goodness." [laughter] In Los Angeles they had a man who walked around in a toga with a wreath on his head, and on a sandwich board that he wore, it said, "Jolly old Gallo, father of wine." [laughter] Advertising has changed somewhat from those days.

'see also pp. 60-61. Teiser: He was competing with the "little old winemakern?

Crawford: That was a number of years before Italian Swiss Colony had their "little old winemaker" idea.

Teiser: Did Gallo do radio advertising?

Crawford: They did some, yes. In the early forties: "See its clearness, taste its goodness," and also: "It's thermalized." They had a radio jingle--one of the early ones back in 1944 and '45. I can't remember how it went (I'm not a musician). It was a jingle that said something like, "Buy, buy, buy Gallo wine; try, try, try Gallo wine. The rich full-bodied flavor, the taste you'll say is divine. Do yourself a big favor and buy some Gallo wine." And then there was "Only the first squeezing of the grapes goes into Gallo wine."

Teiser: All of these things that you were involved in certainly have fallen together, haven't they?

Crawford: Well, yes. Both Ernest and Julio have a genius of being able to look at something that you know the details of, and they don't know exactly how to do that thing, but they know how they would want the results to come out. So they will permit somebody who has the knowledge to develop the thing that they are trying to achieve, and guide him in his efforts. They allow that person to have enough leeway to be able to do the thing and apply his creativity. And if you do it right, then they go all the way with it. That's been the story of their success, in marketing as well as in production.

There's been a lot in the Advertising Ape about how Hal Riney came to Gallo and did all these things for them singlehandedly. Hal Riney is good, and contributed a lot. But he needs guidance, just like anybody else. And he needed somebody like Ernest Gallo, who gave that guidance. It was the team of Ernest Gallo and Hal Riney that made his effort successful for us--not Hal Riney by himself.

In fact, Hal Riney's style of advertising obviously changed when he was with us. Now he's using that same style for himself and for others. But it's still the style that was developed because Ernest would say, "No, you can't do that. You have to change it. I don't know how you're going to change it, but you've got to change it." Then he'd change it, and finally he'd get it to where it would fit the proper pattern. They were a great team, and I hated to see them break up, but everything comes to an end, with creative people particularly.

We still have top-notch advertising agencies, and we're still coming out with good advertising ads in a timely manner.

Teiser: Who dreamed up that wonderful Sonoma and Napa Valley mailbox ad? ' Crawford: It was a team effort. You know, advertising people are wonderful. They'll have someone explain in detail how something is done or why something is a little different. You can spend hours telling them something, and they'll study it and then put it all in one or two words. We wanted the public to know that we used the best grapes from the most respected grape growing regions, and that's how it came out.

I explained to the advertising agency once how we made wine--how we got the free-run juice off from the presses, and then we pressed a little bit and separated the first pressing for blending, and then the distilled the rest of the press wine. Later they came up with the slogan, "Only the first squeezing of the grapes goes into Gallo wine." It was a slogan we used for a lot of years. "All the bestn has been very successful as a slogan.

That's how a lot of these things developed. We would tell the agency how something worked, and they would come up with those slogans. They knew that we had vineyards in Napa and Sonoma, and tried to develop a relationship using cross roads. They finally hit on the mailbox relationship, which told an important story in one picture.

'1t was a 1985 advertisement that featured a color picture of a row of mailboxes carrying the names of a number of prestigious Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries, and pointed out in the text that "Gallo still makes more wine with premium Sonoma and Napa grapes than any other vintner." WORKING WI!l'H ERNEST AND JULIO GALLO

Prom Production to Marketing

Teiser: I think you once told me that in 1978 you started working with Ernest rather than Julio. It sounds to me as if you've worked with both of them all this time.

Crawford: I did. I worked for Ernest when I first arrived, and then I worked with Julio for thirty-five years because Ernest was so busy in marketing, sales, and finance. Ernest would taste with us periodically and give us his opinion--maybe once a day or once a week, whenever he could do it--but he couldn't get into the day-to-day operation when we were doing all the building and growth. Then, in 1978, they both asked me to work with marketing on explaining our varietal wines to the media and the consumer.

It was really a joy to work with Julio because, my God, he's a sincere, down-to-earth person. For example, in the early fifties we poured a concrete tank--a monolithic pour of a 400,000-gallon tank that we had worked together to design the steel, the form lumber, and the equipment. We planned the pour to start at three o'clock in the morning, because pouring the concrete had to be continuous. You had to pour the floor, come up the walls, and keep going until you poured the roof of the tank, because it all had to be one piece of concrete, vibrating it all the way so as to be monolithic as it set. So we were all together with the crew from three o'clock in the morning maybe until midnight when the top was finished. To work with somebody like Julio, with such a sense of humor and such a down-to-earth person, was a treat because of the relationship he developed with everyone involved. I mean, there was no monkey business, because the job had to be done right. Julio established a rapport with workers with the wheelbarrows, and workers with the vibrators. He even had Lyman Cash, our analytical chemist, go down to Standard Materials Company from 3 a.m. until the last load, to be sure they put the exact right amount of cement in every load. He didn't take any chances at all. That was Julio's strength--if we were going to buy seven sacks of cement to the yard of concrete, we wanted to be sure we got that seven sacks. Nothing was left to chance or the vagaries of the supplier.

We not only checked the amount of cement, but we took test blocks out of the concrete as we poured it, all the way through. After curing they were crushed to make sure the strength was right. It was most important, because those tanks were the biggest concrete tanks ever built, and Julio's efforts and rapport insured their success.

Ju1i.o has standards just as rigid for grape growing and winemaking, and he holds firmly to what he believes. The development of an adequate supply of good wine grapes has been a life work for Julio. In 1973, when we finally got enough good grapes in this industry so that we could expand, we started our varietal program. We had a Gewiirztraminer, a Sauvignon Blanc, a Riesling, a Barbera, a Zinfandel, and a Ruby Cabernet. We didn't do vintage bottling because Julio wanted to use vertical blending. You can't use vintage dating if you don't have enough varietal grapes, because you can't have continuity of quality without some vertical blending.

By 1978 we had enough of some of the varietals that we felt we could start doing horizontal blending within one vintage, and yet keep the continuity with previous vintages. We were having some problems with the media and the public accepting varietal wines from Gallo.

We had a few friends among the wine writers who recognized the quality of our varietal wines. In '78 Ernest and Julio asked me if I would be amenable to talking to wine writers about our winemaking.

We've always sort of drawn a line between production and marketing to avoid complications. The story goes that Julio said to Ernest, "I'll take care of growing the grapes and producing the wine. You take care of selling it and marketing it." This led to the story in which Julio says, "I can make more good wine than you can sell," and Ernest would say, "I can sell more wine than you can make."

I do know that when I was in production we didn't get involved with the marketing people too much because we had to work on a fixed plan. Marketing people seem to have too many rapid ideas, and they change their minds too often. When you make a plan in production, you've got to make the plan for a long time--not for just one year, but for two and three years and more, because you're working on a long-term basis. If you're trying to do anything--to bring in a new product-- you've got to get the raw material, the equipment, and everything that goes with it, and you've got to make sure that it's properly analyzed and aged before sale. Then you're ready to put it out, and you don't suddenly change it at the last minute.

Marketing people will work on a plan for six months, and-- bang!--they'll change the whole thing because it's all on paper, not in product! That doesn't sit well with a production person because of the physical materials involved.

I can see the need for creativity, because I was always interested in research and I was always interested in trying to do things a little bit better--either a little bit cheaper or a little bit better--to make a little bit better quality product. There is flexibility in research work. So I was more amenable to quick changes than some in production, and I think that's the reason Ernest and Julio asked me to get involved in a field I wasn't trained for--public relations.

Transferrinn Responsibilities

Crawford: I was sixty-one years old when Ernest said, "Well, join my team and work with my marketing people." Julio said it was okay with him because the time was right. Julio needed me most in those early days because there wasn't anybody else that he could trust to do things his way. But when Bob [Robert J. Gallo] got out of college and came with us, I worked with him and taught him everything I could, which relieved me of a great deal of pressure. The first thing Bob took charge of here, after he came in the winery and got orientated, was the personnel department. He and I both felt people were the important thing in this business, so he immediately took charge of personnel, then engineering, and then he gradually took charge of all the other operations.

When Jim [James E.] Coleman married Sue, Julio's daughter, and he joined the winery, he first became involved in the bottling and then in the shipping, which was a relief to me, as I was trained as a scientist and a winemaker, and Jim Coleman had what it took to do an excellent job. He is now in charge of all production, bottling, and shipping here in Modesto.

In addition to working in winemaking and research, I did production planning and long-term planning. Our computers were starting to develop the capability of handling inventories, and we were able to turn production planning over to the computer group. What took me in the old days six months to plan, they could plan in a week. And they can change it every day almost painlessly; whereas when I set out a plan on innumerable sheets of paper, I would work for days and days just making one change. If Julio said, "We're not going to have near as many Zinfandels this year as we thought we were going to have," I'd have to go back and change the whole production plan, where were we going to crush the Zinfandels, how much juice were we going to take out on the free run, how much were we going to press, what temperature were we going to ferment, how were we going to stretch it by proper blending so that we would have enough, where could we buy more Zinfandel, should we start sampling now from North Coast bulk suppliers like Seghesio or Parducci or Pedroncelli or all the others who used to sell bulk wines? It all had to fit into a pattern, and every change required a complete new plan. With computers, they can now do it easily. It took a load off of me, because I could turn it over to the planning staff who had the computer capability.

