Introduce your brand
Some of today’s biggest wine producers such as the Italian Swiss Colony and Sutter Home were originally founded at the end of the nineteenth centuries by agrarian Italians who were driven from what they knew and the roots they’d grown, to the blinding newness of America and California.
The Italian Swiss Agricultural Colony was a cooperative (talk about wine coops) formed by Andrea Sbarbarao in 1881 for the purpose of aiding Italian and Swiss immigrants to settle in their new land. They hired peasants who had worked in the vineyards in Italy, gave them a fair wage, free wine, and shares in the cooperative.
Prohibition dealt a huge blow to California’s wineries (talk about California before and after Prohibition), forcing many out of business. Those that survived marketed their products as sacramental wines or medicinal elixirs. Some immigrants, such as Giuseppe “Joe” Gallo grew grapes during Prohibitions and sold them to home winemakers (brer rabbit)
By the mid-1960s, over half of the wine cooperage in California was controlled by the four largest producers, all of whom had Italian immigrant origins: DiGiorgio, Franzia, Petri, and Gallo