The Ghosts of California Vino

Why is America’s greatest wine monument just lying there dormant?

Sonoma County Library Archives

America’s most important monument to wine and Italian ingenuity sits quietly off Highway 101 in Sonoma County a few miles south of Cloverdale.

Officially known as California Historic Monument #621, visitors (incredibly) aren’t welcomed here. Public tours stopped long ago. Even though it was once one of California’s top tourist destinations with the state’s first registered tasting room.

This was vino ground zero-- the epicenter of American winemaking before Napa became a theme park, before the Judgment of Paris. Before Jefferson Airplane and even the invention of the airplane. Before other great American monuments like Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial.

Now it’s just lying there — not quite dead. Dormant is more like it.

It was called the “Italian Swiss Agricultural Colony” founded in 1881 by an enterprising Genovese immigrant and one-time grocery clerk Andrea Sbarbaro, who bought a couple of thousand acres of sheep grazing land, planted vineyards and established a utopian wine cooperative that became America’s most important winery. He even christened his unincorporated town “Asti” after the Piedmont’s wine center.

For Sbarbaro the colony was a way for Northern California’s 19th century wave of Italian immigrants (mostly Piedmontese, Ligurian, Tuscan and Italian- speaking Swiss) to thrive in the New World.

In its first years, the colony focused on growing grapes for San Francisco wine merchants planting Zinfandel, Charbono (Bonarda), Riesling, Grenache and “Burgundy”. These were followed by cuttings sent from Italy— of Nebbiolo, Grignolino, Barbera and Sangiovese— planted in bush-trained vines without American rootstock (added only at the turn of the century after Phylloxera plagued the vineyards.

With a dramatic drop in grape prices, the colony was pushed to make its own wine and built its first winery in time for the 1887 harvest.

Sbarbaro then turned the colony into a productive and promotional tsunami.

He built the world’s largest wine cistern holding 500,000 gallons—inaugurating it with 200 invitees from San Francisco society who danced to a brass band inside the tank that had held its popular “Tipo” red wine sold in Chianti-like fiaschi.

In the early 20^th century, the colony was exporting to the world and collecting international medals. In 1909 it hired French Champagne master Charles Jadeau to elevate its “Golden State Extra Dry Champagne”.

Pre-Prohibition, the colony produced millions of gallons of wine out of nine California wineries, one of the largest capacities in the world. Sbarbaro became a vociferous campaigner against Prohibition, penning a brochure on “Temperance vs. Prohibition” with letters from “American Consuls, the Clergy and Other Eminent Men.”

Sbarbaro died three years into Prohibition, after selling his interest to his partners.

During the 13 years of Prohibition, the colony converted from a wine producer to a seller of grapes and dried grape brick sets for home winemaking (allowed up to 200 gallons per year.).

In his book “Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The birth of Italian winemaking in California” (2012) the Italian historian, Simone Cinotto lays out a nuanced case for how Italians came to dominate the California wine industry.

Much of it had to do with Piedmontese entrepreneurs, social networks and credit in a community that was a kind of ethnic bridge between American protestant society and the masses of swarthy southern workers.

And while Prohibition killed off many established wineries, it proved a boon to Italian-American viticulture, which had a natural market in the millions of poorer Italians concentrated in the east coast cities where they worked as laborers.

Piedmontese brothers Ernest and Julio Gallo got their start growing grapes at the time. Similarly, the Mondavis launched into wine after Cesare Mondavi, an immigrant from the Marche who worked in iron ore mining Minnesota was selected by his community to go select grapes to bring back from California.

Two years ago, on a book research trip in Northern California, I found my way inside the old buildings of the colony. There in the old, dark wood-paneled tasting room inside the chocolate-colored chalet headquarters were hung tattered, framed photographs of the colony’s glory days including a celebration of the first post-Prohibition barrels being loaded onto a train at the Asti rail spur—as wine was served by women wearing the colony’s Alpine uniform

Above the great wine cistern. Sonoma County Library Archives.

Ironically the end of Prohibition marked the end of the lighter European style dry wines championed by the colony and a decrease in wine consumption for the stronger drink.

In the book Legacy of a Village: The Italian Swiss Colony Winery and People of Asti, California, (1999) author Jack W. Florence Sr. wrote:

Not only did the market shrink following Prohibition, but the type of wines demanded by the marketplace had changed dramatically. The dry, light wines of Sbarbaro’s day were a thing of the past…Americans wanted high-alcohol wines. And they had to be sweet. Such wines, typically eighteen to twenty percent alcohol, could be made by adding brandy to wines whose fermentation had been stopped….

Through the rest of the 20^th century Italian Swiss Colony changed hands between growers’ syndicates and alcohol conglomerates. In the post war years the colony became bulk producers and marketers of trendy fortified wine cocktails like “Angelica,” “Golden Muscatel” and “Silver Satin.” In the 1960s, the colony with its unforgettable but cheesy branded television advertising (“That little old winemaker, me!”) was a household name. And then it kind of disappeared, overtaken by new waves of California wine. In 2015 it was purchased by its one-time rivals E & J Gallo.

When I visited in late winter 2024, I met its longtime caretaker, Italian-Irish-American Jeff Collins, son of a retired San Francisco firefighter.

“When you work here you feel like you’re working hand in hand with history,” Jeff told me in a gentle voice that was full of awe. “What this place did and what the people did was amazing.”

“But,” he fell into a whisper as he shook his head, “now, it’s all unknown.”

Today, occupying little of its massive production space, it’s used to make mostly Gallo brands like Orin Swift, Ravenswood and Souverain wines.

“The whole concept was to find a place—that happened to be a sheep ranch in Cloverdale where through sweat equity these Italian and Swiss-Italian immigrants could get their piece of the American dream.”

In the office’s old steel cash vault, Jeff showed me some mementos: The largely evaporated bottle of 1893 Mouton Rothschild, the antique wines labelled “Asti Brand California Grignolino” and “Italian Swiss Colony California Barolo.”

California Grignolino?!

Jeff me led through a door onto the lot where we passed an old series of concrete buildings with keyhole arch tops emblazoned with one single set of tall, faded letters that stretched their length reading: “Golden State Extra Dry Champagne Grand Prix.”

“This is the place that put California on the map,” Jeff said proudly. “A lot of early victories got buried with Prohibition.”

“All the major Italian families important to the Sonoma County wine industry started here,” he went on, reeling off names like Pastori, Seghesio and Foppiano.

I checked out the famous wine cistern topped by a crown-shaped sculpture of Russian River stones. (It’s been used since the 1970s as a water tank for the winery sprinkler system.) as well as Sbarbaro’s own Villa Pompeii built in 1902 as a replica of Pompeii’s splashy frescoed House of the Vettii.

“I’ve worked the graveyard shift here many times, and wandered around in the dark, and I’ve slept in the Villa Pompeii after evenings when it was best not to drive,” Jeff said. “I’ve never seen any ghosts. But there’s a sense here of what happened—you can feel it.”

Even in the broad daylight of a Friday afternoon the sense of history is palbable.

I don’t have any insight as to what the future holds for Italian Swiss Colony, but this could and should be America’s greatest wine history museum with a big emphasis on the immigrants who made California wine country.

There’s a lot of work to do. Done right, it would restore to this part of the world the historical dignity it deserves.