Promoting Varietal Wines

Crawford: I vas able to transfer from production to marketing. I had bean downstairs near Julio's office for ten years. I moved upatairs into an officer near the marketing. The next three yetaro I spent my time on varietal wines. We introduced our '78 Cabernet Sauvignon in '82; we introduced our Chardonnay--first non-vintaged, and then vintaged; and we started introducing our other vintaged varietals. Dan Solomon, our communications director, and I traveled around the country, having dinner and meetings with wine writers. I don't use this [roledex card file] any more because Dan handles it all now, but this gives you an idea of the number of people I met and talked with during that period.

We'd go to New York, for example, and set up a series of dinner meetings with wine writers, wherever they wanted to eat. We'd let them choose whatever wine they wanted with dinner, and then we'd choose the Gallo varietal wine that was most comparable to the wine that they chose. We would then just let them do their own tasting and decide. We won over a lot of wine writers, and we made a lot of friends for Gallo and a lot of personal friends.

For example, Frank Prial came out here to visit after we had been on a trip together through Bordeaux in 1978 on the wine cruise of the S.S. Danae, sponsored by Alexis Lichine. He wanted to see Sauvignon blanc grapes growing in the vineyard in California. He didn't believe that Sauvignon blanc could be successful in the Central Valley. I took him to our Livingston vineyard along the lower bench of the Merced River, where cold water comes from Yosemite all summer--the temperature is several degrees cooler than the adjoining upper benches of the vineyard. We've got about four hundred acres of Sauvignon there. Frank tasted Sauvignon grapes right off the vine. Then we came back to the winery with the grapes, and we tasted the year before's production of Sauvignon Blanc. Frank said it was the first time he'd ever tasted the Sauvignon grape and at the same time tasted the wine and found out that they actually had the same taste characteristics.

Dan Solomon, as our communications director, was able to learn enough about wine lore and tasting to handle it himself now.

Crawford: Dan and I set up what we called our "dog and pony show." We traveled together all over the country. Dan would set it all up; he'd get the wines there, arrange for the time, arrange with the hotel or restaurant where we were going to meet. Then I would meet with the wine writers and make our presentation. We would go to dinner with them and Sally, along with their wives when necessary. I remember some wonderful times we had, and lots of interesting people--many in the Society of Wine Educators. Dan is an officer of that group now. I remember when I met David Pursglove in Washington, D. C Both he and his wife are wine and food writers. David Pursglove and I really developed a good rapport. He was an absolute negative critic of Gallo wines before we met, and wouldn't have anything to do with Gallo wines. But David Pursglove became one of our supporters, and featured us in his columns. Once in a while he'll send me a copy of one of his radio talks, when he said something good about one of our wines. [laughs]

Another friend, Bruce Galphin, down in Atlanta, was very kind to us. And Frank Stone and Dee Stone in Atlanta were very helpful. They were very active in the Society of Wine Educators, as are a lot of the writers. Bill Rice has been a good friend of Gallo, as has Andy [Anthony Dias] Blue, Robert Finigan, and Hugh Johnson.

I received an award in 1981--Distinguished Service Award-- from American Society of Wine Educators, which I found pretty rewarding. They are a very knowledgeable group who teach wine and write about wine. Many didn't know anything about Gallo before we met, but by '81 they were using Gallo wines in their lectures to their students, and using them as examples of qua1 ity . I'm probably wrong mentioning a lot of names, because when you mention one wine writer's name, then somebody else is going to wonder why you didn't mention them [laughs], and there were just too many of them to mention them all; I wish I could.

Teiser: Was that your sole duty for a time, then?

Crawford: Just about, but I was still in charge of compliance--internal and external compliance. Also, Bob Gallo was working up through the chairs of Wine Institute then, and Bob felt that rather than have a number of people attending committee meetings at Wine Institute, he wanted me to attend most of the committee meetings for Wine Institute. I was chairman of the Technical Committee, but I was involved in Health and Social Research, Energy and Environmental Studies, Laws and Regulations, Viticultural Research, and Marketing Committee for a while.

Because of my involvement with external compliance, I had to deal in Washington with B.A.T.F. and F.D.A., and in Sacramento with the State Department of Public Health. I was on the Grape Inspection Advisory Committee for the State of California. I worked with the local people in B.A.T.F. and with our internal compliance through compliance director Paul Thorpe and his staff, and with our attorneys. I have always tried to keep up with food and beverage literature, but I gave that up for three years while promoting our varietals. I've been trying to catch up ever since.

The Gallo Winery Laboratory

Crawford: I turned our scientific library over to Art Caputi in 1978. When I was in charge of production, all of our scientists spent at least two hours a week in the library, whether they needed it or not, and I'm sure they needed it. I don't know whether this is obligatory any more; I don't follow up on that. But Art is handling more and more of our scientific relationships with Wine Institute and the government agencies, which is a great help to me.

Our library reviews the literature continually, and copies articles and sends the frontispiece from the journals to whomever on their list of technical people is supposed to be interested in that particular subject--things that are of interest to our different scientists, whether they be a winemaker or a viticulturist or an engineer or a computer expert. Then the recipient can ask for the article or go to the library and read it. If I ever did anything for this company, I think that's one of the important things I did for Gallo--to keep up with the literature and make it available to our personnel, because it's so important to success.

The library has to be kept alive and reach interested parties with timely information. It has to be part of the organization. Once interest in the library dies and you just start piling books into the stacks without the right people keeping up with them, you might as well close the library down and use the public library. Coo~erationWith Other Beverage Makers

Crawford: When Robert Mondavi was going to start his winery, after he left Krug--he and Michael were planning--Julio and Ernest invited them to come here and spend as much time as they wanted to go through our operation and learn anything that they wanted to learn. They did learn. Bob Mondavi is like a sponge in accumulating useful knowledge, you know. He just absorbed. He patterned his operation after things that he learned here, and part of it was that communication with the scientific world that Bob was so good at.

In 1972 I got a call from the American Society of Quality Control, and they said they wanted to give me an award. I said, "Award for what?" I thought it was just a joke, but they said no, and they wanted to come down and see me. A committee came down to see me, and then I found out that Bob Mondavi had recommended me. That was kind of an honor to me, because Bob, of course, goes to his own tune and maybe has a little different drummer than others, but still he has a great deal of respect for Ernest and Julio and what they did for him--and they both respect and appreciate what Bob has done.

Another contact I had with Bob was that his financing came through the Rainier Brewery in Seattle for a long time. I had been working with Nick Vaccano, brewmaster at ~ainierBrewery in Seattle,. trying to develop sterile filtration. We worked as a team. They would try something, and we would try it at the same time. We would compare notes to see what problems we encountered. I imagine Bob probably knew that we were doing that, but we never discussed it. They had some problems with organisms in the water in Seattle of a very small diameter-- less than 0.4 microns--so small that they went through the 0.45 micron Millipore filter. He didn't want to take any chances. I remember Nick's decision: "Let the young guys do it. When I retire, then they can start sterile filtering the beer. But in the meantime, we're going to pasteurize." [laughs]

We went ahead with sterile filtration because it did work for us. We didn't find that organism at all in our well. Also, we don't put water in the wine, as is necessary for brewing beer.

I still take a trip to the winery periodically to monitor quality control. When I first turned quality control over to Jim Coleman, I used to walk through the winery with him about once a month and comment on what was going on, and remind him, "Well, ten years ago something like this was starting to occur, and here's what we did about it." Then I' didn't have to do that after a couple of years, because he knew more about the routine than I did. But I still do go through the winery periodically with the quality control supervisor, Phil Drew, and I give them tips if I see potential problems that might happen in a certain area. When you go through something for fifty years, you see a lot of things that other people haven't experienced. But Phil Drew is a real professional, and working with Jim Coleman he has done an outstanding job.

I can remember going to a pickle factory with Professor Cruess in 1939. He took us on field trips all the time, and he took us to a pickle factory. The pickle vat that we were looking at had a film growing all over the surface. It looked just like that paper there; but you could put your finger through it, and it would close over the hole. Professor Cruess was always one to say, "You want to use all of your senses all the time. You want to use your eyes; you want to see everything. You want to look at it; you want to observe the color, you want to observe the texture, you want to observe everything you can about it. Then you want to smell it. After you've smelled it and evaluated it, you want to taste it.

I'll never forget that pickle vat. He was going to give us a lesson, so he showed us that film and explained which organism it was, and what it would do to the pickles--it'll give them a "zapaton flavor, which is a flavor of old shoes-- and how you could get rid of it and how you can avoid it. Then he says you want to look at it. So he stuck his finger in that film and stirred it around a little and took it out, smelled it, and then stuck a finger in his mouth. A couple of the students were willing to try it, too. They put their finger in the film and then put it in their mouth. They started to spit and almost vomited.

