On the surface, Pietro Pinna’s skilfully researched and written book, La valle del vino, is a work of business history about the role of Italian entrepreneurs in the growth of the California wine industry. The intrinsic value of this book, however, is in how it weaves together stories of winemaking with those of immigration, development, and social history.
La valle del vino traces a long history of wine production in California across four lengthy chapters, which focus primarily on the century between the state’s founding in 1850 and the years immediately following the Second World War. The periodisation of chapters feels appropriate – late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, and post-repeal years – although other events certainly shook the industry: earthquakes, economic crises, wars, migration restrictions and insect infestations among them. Pinna handles each with clarity and aplomb, relying on sources including trade publications, newspapers, institutional and business archives, oral histories and government records.
As a project of business history, the author presents a detailed account of pioneering and industrialising businessmen such as Louis Martini, Giuseppe and Pietro Simi, Pietro Carlo Rossi, Robert Mondavi, and Ernest and Julio Gallo. It outlines the companies and consortiums they led in the expansion and consolidation of the industry. Growth became a ‘collective process’ (p. 68) as new grapes and wine styles entered the market and demand rose alongside wine-drinking immigrant populations (p. 68). Technological innovations in engineering and chemistry, political lobbying and new marketing techniques enabled mass production and, eventually, quality winemaking in California. Especially interesting are the ways companies managed Prohibition by selling grapes, making juice concentrate that could be fermented at home (p. 199), or planting other crops. All of this was led, Pinna convincingly demonstrates, by Italian immigrants and Italian-American descendants who built wineries, distillation facilities, financing capabilities and logistics operations. The book thus serves as a valuable history of US capitalist enterprise.
This work’s position as an illustrative case study in migration history is, nevertheless, undeniable. Topics including ‘pull factors’ (economic dynamism created by mining and railroad development), generational shifts in ethnic communities and anti-immigrant backlash align with other studies of US mass immigration. What stands out in La valle del vino is the pioneering role of Italians in the settlement of rural areas and their leading involvement in agroindustry, San Francisco’s North Beach enclave notwithstanding. This contrasts with primarily urban histories of Italian immigrant labour in cities of the East Coast and Midwest, and in the agricultural industries of the South, where newly arrived Italians rarely owned property or cultivated their own land. Meanwhile, a larger proportion of Italian immigrants in California were from northern regions of Italy such as Liguria and Piedmont, whereas in other parts of the US a larger share of Italian immigrants were from southern Italy. Studies of this distinction exist, but Pinna provides insight into how the image of San Francisco Italians as a ‘model colony’ (p. 80) connects with the ‘legitimising’ (p. 266) cultivation of land by northern Italians, something emphasised repeatedly by Liguria-born California wine pioneer Andrea Sbarboro (p. 82). This feels more akin to histories of northern Italian settlement in rural areas of Argentina and Brazil.
More than this, outlining entwined histories of agrobusiness and Italian migration brings this book into conversation with studies of frontier development in the USA from which Italians are often excluded. As a result, the project offers considerable insights into ‘Californian exceptionalism’ (p. 143). Such exceptionalism takes geographic form in the establishment of rural Italian settlements like Asti, north of San Francisco, and Cucamonga, in Greater Los Angeles (pp. 132, 260). Pinna demonstrates persuasively how the Italian wine industry also shaped southern California, even when vineyards were later replaced by suburban subdivisions. Parts of the Central Valley, such as Modesto (home to Franzia wines), and the Central Coast also feature in bringing forms of Mediterranean-style development to the state – an aesthetic visible in the architecture and branding of the state’s wine and tourism sectors (pp. 158, 247). Pinna notes that winemaking was a longstanding part of colonial processes in the Mediterranean and the Americas, serving as a symbol of ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernisation’ for millennia. He also connects Italian activities in California to the agrarian ethos of Thomas Jefferson, who brought Tuscan vintners to the USA in the eighteenth century (pp. 19–20). Italian winemakers’ central role at expositions held in San Francisco illustrates these connections between agricultural development and Italian settlement in relation to Californian modernism (p. 260).
Simultaneously, the making of italo-californità (p. 158) occurred through processes of adaptation and contestation within the state’s particular ethnic and racial environment. Italians were sometimes racialised and vilified in California, their wine referred to as ‘dago red’ (p. 148). They were alternatively or collectively grouped with Mexican, French, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants, which could encourage ‘Latin solidarity’ (p. 146), but this also designated them as racially inferior to the country’s genuine ‘whites’ of northern European origin (p. 63). Even when winemakers like the Petri or Sebastiani found success, they had to confront scepticism about how Italian families ran businesses. Meanwhile, some Italians sought to separate from and denigrate other groups, such as Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Within Italian communities, pioneering immigrants from northern Italy, and their children, racialised and distanced themselves from more recently arrived southern Italians, particularly as Prohibition and Hollywood gangster films added to stereotypes of Italian criminality (p. 203). Ultimately, the reader encounters a fascinating ethnic and racial history amid the increasing Americanisation (and whitening) of Italians and the California wine industry.
This book is exceedingly detailed (although without illustrations) and provides examples across multiple families, localities, companies and events connected with narrative elements woven throughout. There are spaces for greater engagement with other contextual frames, world events, analytical constructs and historiography. While sometimes given passing reference, there may be more to say about this history’s relationship with the cut-throat elements of turn-of-the-century capitalism, the place of Italian fascism in shaping immigrant experiences, and longstanding processes of settler colonialism. Fortunately, La valle del vino allows the reader to engage with these, and more, whether or not it explicitly emphasises such connections and contexts. Its meaningful contributions to the histories of business, Italian migration, development and ethnicity formation in California and the USA are unambiguously apparent.
