From Prohibition to popularity

During Prohibition, the Gallos had travelled east by train with their father, Joseph, to Chicago and New York to sell their grapes to home winemakers in marketplaces set up in railway yards, as their neighbors were doing. Post-Prohibition, sweet, high-alcohol wines were the rage across the country, and the Gallos competed by launching brands like White Port. In the late 1950s, they launched a fortified, citrus-flavored wine called Thunderbird, which was 20% alcohol by volume and 80 cents a quart. The advertising jingle went: “What’s the word? Thunderbird!” Targeted at poorer inner-city populations, it later became known as a bum wine.

While the Gallos made cheap wines, they were also innovators, keeping up with contemporary wine companies like Italian Swiss Colony, Guild, and Cresta Blanca with superior technology. They built a modern winery, got rid of bacteria-ridden oak and redwood tanks, installed epoxy-lined steel tanks, introduced aluminum screw caps to replace leaky corks, and even built their own glass factory to produce wine bottles. Today, it’s the world’s largest.

But success, unlike their wines, had often been bitter. Uncle Mike Gallo, Joe’s brother, served time in prison for bootlegging. In 1932, their parents, Joe and Susie, suddenly and mysteriously moved from the family home to a rundown farm, where a year later both were found shot dead. Even more devastating was the death in 1958 of Julio and Aileen’s youngest son, Phillip, who shot himself in his bedroom.

Now it was the mid-60s, and Julio wanted to do something his neighbors and competitors had not done first — make a decent table wine most Americans could afford. At the time, there was no fine-wine industry in America, and most people who drank wine did so for its alcoholic content. The brothers became convinced American adults were ready to have wine with their food. What they weren’t sure about, however, was how to give it to them.

“Some winery executives were allowed to order cases of wine at no charge for their personal use, and Ernest noticed that those who seemed to have more sophisticated tastes requested Gallo’s robust reds,” wrote Ellen Hawkes, author of “Blood and Wine: The unauthorized story of the Gallo wine empire.” But even those wines were anemic compared with what the emerging Napa Valley was producing at higher prices.

Julio set to work, buying expensive grapes from Napa and Sonoma to blend with Central Valley Petite Sirah and his favorite variety, Zinfandel. He also started blending back heartier, more-tannic press wine to give added body. To emphasize the change, the wine was named Hearty Burgundy, even though it tasted nothing like Burgundy’s Pinot Noirs.