Cruess said, "You know, I've always told you, the first thing is to watch carefully. You'll notice I put this finger in there, but I tasted this [other] finger." [laughter] It's something you never forget. It was so wonderful the way he pulled that off, and demonstrates his delightful sense of humor .

AWARDS

Crawford: I got an award from the Museum Society--California Wine Patrons. In 1979 Hernando Courtwright, who I believe owned the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, called me and said that I'd been nominated to get their Junipero Serra Award. I said I didn't understand why, and he said they give it for outstanding contributions to the wine industry. He mentioned other people who had gotten that award before. I felt it was a great honor, because it's the Museum Society of Southern California. I agreed to do it, and Sally and I went down there. Hemando-- affectionately known as "Pacon--Courtwright picked us up in his limousine and took us to his hotel. We were treated like royalty. That evening he took us over to the Museum of Science and Industry in his beautiful antique white Rolls Royce. He and his charming wife chauffeured us. As we got out of his Rolls Royce, they had violins playing and we walked down a path with girls throwing rose petals on us. It was overwhelming! [laughs] I've never been through anything like that before.

I made a talk and accepted the award, and then we went back to his hotel and sat in the bar. "Paco" wanted to drink champagne. He shouldn't have, as he was eighty years old and had high blood pressure, and it was late. His wife was upset because she wanted him to go back home and go to bed, and I agreed. In parting, I asked, "Paco, why did you give me this award? There are many people in this industry much more deserving of it." He said, "Well, we called Andrd Tchelistcheff and wanted to give him the award, and he couldn't make it." So he asked Andrd who he should give it to, and Andre told him to give it to me.' [laughter] I think they gave it to Andre a year later. 2

But Andre was going to be out of the country or something that year, so I was second in line. But I was very honored. It's an honor from both directions, really. I have always appreciated what the Gallos and this industry have done for me, and I feel these awards are a recognition of Ernest and Julio and their creative ability to allow their people to expand with their job. For example, the American Wine Society has offered to present me with their award of merit for 1989, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 4 of this year [1989], and I have accepted the honor, although I feel humble at being included in such an illustrious list of people going back to 1971, including Charles Fournier, Leon Adams, Willard Robinson, Maynard Amerine, Harold Olmo, Andre Tchelistcheff, Robert Mondavi, Louis Martini, and Harriet Lembeck.

l~eealso page 87 for a 1981 award from the Society of Wine Educators.

2~n1980. VARIETAL WINES AND SHERRIES

Their Evolution

[These further questions were put to Mr. Crawford in written form, and his replies were dictated to his secretary.]

Teiser: Can you relate the cork-finished varietals to earlier Gallo varietal wines?

Crawford: Our first cork-finished varietals were produced from grapes which, up until 1971, had all been used to produce our proprietary wines. l With increased grower plantings resulting from our long-term contracts initiated in 1967-68, we were able to plan to introduce a few varietals by 1973. The first wines were not 100 percent of the variety, and were scarce enough that we could not achieve the selectivity and continuity of quality which we can now expect. The white varietals-- Gewiirztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, and Riesling--were well over the legal requirement for varietals, but did have several other grapes blended in as needed. The Riesling was a blend of White Riesling with Gray Riesling and some Franken Riesling (Sylvaner). Today our Johannisberg Riesling is 100 percent from White Riesling grapes selected for the varietal character expected from the grape from the best vineyards.

The red varietals in 1973 were Barbera, Zinfandel, and Ruby Cabernet. They were higher in varietal percentage than the whites, and were selected for their true resemblance to the wines we had made from these three varieties in our research annex pilot plant for the twenty-year period prior to 1968. Those wines were not wood aged, as we attempted in the pilot plant, by fermenting in stainless steel and glass, to try to maintain the character of the varietal fruit through to the bottled wine. We hoped that the consumer might be more

l~eealso pages 39-41. interested in the varietal character of the fruit in the wine rather than in extraneous characteristics developed through malolactic and other fermentations plus wood aging. Our red varietals of today are aged longer in wood than almost any other U.S. producer. The long aging and wood maturation contributes sophisticated nuances of bouquet and flavor which were absent in our 1973 fruity varieties.

The S~ecialCellar

Teiser: Would you discuss the construction of the new cellar for varietals and some of the techniques used in producing them? You mentioned them some years ago when you showed Catherine Harroun and me the cellar.

Crawford: That's a big subject. We felt that oak makes wine different-- not necessarily better, but oak is a tool in winemaking to develop interesting nuances of flavor and aroma. We discussed building an oak cellar for some time. The fuel and power shortage in the early 1970s prompted Robert Gallo to suggest that we should build an underground cave to house our oak cooperage rather than build an above-ground "chain style cellar, We found that the underground temperature here in hot Modesto was never over about 70 degrees Fahrenheit at ten feet underground, so we planned our aging cellar accordingly.

We started construction about 1975. Rather than tunnel into the hillside across from our administration building, we bulldozed the earth away and deep enough so that we could construct a concrete underground room, 183 feet by 540 feet, with a 20-foot high concrete ceiling. This cellar was then covered with the soil which had been removed, and a 50-foot long concrete ramp was constructed so that personnel and vehicles could come down into the cellar from ground level.

This underground cellar has many of the features we learned about concrete construction in the forties and fifties, building 500,000-gallon concrete tanks. The walls are twelve feet thick, the floor is seven inches thick, and the ceiling varies between twelve inches and eighteen inches thick, depending on the spacing of the columns. Originally we planned to have a large viewing window on the north end of the cellar, as we had discussed a visitors' center at that spot, but we dropped that idea, as we now feel that a visitors' center at our winery in Dry Creek in Northern Sonoma County will be far more useful. The underground cellar has a perimeter drain system with floor drains, vents, and sump pumps designed based upon 100- year flood records available from the Modesto Irrigation District. The average cellar temperature is around 65 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, as there is over four feet of soil over the ceiling of the entire cellar. The floor of the cellar has a water-resistant plastic membrane under the concrete, and the walls and ceiling are treated with a waterproofing membrane.

As I think I told you several years ago, we have reversible fans strategically located to maintain the cellar at what we consider its optimum humidity for avoiding evaporation from the wine while keeping the cellar and tanks clean and free from mold.

When the decision was made to construct the cellar, which we estimated would hold 676- to 4,000-gallon casks, we located enough wood in Yugoslavia and in France to set aside for aging prior to forming into staves for the tanks. We estimated we would lose 40 percent of the wood during forming into casks, so we had to buy a surplus. The casks were constructed in Italy, then disassembled and shipped to us in Sea-Land vans.

Once the cellar was constructed, a father-and-son team of coopers came to Modesto to live until all the tanks were built. These two had very sophisticated tools and expertise which were used in assembling the casks, which are approximately 9 feet in diameter and twelve feet high, with sixty-five staves per tank which are two and a fourth inches thick, with floors two and a half inches to three inches thick, and the domes two inches thick.

The casks are equipped for aseptic sampling with a laboratory-style sampling port. The top of each cask has a 2.5 gallon expansion tank installed at the bung hole to avoid any access of air to the wine at the top of the cask. Constant care of oak cooperage is necessary to be sure that a headspace or "ullage" does not occur.

Control of temperature and humidity are important in continuity of aging in oak, as the reaction between wine and oak in the micropores of the walls of the cooperage is the important factor in the aging of the wine. The increase in oak tannins in the wine which are hydrolyzable gallo--or ellagitannins--as contrasted to the grape tannins which are condensed flavan polymers--can be used to gauge the extraction process during aging., These 4,000-gallon casks, when compared to 50-gallon oak casks, have far less wood surface per gallon of wine exposed, but we feel that the major role of aging wines is to increase the complexity, and not necessarily supply a strong oak flavor.

Teiser: Would you discuss briefly the well known Livingston Sherry?

Crawford: Our Livingston Pale Dry Sherry and Livingston Cream Sherry have been developed over the years since 1942, when Ernest first asked me to work on improving the quality of the then current wines. A great deal of research on varieties of grape, methods and temperature of baking and uses of flor sherry yeast for flavor complexity, plus the use of barrels for aging of the sherries, have all contributed.

Our winemaking staff has been fortunate for the last thirty years to have had George Fujii in charge of the sherry production, as George had experience in the early 1940s working at the old Mattei Winery in Fresno. He has been on our winemaking staff since the late 1940s, and has contributed a great deal to the development and continuity of the superb flavor of our sherries, particularly the Livingston Cream Sherry. George will be retiring in April 1990, and we will miss his quiet excellence. GALLO STAFF RESEARCH

Teiser: We are leased to be able to include a list of research papers,P but would you explain how the research laboratory chooses its subjects for study?

Crawford: Yes. I previously mentioned how both Ernest and Julio were interested in research and its importance to progress. As you can see from the various subjects involved in the research papers, the subjects chosen are related to wine production, processing, aging and analytical problems, and to subjects related to the grape growing and winemaking field where answers are needed to specific problems. The titles of many of the papers are almost self-explanatory as to why the subject was chosen.

