Looking backward into the future

Wines & Vines, May, 1992 by Al Cribari

Also there was a great picture of Max Goldman and Bert Silk, among others, attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Enologists at Santa Barbara; my how we age.

Well, another great picture of Ed Mirassou, Congressman Sisk (of Fresno), Don McColly, and Otto Meyer with a beaming Lyndon Johnson (May, 1967). Again I say, we would wait a long time for a similar picture of a current governor, president or even a dog catcher! Such are the ups and downs of this industry.

Also on the same page, Marvin Sands and Robert Meenan of Canandaigua show off the new labels for my old friend, Virginia Dare. We, at Guild, had just franchised Sands and Company to bottle and market Virginia Dare under a royalty agreement. At last contact, the ole 'gal was doin' ok. Lots of luck to her.

One of the cover stories is "What happened At Annual Bottlers Meeting." I quickly turned to this report as I remember it rather well (Bob Ivie was a speaker). Nowhere in the report is there much of a hint of the things to come, i.e., the demise of the bottler within 10 years; table wines were now creeping up on desert wines saleswise (4.5 million gallons to 6.0 at latest count) and the typical bottler could not handle bulk table wines successfully. However, Guild had a large surplus of dessert wines and the bottlers were very helpful in solving this problem. At one time, we (Bob Ivie, Abe Silk and I) were moving 1 million gallons of bulk wine per month. As I look back, the sale of this surplus wine was timed perfectly -- a year or so later, the market may not have been able to absorb it so easily. Certainly not so quickly. Bob made a good decision.

As for the bottlers, all their chief execs are either gone or in retirement except for John Bardenheier, Marvin Sands and Louis Finnochiaro, and their world is gone with them.

"Controlled Fermentation" is the title of a wonderful article in this May '67 issue. A most provocative article. While it seems to raise more questions than it answers, it was designed to do just that. Unfortunately, no one seems to have picked up the ball and I think that the industry is the worse for it. By the time I was to have retired, I firmly felt that we would be much further along in the use of fermentations to give the kinds of wines that we wanted -- such as the use of "ferments" to give us new and unusual and pleasant bouquets to some of our wines (as, for example, what the molds do for cheeses and other products). But we don't seem to have made much progress. Wonder why?

We have another "gadget" mentioned in an all-too-brief article in the January '92 edition. The 'Spinning Cone Column.' I know nothing of it but if it produces a dealcoholized wine as delicious as the current near beers are to the real brew, then I think we have something we need badly.

The May, 1972 issue is not only a bit slim (36 pages) but also, believe it or not, has almost nothing of interest for me to write about -- or, as Winston Churchill would say, nothing of interest about which to write. (Yep, even we amateurs can think of ways to fill up a page.)