How Prohibition Scrambled California’s Wine Legacy

The true cost of Prohibition includes lost records and mysterious wine origins.

Welcome to a newsletter themed at the intersection of longevity and wine history. 🍷

1978: Four of Mario Gemello’s grandchildren. I’m number 40.

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The Padre Vineyard Co. opened in 1870 in Southern California and was issued Bonded Winery (BW-CA) No. 1. Less than 65 years later at the repeal of Prohibition, the Gemello Winery, launched by my great grandfather, was given BW-CA-4030. How did California bonded winery licenses get into the four thousands so quickly for such a nascent industry? The answer is tied to the chaos of Prohibition, where many of the public wine records were destroyed.

In 1919, Great Grandpa John Gemello didn’t run his own winery yet, but was part-owner of a vineyard in Cupertino just before the 18th Amendment was ratified that year. They sold the vineyard, and he pivoted to truck farming, a kind of traveling farmers market, delivering vegetables house-to-house throughout the Santa Clara Valley.

California’s wine industry was booming just nine years earlier with about 1,000 wineries. The looming prospect of Prohibition in the next decade would cause 40 percent of wineries to shutter. Many grape growers ripped out vineyards or switched to non-wine crops due to a lack of legal markets. Only half of the remaining 600 wineries would survive the 14 “dry” years of Prohibition. Some were able to stay afloat legally by making sacramental wine for churches during that era.

Prohibition was repealed in December 1933, leading to an influx of winery bond licenses. E & J Gallo Winery (BW-CA-4213), the world’s largest winery, was founded in Modesto in 1933 by brothers Ernest and Julio. Two other Santa Cruz Mountains wineries to get their bond licenses in 1934 and are still in operation include Bargetto Winery (BW-CA-3859) in Soquel and Guglielmo Winery (BW-CA-3656) of Morgan Hill.¹

John Gemello’s son, Mario, in the mid 1970s

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To operate in the state, each winery was required to post a bond as surety that taxes would be paid to the federal government for wine produced. A number was assigned to each winery. During Prohibition, records of these bonds were destroyed. At repeal, wineries that could prove their origin were allowed to claim their old numbers.

But neither historical records nor anyone’s memory at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms could explain how some wineries acquired certain very low numbers, according to historian Charles Sullivan.

Sullivan writes in his book, A Companion to California Wine: “It is often difficult to tell exactly how old a winery is from its BW number, but there is something of a correlation” — particularly for wineries that began in 1933 or later and have a BW number in the 3500s or beyond.

Pre-statehood, Joseph Chapman of Massachusetts started the first commercial winery in California in 1826, planting four thousand vines in Los Angeles. Charles Lefranc was the “father” of the commercial wine industry in Santa Clara Valley, planting grape cuttings from the Santa Clara Mission as early as 1851 or 1852.²

Pre-statehood, Joseph Chapman of Massachusetts started the first commercial winery in California in 1826, planting four thousand vines in Los Angeles.

In 1934, Gemello Winery produced 3,891 gallons of wine. John Gemello’s right hand man was his 17-year-old son, Mario (my grandfather). The following year, they increased their production to 5,680 gallons. The majority of the family’s income, though, still came from farming. Wine sales would become the family’s main income by 1937.

Some of the people who reopened old wineries or started new ones were quick-buck artists. They were trying to capitalize on an expectation that there would be an explosion of demand for wine. There were as many as 800 bonded wineries by the end of 1934. But this far exceeded demand. A decade later, that number had sunk to 465.³

Another industry downturn would occur in the 1960s, causing many bonded wineries to close. By 1965, bonded wineries reached another low, if not the lowest point, since repeal: only 227 bonded wineries in operation.⁴

California wine industry grew to 300 by 1970. The following decade continued to see new winery growth, getting a big boost following the 1976 Judgment of Paris, the blind tasting that unexpectedly favored California wines over more established French wines. This sent shockwaves through the industry putting California on the international map. By 1990, there were about 700 bonded wineries in California.

An Explosion of Wineries in the 21st Century

By the year 2000, California had eclipsed 1,000 bonded wineries, the first time since about 1910. That number would quadruple in the next quarter century, driven largely by small winery operators and getting a boost from Sideways, an Oscar-nominated film of two buddies road tripping through Santa Barbara wine country.

There were 4,060 bonded wineries in the state in 2024, many of them producing less than 1,000 cases a year.⁵

Bonded wineries nearly tripled in the first 10 years of the 21st century, reaching 2,900 wineries according to the Wine Institute. The Paso Robles wine region quadrupled its number of wineries (50 to 200) during that period. Nearby Santa Barbara County, the backdrop to Sideways, didn’t see as much growth in bonded wineries. However, its wine-related jobs soared from 950 in 2005 to nearly 1,400 by the 2010s.

Movie fun fact: Anyone who saw Sideways remembers Miles, Paul Giamatti’s character, showing his love for Pinot Noir and his disdain for Merlot. This triggered a phenomenon known as The Sideways Effect: a sharp rise in demand for Pinot Noir, and slight decline for Merlot.

If you’re new here—hi, I’m Kevin!

I’m the author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇

The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features:

• Healthy aging/longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life.

• Wine history & stories of the Gemello Winery

• Ancestry & family research tips

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1. Mario Gemello took over day-to-day operations of Gemello Winery in 1941. He grew it into producing more than 8,000 cases of wine per year, by the time he retired in 1982. The Gemello wine label would live on for another two decades as its wine would be produced by Sandy Obester, Mario’s niece, at Obester Winery.

2. Source: Charles L. Sullivan, Like Modern Edens: Winegrowing in Santa Clara valley and Santa Cruz Mountains, 1798 - 1981 (California History Center, 1982)

3. Source: George M. Taber, Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (New York: Scribner, 2005)

4. Source: Charles L. Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine: An Encyclopedia of Wine and Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) pg. 30

5. Source: Wine Business Monthly, “U.S. Winery Count Declines Slightly,” by Andrew Adams, 2/1/2025