Teiser: Do changes in consumers' tastes ever influence the studies?

Crawford: Yes, much of our technical research and product development is guided by research done by our marketing department, using consumer focus groups.

Product improvement and new product development both require the interfacing of specialists within our research department groups.

One major research group, led by Dr. Tom Wong, is involved with technical scientific research on winery unit processes and procedures, winemaking materials such as filtration aids, packaging improvement, and ecological problems. Constant improvement in winery technology is necessary for product improvement, introduction of new products and increased efficiency throughout the winemaking and packaging processes, and in knowing and providing social responsibility in the environmental field. A separate group in our research department is involved in development of new products as well as improvement, by carefully controlled steps, of existing products.

The critical path to successful product improvement and new product development is involved with reading and understanding the consumer.

Teiser: Where are new products developed?

Crawford: We have a product development department, led by a product development vice president, in a large module of our laboratory complex. We have a microbiological research department, led by a Ph.D. specialist in fermentati~nsand their relation to new as well as existing products.

The product development department communicates through new products developed with our market research department by their tasting and researching desirability of new products so that we can achieve balanced and knowledgeable creative output. The critical balance between the consumer, market knowledge, and technical research guides us in this area. GALL0 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNIVERSITIES

Teiser: Would you discuss cooperation between Gallo and UC Davis?

Crawford: Yes, for fifty years we have been communicating with the staff at Davis, have been guided by their expertise in viticulture as well as enology, and we have had many joint projects both in the vineyard and in the laboratory over the years.

In 1978 Ernest Gallo endowed the Maynard A. Amerine Chair at UC Davis, in the amount of $427,000. At present, the chairman of the Department of Viticulture and Enology, Professor Michael Mullins, occupies the Amerine Chair.

But it is important to us to not only be associated with UC Davis, but to be involved with California State University at Fresno. Over the later years we have been involved with them on viticultural research, waste disposal research, and most recently, fermentation air emission research with Wine Institute and the Air Resources Board.

In 1979 Julio Gallo donated the new Graduate Research Laboratory to California State University, Fresno. Today long- term extensive vineyard experiments on rootstocks, clonal selection, hedging, cover crops, Eutypa prevention, bunch rot control, trellising, pruning, leaf removal, fertilizer/ macronutrients, and irrigation are underway at our Dry Creek (Sonoma), our Laguna (Russian River), and our Livingston (Merced) vineyards, in conjunction with staff at California State University, Fresno.

But university-related research and Gallo Winery have gone beyond the viticulture and enological fields into the medical field. Social responsibility has been evaluated and made part of our research program. In 1981, Ernest Gallo and Amelia Gallo founded the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine to provide care for patients with alcohol-related neurological diseases at Moffitt Hospital and at San Francisco General Hospital.

Mr. Gallops initial grant of $3 million, followed by $1 million each year, provides for research on the reason why alcoholism occurs, and has resulted in publication of over 110 articles and abstracts in major medical journals since 1982. Research at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center today is on the cutting edge of science, and the clinic, under the able direction of Ivan Diamond, M.D., Ph.D., with a staff of eight, has been awarded numerous federal research grants from N.I.A.A.A. and other government agencies.

In 1989 a grant of $6 million became available to the clinic, as it has become a major resource in the medical community for expertise in the neurologic disease of alcoholism. The basic research in cellular and molecular biology and on the fundamental nature of alcoholps interaction with the nervous system, focusing on cell membranes, appears to be leading to the discovery of specific biologic markers for alcoholism and those who maybe genetically at risk.

I have been privileged to serve as secretary to the Annual Scientific Advisory Board Meeting with Ernest Gallo each year since 1980. This Scientific Advisory Board meets with the staff of the clinic and with Mr. Gallo each spring and critiques and makes recommendations for future research. The Board includes noted medical doctors specializing in neurology as related to alcohol from throughout the U.S., and is led by Rudi Schmid, M.D., Ph.D., past dean of the UC medical school in San Francisco. WINE INDUSTRY AFFAIRS SINCE THE 1940s

Advances and Problems

Teiser: What in your opinion are the greatest strengths the industry has achieved since the 1940s?

Crawford: The broad base of vineyards throughout California, which are planted in excellent clonal selections of varietal grapes, is the greatest strength achieved since the 1940s. In addition, the hundreds of small wineries which have started operations, not only in California but throughout over three-fourths of the states--all making outstandingly good wines. This base of small wineries, operated by dedicated entrepreneurs with a love of fine wine and an understanding of moderate use of wine, is the greatest strength the wine industry has.

Teiser: What are the industry's most important current problems, and how may they be solved or at least combatted?

Crawford: Unfortunately, wine is being made the target of environmental movements, activist attacks, and governmental moves against wine through tax proposals, warning labels, demands to stop television advertising, and many other misguided activities. Wine is being lumped together with beer and spirits as the reason for drunken driving, even though private and federal studies both show that wine is less than 5 percent of the reason for drunken driving arrests.

It seems that everywhere in the world the communist- socialist dreams have collapsed under their own inefficiency, but here in the United States the activists are proposing bureaucratic control and collectivist panaceas, such as California's Proposition 65. They are damaging the image of wine, which is probably the worst thing that they could be doing if they truly want to have moderation in alcohol consumption. Fine table wine may well be the solution to the abuse of alcohol rather than 'the problem, particularly if everyone were properly educated in the value of wine in moderation with meals.

In our litigious society, where there are more and more lawyers ready and willing to sue producers of consumer goods, the wine industry has been forced into a mode of careful references to general historical, religious, cultural, and artistic values of wine since its prehistoric beginnings, rather than taking a strong position on the many differences and values of table wine. The recent California initiative proposing that the state tax on wine be raised 12,800 percent is the most ridiculous and regressive move that an uninformed group of California legislators and activists could make toward society and toward the economy of California.

It's too bad that every California legislator is not required to take a general course in wine at UC Davis. Perhaps if they did they would learn that Thomas Jefferson, with the accord of the other first four presidents of the United States and medical authorities of his day, made the point that "...it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wine as a tax on lyury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens ... No nation is drunk where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage."

The truth about teenage drinking is that knowledge could overcome the problem. Young people worldwide who have been introduced to wine early in life in a responsible family setting have few alcohol problems throughout their lifetime. Problems that do occur seem to be traceable to a genetic propensity for somewhere in the range of 10 percent of the world population to be susceptible to the abuse of alcohol. We can only hope that if a genetic marker is found for potential alcoholism, that activist bureaucratic sentiment does not try to block the use of such knowledge on children before they grow up and start to abuse alcohol.

Those who have linked all alcoholic beverages together, in their haste to quickly solve an ancient problem, do not accept the fact that there are many reasons to dissociate wine from other alcoholic beverages.

Wine, a seasonal, agricultural product, is different from cooked, fermented grain, which constitutes beer, and is different from distillates. Table wine is the fermented juice of sound, ripe grapes, with nothing remaining in it which is not natural to the fruit or to its fermentation. Even sulfur dioxide, which has been selected by consumer advocates to be stated on every bottle of wine, occurs naturally during fermentation, and is only increased by the winemaker in nominal amounts to protect the consumer against spoilage.

Wine is different biochemically, physiologically, socially, and legally. Biochemically, wine is differentiated from all other alcoholic beverages through its natural flavors and aromas, its natural anthocyanin pigments, its tannins and phenols, and particularly its natural fruit acids and their natural fermentation reaction products of complicated esters and ethers.

Physiologically, the anti-microbial value of wine as a substitute for other beverages was demonstrated by both Napoleon's and Caesar's armies through its protection against intestinal diseases. Medical tests run since the early 1920s have repeatedly shown that the blood-alcohol resulting from the consumption of equal aliquots of alcohol in wine vs. distilled liquors is quite low, particularly when accompanied by food.

Socially, wine is always used in different contexts than are beer or spirits. It is a mealtime beverage, its religiouc uses are well known, and it is a part of wholesome family Ijfc.

Legally, in wine-producing countries wine is conmidered a natural agricultural product of the first processing of perishable fruit, and in most civilized wine-consuming countries there is little or no excise tax on wine, 86 it is considered a food. Even in the United States the tax base for wine has been different. For example, during the thirteen years of Prohibition, there was no tax at all on the 200 gallons per household which was allowed for home production and consumption.

Concern about illegal drugs and the indictment of wine, along with other alcoholic beverages, as the most abused drug and as the introductory drug has created an obsessive state of mind in the present-day advocates of bureaucratic control. This could be combatted somewhat if each person who likes and respects wine as the beverage of moderation would become pro- active, individually and through the many organizations now available to him, to get out the true story of wlne. The Future of Wine in the United States

Teiser: What will be the probable state of the California wine industry at the end of this century?

Crawford: I never accept a challenge to make a prediction, because I have found by sad experience that the more one knows about a subject, the more he has yet to learn; the law of limits is always there.

We can be sure of one thing, however: the wine industry will be different from the one we have known. As Dan Berger recently jested, we may be tasting "...a 1991 Chardonnay from General Foods, a 1993 Sauvignon Blanc from Mitsubishi or a 1990 Cabernet from Pennzoil ..." The world-shaking events of the past year in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the emergence of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Australia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and others as competitive exporters; the recent reports that almost 200 California wineries are exporting wines today; the emergence of the Common Market in Europe by 1993; and the possible lifting of trade barriers by Japan and the other Pacific Rim countries all are indications that the wine industry will be competing on a complicated international level. With the quality of grape planting, winemaking, and excellent proprietorship in our industry, I can see nothing but success in the long run for American wines in the world market.

And if the hundreds of thousands of enlightened wine producers, educators, distributors, retailers, salesmen, and consumers make their understanding of wine common knowledge, and wine escapes being blacklisted as a "drug," wine will still be around in the United State in the year 2000, and it will still be the choice of discerning consumers as the best mealtime beverage known to man. TAPE GUIDE -- Charles McNeil Crawford

Interview I: 22 May 1989 tape 1, side a insert, tape 4, side a tape 1, side a, continued tape 1, side b tape 2, side a tape 2, side b tape 3, side a

Interview 2: 23 May 1989 tape 4, side a tape 4, side b tape 5, side a tape 5, side b tape 6, side a tape 6, side b not recorded

APPENDIX I CHARLES P!. CRAWFORD MEMBERSHIPS, PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

National Society of Professional Engineers (Chemical Engineer #317)

California Society of Professional Engineers

Stanislaus Chapter Society of Professional Engineers (charter member, past president)

Modes to Engineers Club

American Society of Enology and Viticulture (charter member, past president)

Institute of Food Technologists

American Chemical Society

American Institute of Chemists

Society of Wine Educators

American Association for Advancement of Science

California Academy of Sciences

Wine Investigation for Novices and Oenophiles

Americans for Wine

American Vineyard Foundation

Wine Institute Committees: Technical (chairman) Laws and Regulations Health and Social Research Energy and Environmental Studies Proposition 65 Market Development

Les Amis Du Vin

O.I.V. Delegate Etats Unis

California Department of Agriculture

APPENDIX I1

PL'BLICATIONS, IN-HOUSE REFORTS AtD PWCPRESENTATIONS by Charles M. Crawford 1940 - Present -Year Lazation &re -1. or Reported 1940 Table and Dessert Wines frm Oranges Undergraduate &search U.C., Berkeley (Co-author - Ze'ev HalperirJ Guidelines Far Sherry wines Run Concord Grapes N.Y.State Agr. Ehper. Station Apple olampagne, Wllk Process vs. Bottle N.Y.State Agr. Ehper. Station (Co-authar - Rdlph Celmr) Fesponse of Certain Chmercia.1 Yeasts Cornell .Lhiversity to Accessary Grawth Factors Master of Science ?hesis Cornell Library, Ithaca, N.Y. Diatamaceous Earth Conparative A Gallo &part Filtration Study (Co-author - Jduls-Manville mSi=ing) mating Procedures end Jab Descriptions Fbr Tartar, Inc. Control of Tartrate Concentration Thraugh Sodim Metavanadate Analytical Prccedm Tartar, Inc. -rating Predures and Job Descriptions Far Gallo Incbrstrial Alcahol Plant A Gallo Report on Establi-t of quality Wines (Grape Planting, Wine Selection, Wine Production, Blending, Aging, and quality Carparixsls to Establish Gal10 Vintner's St& wines) Gallo to O.P.A. Basic Laboratory Manual far Beginners A Gallo &part kw mature Sherry Baking Using Catalytic Cbcidatiar A Gallo Idepart . Job Instructicn Manuals: Steps and Fey Points-Grape Testing; CNshing; Fkmmta- tion, Pcmace wal; Pressing; Clarifica- tion; Recking; filtratim; Pasteurizaticn (HEXE); Distillation; Labratory Procedures; Bottling mdule and Increntory -1; M Systaa and Cardex Wds; Excise Stamp Inventay Controls (&.&dl- State) : Gall0 Industrial Waste Treatmmt far mlasses A Gnllo Reparr and Grape Waste. Biological filtration; (Resented to Technical Advisory Clarif icatim, mu Separaticn; camittee in 1945) Use of Soil Mantle far Liquid Waste and (Wauthcrr - W.J.O'ml,Jr.) S1- Dry* in Shall- Checks

Proce&ures Manual for Purchasing AGallom 1 Procc~Manual for PezgoMel A-om. Procedures Manual for mint- Stock IIDam A Gallo &port Page 2 .. -Year wation h%ere Publ. or Reported 1945 Plans and Procedures for U-shaped Battling Lines in a Clean Rcan

Calciun in Dessert Wines mality Control Paining Manual ?Way's Views on Clarification and Stabilization of Wine A.S.E.V.J. 4 9-13 (1953) A Review and Study of Color Standards for Wte Wines . A.S.E.V.J. 9 194-201 (1959) Science and Wine of the Future A.S.E. &it Award Pcceptance mch.' A Slide ltm of Gallo Winery Presented to Institute of fran Grapes to Finished Prcdxt Food Technologists (Slides by Mas Ueda) Gocd Manufacturing Practice Wine Institute A Review of the Labeling Issues (S.W.E.) Come11 Lhiv. Ithaca, N.Y. ?he mality Aspects of Different Grape (S.W.E.) Carnell Lhiv. Varieties in Wine l&es Ithaca, N.Y. Gallo Publication The Consmr and the Winemaker Gallo-Interndl ?he Vigil of the Wbadcer Gallo-Internal ?he urge Prcducer, nT@roved Wtymough l-echnology Wine Tasting Develqmnts Wine Ebnm V Univ. of San Diego Ihe American Wine Business, Were N.S.C.A. Camrention We'veBeenand~WeAreGoing ?re= Beverage News 6/2/80 0144 Years in Wine Wines 6 Vines, Sept . 1980 lbenty-tw Importart Bits of Momticm on a Wine Label A Gallo Rqtxt to Marketers Great -ians. ?he Wine I.L.S.A. Camrenticm Industry Next Five Years Chicago Forty Years in ?he Wine In-

* Varietal Wines in California s=uth mbrange -tY Fca W.I.N.O. Presentation De Anza College Wine Dpx#itian Panel Vinicultural Research and Gallo Winery California Wines, Ihe World's Finest K- for win BO& Wine - -re It's een, khe!re It Is, and there It's Going S.F. Advertising Club Ccmtemporary California Wine NRJ Ofleans Radio for Tun Fitm~zlis Page 3 ..

-Year 1982 ~f YOU Could -1 T%e Years Away Wines 6 Vines, mch 1982 1983 Ten Wine Appreciation Seminars A Gallo Project IntrcbXicn and History; for Marketers Post-Mitian Develgments in California;. Wine F~odwingAreas of the Wld, Grape Gradng and Vineyard Reseath (I 6 11); WinemakSng (I 6 11); Chermpcgne 6 spatkling Wines; Wine 6 Heale:; Brandy . A Celebratim of Wine and Food Fbr Amrican Vineyard Foundation at .A.S.E.V. .- Wine - T?K bmg ~smq Wine West, July/Aug 1983 Histary of Ecmcmic Slurps in the California Wine Industry A Gdllo Report he Role of Sulfur Dioxi* in U.C. Davis .S?minar l%e h3rld of Wine for Professor myRyu chair)

?he Challenges of ltday's Wine Industry C.E.D. Seminar . .. Chicago, Illinois Society of Wine Educators 1986 Canvention lbur Win, Grapes and Gallo Winery Fbreign Agricultural Senrice Chganization

wine Appreciation Seminars A Project Ccnpanent Tasting and Farelling; for tm-keters Odar Ccmpoarents; History of Wines Before Prchibiticm; Post Prthibitian Dwelq?rents in California A Gdllo Internal Publication SarP camtents tx Wine and Society Prnerican Wine Society Journal "- Vol. 21 No. 4, pg. 118-119

APPENDIX 111

CALCIUM IN DESSERT KIhZS C. M. Crawford American Jou=nal of Enolow cn8 Viticulture, 2, p 76

TODAY'S VImS ON THE CLARIFI CATION AND STASILZTY OF WIhTS C. M. Crawford American Journ~lof Enolo~yand Viticulture, C; p 9 THE MECHANISM OF ISOWL ALCOHOL FORMATION USING TRACER TECHNI QVES George Thoukis American Journal of Enolow and Viticulture 9, p. 161 MECHANISM OF COPPER CASSE FOP-UTION IN ~ITET-LS WINS

R. G. Peterson. M. A. Joslvn.-. and P.- W.~ Durbin Food ~esearch;-23-, p. 518

A RNiEh' AND STUDY OF COLOR STANDARDS FOR IfilTE WINZ C. M. Crawford, A. Caputi, Jr., cnd R. J.2outhilet American Journal of Enolow adViticultu=e, 9,.p. 194

FACTORS ~ECTING.TEE COLOR OF 'DRY VTRW~ Dawson Wright Rmericcn Jo~rnalof Enolow md Viticultiire,' 2, p. 30

ANfLYSfS OF ETGXNOL i?J WIhT 'tY GAS-LIQUiD ?iiRTf"ION UiROUATOGS-:

R. J. BouASlilet. k'Aur Ca~uri.* - Jr. cnd Mrs Ueda Journal of the ~ssociationof officicl laalyticrl. .-. Chemists 44 (2: 410-414 DETER~IKATIONOF ETEANOL IN KINE BY GAS-L~~CIDPARTITION CHRO.!!TffiRAPHY - Robert L. Morrison * Amezican Journal of Enolow md Viticulture 12 (3) : 101-106

' -2962 PA~-'OF DIE^ PPROCARBONATE IN WINS GeorQe Tnoukis, R. J. BouA&ilet, Mrs ~edr,anC A-'Am Ceguti, a'- American Journcl of Enolog md Viticulture 13(3); 105-113

A R.Z& SO= STUDIES OF TEf EFFECT OF SUVUR ON 'TEE. FORMAT1 ON. OF OFF-ODORS IN WINE . George Thoukis and Lewis A. Stern America Journrl of En0109 and Viticulture, s,p. 133 TBE DETERYINATI ON OF ACTALDEEYDE IN HIGE-PROOF FOR?=-XING SPIRfTS, BEVERAGS BRANDY, AND WINE Robert L. Morrison America Jo~nclof Enolog and Viticulture 13 t41 : 159-168 2. 6 J. Gall0 Wiaery Research Publicatiozs - Paoe 2

1963 EKZYYXTIC DETEXTIKATION OF CAPSON DIOXIDE it2 LfSCT'IY CARBONATED WINES - 1962 COLLA3OiiATIC'S STGDY Robert L. Morrison Journal of the Associztion of Official A~ricultural Chenists 46: 268-289

PRCDUCTION AND USE OF COY2RESSED V-&ST FOR KII;ERY FE.WZNTP.TIC?Z G. Thoukis, G. Reed and R. J. Bouthilet American Journal of Enology and Viticultu=e 14, p. 148

S~31-AUTOMATIC DETERYINATION OF ETHANOL, IN WINE BY TIiI MICRO-DI CIiRO.?lATE METHOD Robert L. Morrison and Ted E. SBwarZs Ame?ichn Journal of Enoloqy and Viticulture 14(4) : 185-193

1965 TEZ FORYATION OF SUCCIKIC ACID DURfNG ALCOHOLIC FERYSKTATION - G. Thoukis,. ?!. Ueia and D. Wricht American Journal of Enoloq md Viticulture,' 16, p. 1 TAE SROWNING PROSLZM IN WINES A. Caputi, Jr. iznd R. G. Peterson . . Rnerican Journal of 2nolog and Vi%icultu:e 16(1): 9-13 . .. DSTZ%SXATION OF -ON DIOXIDS IN LIGETLY C~FUONXTED WIKZ Robert L. Horrison . . Journel of &he Association of Official A~zic~lturclChexrisrs ,C8 (3) : 471-472 .. . - ..

1,066 TSS DSTEXXIXATION OF DIZTEYL ?YROW30NAlI"; IN WIhT - R. L. Morrison Journel of the .Association of Officiel Acricultuzel Chemists . . A NSW INDICATOR FOR TOTPL ACfD DBTSRYIFION, IN WIES Gibe== Wong and Arthur Capuzi, Jr. American Jo.ynal of Enology and Viticulture 17(3): 114-137

-1967 VOLUME COhTRACTION OF WINE =ER ADDITION OF' WfNE S?ZXTS .~~ Jr.. R. Hackamack ~~ - A. - W. ~ ~ Caouti. . - - and D. D. Sanford ~mezi;& ~o&ialof Enology &id Viricultnre 18 (3) : 113-120 DETERMINATION OF COPPER AND IRON IN WINZ BY P.TO?!IC ASSOWTION SPfCTROPHOTOMETRY Ar'Slw Caputi, Jr. and Mzsao Ueda Ameziccll Journcl of Bnology and Viticulture 16(21: 66-70 'E. g J. Grllo Winerv Reserrch Publiceticas - Pace 3

1967 TEE SROhifNG PROELE!! IN KfNES, 11. IOK-EXCHANGE EFFSCTS -(cont.) R. G. Petezson en8 Arthur Caputi, Jr. American Journcl of Enolog and Viticulture 18(3): 105-112

WIh? STABILiZATION BY ELECTRODIALYSIS k-hur Caputi , Jr. Report to the Wine Institute Technical AZvisory Cormittee Meeting, December 8, 1967

196 8 SPECTROPHOTOMZTRIC DETER!IXZ;TION OF ETWCL IN WINE - bbhur Caputi, Jr., Masao UeZa, and Thomcs Erown American Journal of Enolog and Viticulture 19(3): 160-165 TY! QUm?ITATIVE AKALYSIS OF PLAVANOIDS AND R5LAZED COMPOUKDS IN WIhT BY GAS-LI QUID CHROMATOGWHY Eric Christensen and Ar'Aur Caputi, Jr. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 19(4): 238-245

DfTSRrlIKATION OF P USEL OiLS IN NZCTRAL GR%.?E SPIKITS BY TWEmTUE PROtRA..D GAS CBROMATOG3APEY Eric Christensen end Arthur Caputi, Jr. Americzn Jou-?la1 of Enolow and Viticult~-e19 (3) : 155-159

COLISSOiV-TZVX STUDY OF ?E DZTZXYZNAION OF ETriANOL IN WINZ BY CVFYI0.L OXIDATION . . Arbbur Caputi and Davson Wright Jo~~E~of 'he Associcrion of Officicl mclyticcl c!!eziszs 52 (1):. e5-88 ..

RZSIDGAL POL?!Vih~YRROLIDOhiXE WINS a A. Ccputi, Jr,, ~homcsBrown, and MZS~ODedc Americ~nJournal of Enolow knd Viticulture 20(31: 152-154 . . TEE DETZXMI~JATION ]OF SODIUM AND POTASSIUM IN XINI: BY ATOEIC ABSORPTION SPZCTRO?HOMETRY G. L. Hill apd A. Caputi, Jr. . Americcn, Jo~i=ncl05 Enolog uid Viticclture 20 (4 1 : 225-236

-1970 ' TITRDETRIC DETERH.INAT1ON OF UiRSON DIOXIDE IN WINS P.. P.. Ccputi, Jr., Mrsao Deda, Phil Wclter, and Thomas Brown Americcn Journcl of Enology and Viticulture 21(3): 140-144

DETERYINATION OF ETHANOL IN WIXZ BY CEZMICAL OXIDATION 1969 STUDIES &'Slur Capu'f , Jr . Journ~lof the Association of Official Anclytical Chemists 53(11: 11-12

COLO~I~TRICDETER~~ATION OF T~TARICACZD IN V~NE Grego-y Hill and Arthur Caputi, Jr. Americcn Jouzncl of Enology cnd Viticultcre 210) : 152-161 / 5. 6 :. Gallo wi2ery ?.esesr=h ?-.5licccio:s - Pace 4

197 1 DETER!!IKATION OF CARSON DIOXIDE IN WIRE - Arthur Caputi, Jr . Journal of &heAssociation of Official Rnclyticrl Chemists 54 (4) : 762-764

=FECT OF PELOROGLUCINOL AND RESORCINOL ON TEE CLINGSTOKE PEACE POLYPHENOL OXIDASE-CATUZED OXIDATION OF 4-NETRYL CATZCHOL Thomes C. Wong, Bor S. Luh and John R. Vhitaker Plant Physiology 48: 24-30 . fSOWITfON AND CIiARACTERIZATION Of POLYPEENOL OXIDXE ISOZVFZS Of CLINGSTONE PEACH Thomrs C. Wong, Bor S. Lch, and John R. whitaker ~la'ntPhysiology 48: 19-23

DETIzlINATION OF CO IN WINE BY INFED S?ECTROPYOTO.CTRV Arthur Caputi, Jr. 2nd Mcsao UeZa American Journal of Enology cnd Viticulture 24 (3) : 116-119 PROPOSZD MODIr'ICATION OF TI32 MANOP!'!TRIC PSTHOD FOR TEE . DETfR!INATION OF ==ON DIOXIDE IN WIhZ Caputi, Jr. Jouznel of 'he Association of Officiel Analytical CherrLsts 56(4): 843-845 '

. 1974 .QUILNTITATIVZ DETZXYINP-TION OF ETFJINOL IN WIhi 3Y GAS CEBO?iiTG-. - GRlVIIY Ben Stackler adEric N. Christensea Americen Jocrnrl of Enolow adViticulture 25C4): 202~2137 TEk PRODUCTION .Of ALDf2YDES AS A'RESULT OF OXIDATION OF - POLY?EENOLIC CO-?!FOUNDS AND ITS RELATI ON TO WINS AGING 8. L. Wildenradt and V. L. Singleton Americcn Journal of Snology and Viticulture 25(21 : 119-126 DZTERFINATION, OF SORBIC ACID IN WIN5 Atthur Caputi, Jr. Masao DeZa, and Sruno T=omSella Journal of the Associction of Official Anelyticcl Cherists 57(4): 551-953

1975 COLLABORATIVT STUDY OF TEE DETSRMZNATION OF SO33IC ACa TN WINZ - Arthut Caputi, Jr. and Karen Slinkerd Journcl of &he Association of Official Analytical Cherdsts 58(1) : 133-135

VOLCITILE COXSTITUEhTS OF, GRAPE LEAVES I. VITIS VINIFEXA . VARIETY 'CEENIN BLANC' H. L. WilbenraZt, E. 1. Christensen, 3. Stackler, A. Caputi, K. Slinkcrd, and K. Scutt American Journal of Enolov and Viticulture 26C31: 146-153

- foward - 1976 COLLkBORCITIVE STUDY OF THE DETEmINhTSON OF COLOR IN - WHITE WINES ~erb-L. ~ildenradtand Arthur Caputi , Jr. Journcl of the Association of Officicl Anclytical Chemists

59 (4) : ' 777-779

1977 WINE ANALYSIS COLLRBORATTVE STUDY - H. L. Wildenradt and A. Ccputi, Jr. American Journcl of Enology and Viticulture 28[3): 135-148

DETERYINATION OF COLOR IN WHITE HINZ AND WHITE GRAPE JUICE USING THE WIiITf WINE COLORIMETER . Herb L. Wildenradt and Paul A. stafford' Journal of the Association of Official Analyticcl Chemists 60 (3) : 739-740 RUGGEDNESS .OF OFFICIAL COLORIMETRIC METHOD FOR SOF91C ACID .IN WINE Wthur Caputi, Jr. cnd Paul A. Stafford Journal of the Associction of Official Pnrlyticrl Chemists 60 (5) : 1044-1047

19 78 !EE QUALITY ASPECTS OF DIFFEREhT GRAPE VARlETIES IN - WINE TYPES Chcrles H. Crawford Society of Wine Educators, 1978 Generzl Meeting Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, July 22, 1978

-1979 iES'dCE NOTE A =ID COLORfMfTRlC C2LCIUM KETBOD C. S. Ouoh, A. Caputi, Jr. and M. Grort Americu! Journal of Enology and viticulture, Vol. 30, No. Tr . . p. 58-60

Eruno TrombGlla ddTony Ribeiro' .. American 3o\lmal d'f Enology and Viticulture hot printed yet). To be siven at the America Society of Enolo~istsConvention . June,L979. . . *YSIS OF GLYCEROL IN WINE BY HIGH PlCSSURf LIQUID ' .-. CHROMLTOGRAPHY ' Karen Slinkard Arnericea Jo=nal of Enolog an8 Viticulture hot printed yet). - To be ~ivenat*the America society of:Enologists Convention ' June, 1979. E. 6 J. Gello winery Research Pcbliccrions - Pace 6

-1980 TECBNICAL NOTE-MICROWAVE OVEN PROCEDURE FOR MOISTURE DETEmlINAT ION OF POMACE-- Mas Ueda ~mericanJournal of Enolog and Viticulture, Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 202

IMPROVED GAS CHROMATOGRAPHIC DETERTIINATION OF ACETIC ACID IN WINE Bruno Trombella and Anthony Ribeiro American Journal of Enolog and Viticulture 31 (3) :294-297

19 81 THE ROLE OF ENOLOGY AND VITICULTURE IN CALIFORNIA: - PAST, PRESENT AKD FUTURS George Thoukis Second International Flavor Conference (co-sponsored by: Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, ACS ; . Institute of Food Technolo~ists; and Society of Flavor Chemists,: "The Quality of Foods and Beverages: Chemistry and Technolog" ' at The National Hellenic Reseerch Foundation, A6&eos, GrPece July 20-24, 1981 Z'ZCEKICAL NOTE-yCO-WRSION OF ALCOHOL COXTENT TO PERCSNTAGE BY VOLUm AT VAXOVS E.?SE,SC;TURES kv'hur Caputi , Jr . hericcn Jor;rnal of molow anh Viticulture 32 (3)256

-1983 GAS CHROMATOGRXVHIC DfER!!NkTLON OF fmOL IN VINE: COLLABORATIVE STUDY Lvrhur Caputi, Jr. and Dennis P. Mooney . Association of Official Analytical Chemiscs Jo~nel66(5): 1152-1157 (1983)

-1987 TITRLCTRIC DETER!NATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN WINE: COLLABORATIVE STUDY .- Arthur Caputi, Jr. and byWalker Association of Official Analyticel Chemists Journal 70(6) : (1987) INDEX -- Charles M. Crawford

Adams, Leon, 48, 56 Cal-Pack [California Packing Advertisinn Ane, 80 Corporation], 14-15 Air Resources Board, 99 California State University, Fresno, Alcohol Tax Unit, 31, 44, 68 99 American Society of Quality Control, Canandaigua winery, 16 8 9 Caputi, Armando, 66 American Vineyard, 31 Caputi, Art, 65, 66, 67, 88 American Wine Society, 92 Caputi, Emil, 66 Amerine, Maynard, 12, 40 Caputi, Jr., Arthur, 52, 66-67 Angelo Petri [S.S.], 78 Cash, Lyman, 49, 83 anti-alcohol movement, 101-102 Celmer, Ralph, 14, 16, 18, 52 Arata, Dave, 27 centrifuging, 42 Ash, Charles, 14 Champlain, Charles, 17 Avi Publishing Company, 15-16 Cherski, Emil, 49 Christian Brothers, 73, 74-75 cold fermentation, 42 Ballatore, Spirito, 51 Coleman, James E., 70, 85, 89, 90 Barengo, Dino, 49, 56 Collins, Lester, 29 Beard, George, 27 Concannon family, 34 Beard, Walter, 27 Cornell University, 13, 14, 17, 18- Beard Land and Investment Company, 20, 22, 23 27 Courtvright, Hernando, 91 Berg, Harold W., 49 Crawford, Charles M., Berger, Dan, 104 awards, 89, 91-92

Berti, Leo, 36 ' children of, 7-9 Bioletti, Frederic T., 12 family background, 1-7 Blasdale, Walter C., 13 first duties at Gallo, 29-32 Blue, Anthony Dias, 87 high school years, 10 Bonar, Lee, 6 public relations activities, 83- Boughilet, Robert, 52 8 8 Braskat, Norman, 30, 49, 52 responsibilities at Gallo, 51 Bretherick, Ormond, 29-30, 47, 48 university education, 11-15 Brown, E.M., 34, 47, 49 Crawford, Charles McNeil, 3 Bulger, Helen, 65-66, 69 Crawford, Elinor, 5-6 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Crawford, James McNeil, 4 Firearms, 46, 68, 69, 76-77 Crawford, Judy, 7, 8 Bush, John, 45 Crawford, Merton, 5 Crawford, Robert, 5, 6, 11 Crawford, Sarah Katherine Glover Caddow, Harry, 48 [Mrs. Charles], 7, 13, 15, 20 Crawford, Robert, Jr., 7, 8 Cribari family, 62 Gallo, Amelia, 28, 99 Croce, Guido, 51-52 Gallo, Ernest, 7-8, 21-22, 23, 24, Cruess, Marie [Mrs. William V.] 43 29, 30-31, 35, 38, 52, 53, 54-55, Cruess, William V., 11, 12, 14. 15- 57, 58, 59, 60, 61-62, 74, 79, 80- 16, 20, 21-22, 34, 43, 49, 53, 90 81, 82-84, 88-89, 90, 96, 99-100 Crum, Phil, 65 Gallo, Julio, 7, 23, 26, 28, 31, 35, 37-38, 40, 41, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, De Bye, Marian, 23 66, 67, 71, 74, 80, 82-85, 88- De Bye, Peter, 22-23 89, 90, 99 De Bye, Peter Paul, 23 Gallo, Robert J., 57, 84-85, 87, 94 Detwiler, William, 70 Gallo brandy, 71-75 Diamond, Ivan, 100 Gallo Cellars of Sonoma, 41 Diener, George [Brother Timothy], E.&J. Gallo Winery, 75 aging cellar, 94-95 Digardi, Ernie, 75 assisting other vintners, 88-90 Dithridge, Ed, 69 association with university Dolague, George, 29 research, 99 Dounce, Dr. [teaching assistant], bottling and fermenting 19 facilities, 58-61 Drasbek, Jack, 69 concrete tanks, 82-83 Drew, Phil, 69-70, 90 consumer research and product drunk driving, 101 development, 97-98 contracts with growers and wineries, 37-39 E&J Brandy, 73 cooperation with other beverage Eden Roc Brandy, 73 makers, 89-90 Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research cork-finished varietals, 93-94 Center, 99-100 employees, 51-52 Experiment Station (New York), 22- experimental varietal grape 23 vineyard, 36-37, 40 export market, 104 experimental winery, 37 facilities in '40s, 28, 29 family tradition, 66-67 Fillipello, Phil, 56 glass factory, 60-61, 77-79, 84- Finigan, Robert, 87 8 5 Flavor Guard, 78-79 government compliance, 68-69 flavored vines, 43-46, 76-78 industrial alcohol production, 44 Fournier, Charles, 17, 18, 20, 21 instituting written orders, 32- Fournier, Mildred, 20 33 Franzen, Nick, 56 library, 52-53, 88 Frei, Andrev, 38 management philosophy, 74 Frei, Julio, 37 medical research, 99-100 Frei, Louis, 37-38 Modesto property, 27-28 Frei Brothers Winery, 37, 41 patents, 52 Freiberg, John, 7 personnel in the '30s and '40s, Fujii, George, 96 28-29 personnel department, 31 Hildebrand, Joel, 13 production controls, 68 Hilgard, Eugene W., 12 production planning, 85 Hinckle, Richard Paul, 51 production vs. marketing, 82-84 Holt, Frances Ann, 2-4, 6-7 promotion and advertising, 79-81 Hust, Alice, 1, 2 proprietary and varietal vines, Hust, Charles, 4-5 39-42 Hust, Mabel, 1, 2 Prorate and experimental brandy, Hust, Steven Grover, 2 25-27 purchasing department, 31 quality control, 69-70, 89-90 Ibarra, Marciel, 49 reputation in early '40s, 21-22 Imbesi, Tony, 63 research laboratory, 52-54, 97- ion exchange, 48 98 Italian Swiss Colony, 33-34, 80 surviving the 1946 market crisis, 61-63 tanks, 64-65, 70 Jaffe, Mannie, 69 test marketing, 55-56 James, Audrey, 59, 65 varietal program, 83, 85-88 Jefferson, Thomas, 102 vin ros6, 55-56 Jenkins, Jess, 28 visitors' center, 94 Johnson, Hugh, 87 vartime employees, 57-58 Jones, Lee, 34 vine quality, 54-55 Joslyn, Maynard, 12-13, 15, 39, vinemakers, 55 43, 53 vinery equipment and processes, 41-43 World War I1 defense products, Kane, Max, 28, 29, 32-33 24-25 Kasimatis, Amandus N., 50 Gallo Wine Press. The, 36 Kite, Ted, 47, 48 Galphin, Bruce, 87 Knovles, Legh, 56 Gehlert, Millicent, 31 Krenz, Oscar, Copper and Brass Gibson, Bob, 47 Works, 27, 72 grape prices, 35 Great Western Electro-Chemical Company, 32 labeling regulations, 44, 46 Great Western Wine Company, 16, 17, Las Palmas Winery, 52, 62 18 Lawrence, Ernest O., 13-14 Gross, Pete, 67 Lewis, Art, 64 Grosso, Patty, 67 Lichine, Alex [Alexis], 86 Guild Wineries and Distilleries, Life magazine feature on Gallo 59, 78 vinery, 7-8

Hartford Empire organization, 78 Martini, Louis M., 20-21, 28 Heck, Paul, 33 Martini, Louis P., 21, 43 Heitz, Joseph E., 51 Matchett, John, 48 Heublein, Inc., 74-75 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 2 Medford, Clifford L., 12 Posson, Phillip, 49 Millipore Corporation, 45 Prial, Frank, 86 Mills, Dale, 47 Prohibition, 11, 44, 103 Modesto, 3, 6-7 "proof gallons," 36 Modesto Colony, 27 Pursglove, David, 87 Modesto and Empire Traction Company, Putnam Wine Company, 16, 17 27-28 Quaccia, Lawrence, 49, 59 Mondavi, Michael, 88-89 Mondavi, Peter, 49 Mondavi, Robert, 49, 88-89 Rahn, Otto, 17, 19 Monterey County grapes, 41 Rainier Brewery, 89 Moyer, Jim, 22 raisins, 34-35 Mrak, Emil, 12, 42, 43 Ramos, John, 32 Mullins, Michael, 99 rectification tax, 45-46 Museum Society of Southern Reinkey, F.J., 49 California, 91-92 Rice, Bill, 87 Richert, Paul, 47, 48-49 Riddell, James, 72 Napa Valley Cooperative Winery, 37, Riney, Hal, 80-81 40, 41 Rollefson, Gerhard K., 13 National Distillers, 33 Roma Wine Company, 30 New York State wineries, 15-18 Rosenstiel, Lewis, 61, 62 Nightingale, Myron, 34 Rossi, Edmund A., Sr., 20 North Coast grapes, 39 Rossi family, 34 Novlin, R.L., 72

Sanford, Don, 51, 69 Olmo, Harold P., 40 Saxby, Mr. [employer at Cal-Pak], Osteraas, Paul, 36-37, 40 14-15 Owens-Illinois Glass Compnay, 59 Schatz, Walter, 20 Schenley Industries, 61, 62 Schmid, Rudi, 100 Pacific Can Company, 27 Schonkveller, Bill, 72 Pearl Harbor Day, 20 Schveitzer, George, 20 Pederson, Carl, 19, 22 Scientific Advisory Board, 100 Pedro Domecq vinery, Mexico, 49-50 Seagrams, 72, 74 Peitzman, Augie, 42 Senate committee on champagne, 18 Peters, Leon, 70 Setrakian, Arpaxat, 34-35 Peterson, Richard G., 29, 52 Setrakian, Robert, 73 Petracci, Art, 28-29 Shedler, Mr. [owner of Great Western Petri, Louis, 36, 78 Electro-Chemical], 32 Phaff, Herman, 42, 43 sherry making, 15, 18, 31 Pilone, Frank, 49 Shewan-Jones Winery, 34 Pirrone, Al, 49 Simco, Al, 71 Pirrone winery, 49 Skaneateles Winery, 16 Pool, Allen, 49 Skofis, Elie, 47 Popper, Karl, 52 Slayton, Bob, 52 Smithcamp, Bert, 60 Valley Foundry and Machine Works, Soares, Manuel, 64 70 Society of Wine Educators, 86, 87 Vaughn, Reese H., 12 Solomon, Dan, 85-86 Vella, Peter, 52 Sonoma County Cooperative Winery, Vierra, Tony, 32 37 Vieth, Fred, 72 St. Helena Cooperative Winery, 38 Virgina Dare winery, 16 stainless steel tanks, 70 Vosti, Don, 51, 52 Stefanich, Frank, 38 sterile filtration, 45 Stiles, Ella, 1, 2 W.I.T.S. [Wine Industry Technical Stone, Dee, 87 Symposium], 48 Stone, Frank, 87 Weast, Claire, 12 Sumner, J.B., 19 Webb, A. Dinsmoor, 29 Webb, R. Bradford, 45, 51 Wente, Ernest, 34 Tanner, Frederick W., 23 Wente, Herman, 20, 34 Tanner, Marian, 23 Widmer, Will, 17 Taylor, Clarence, 17, 21 Widmer Wine Company, 16, 17 Taylor, Greyton, 17 Wilding, Grace Crawford, 3, 4 Taylor, Walter, 17 Wileman, William Wolfe, 14 Taylor Wine Company, 15, 17, 18 Wilkins, Edgar, 47, 48 Tchelistcheff, AndrB, 49, 91-92 Williams, Howard, 78 Tchelistcheff, Dimitri, 52 Willkie, Frederick, 72 Technical Advisory Committee, 35, Willstatter, R., 19 40, 42, 47-49, 56 Wilson, John, 31, 56 Terrill, Vern, 29-30 wine, compared to other alcoholic Thomas, Wilbert, 11 beverages, 54, 102-103 Thompson Seedless, 36, 40, 76, 77 Wine Advisory Board, 48 Thorpe, Paul, 69, 88 wine industry, future directions, Thoukis, George, 51, 52 103-104 Tressler, Charles, 22 wine industry, strengths and Tressler, D.K., 14, 15, 16 weaknesses, 101-104 Turbovsky , Maury , 47 - 48 Wine Institute, 35, 44, 48, 87, 88, Twining Laboratories, 47 99 wine writers, 86-87 Wines & Vines, 48 underage drinking, 102 Winfree, Beverly, 31 Underhill, Stuart, 21 Vinkler, Albert J., 12 University of California, Berkeley, Wong, Tom, 52, 97 Fruit Products Department, 11-14, 30 University of California, Davis, 56, 99 Urbana Wine Company, 16, 20

Vaccano, Nick, 89 Grapes Mentioned in the Interview:

Chenin blanc, 37 Sauvingnon blanc, 86 Sauvingnon vert, 40

Wines Mentioned in the Interview:

Ballatore Spumanti, 51 Carignane, 40 Carlo Rossi, 39 Chablis Blanc, 39-40 Chardonnay, 40-41 French Colombard, 37 Grenache, 56 Hearty Burgundy, 39-40, 78 Johannisberg Riesling, 93 Livingston Sherry, 96 Paisano, 39 Palomino, 40 Sauvingnon Blanc, 41 sherry, 15, 18, 31, 96 Thunderbird, 76-78 Zinfandel, 37, 40 Ruth Teiser

Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever since. Stanford University, B.A., M.A. in English; further graduate work in Western history. Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since 1943, writing on local history and business and social life of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the San Francisco chronicle, 1943-1974. Co-author of Winemaking in California, a h5s tory, 1982. An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1965.