It's here! My new book: The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine
Visit my website: www.corkjester.com

The Importance of Being Ernest
  (And Julio)  

            The neon-green-and-pink striped socks I’m wearing are all the rage in Paris, London and Rome. But you can’t buy them here, because they’re made by a company called Gallo.

As far as America’s Gallo Wine Company is concerned, this country ain’t big enough for two roosters. Carefully patrolling the US market, they’ve block a range of products including salsa, beer, rice, T-shirts, poker chips and Thoroughbred racehorses from taking the Gallo name in vain.

Gallo makes or imports one out of every four bottles of wine Americans drink. They also export to 90 other countries. Two and a half million bottles roll off their lines every day. Family patriarch Ernest Gallo died this spring at 97, worth about $1.2 billion.

            The Gallos were grape farmers since back in the 19^th century. When Prohibition put other growers out of business, Ernest’s father thrived; sending grapes back east for private winemaking. But Repeal left him in debt, and, apparently, despair. One morning he went into the kitchen and shot and killed his wife, and then himself. Ernest and his younger brothers Julio, 17, and Joseph, 12, were left to fend for themselves.  

The older two borrowed money and started a winery. Spurring each other on, Julio would try to make more wine than Ernest could sell, while Ernest worked to pile up more orders than Julio could fill. "We don't want most of the business,” Ernest was fond of saying, “We want it all." To this end he won shelf-space by aggressively under-pricing the competition, even giving wine away to capture new markets.

If he didn’t get his first wish, he aced another goal: to become “The Campbell’s Soup of the wine industry.” Their first big success came in 1957 with Thunderbird, the cheap, fortified wine named after a car. An instant hit in the “misery market,” Thunderbird paved the way for fine beverages such as Ripple, Night Train and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.

If these are not well known as Gallo brands, it’s to keep them from tarnishing their next mega hit, Hearty Burgundy. King of red jug wines, it was dubbed by the LA Times in the 70’s, “The best wine value in the country today." Hearty Burgundy and Mountain Chablis were followed by other low-brow successes like Carlo Rossi Wines and Bartles & Jaymes coolers.

Not content being top rooster in the screw cap ghetto, Gallo began its bid for respectability. They began buying up local competitors and better quality foreign wineries as well as launching Gallo of Sonoma, known in the industry as a “super-premium” brand, which basically means a step above, well, Gallo.  

Basic laws of branding dictate you must never dilute your image. Rolls-Royce doesn’t dabble in compact cars, and you don’t buy your mink coat from Target. Given Gallo’s firm place in the bargain aisle of America’s brain, Gallo of Sonoma should not have worked.

Except Ernest was not one to leave things to the vagaries of the market place. He preferred hands-on control. By the mid-sixties, Gallo owned glass factories for bottles, aluminum plants for caps and a trucking company for distribution. To be sure, when they strongly suggested their wholesalers drop all non-Gallo brands the Federal Trade Commission stepped in. But suggesting a little Gallo of Sonoma with the usual mega order was not beyond the pale.  

Generous political contributions to both parties helped smooth over other speed bumps. In 1978, a California amendment saved the company millions by allowing them to spread inheritance taxes over several years. Later, Congress delayed an increase in Chilean wine imports, while passing increased funding for a program that netted Gallo millions of dollars to promote its wines overseas.

It’s hard to imagine the American wine landscape without Gallo. They contributed enormously to developing vineyard and winemaking technology, as well as funding lesser-known projects, like a research center on the effects of alcohol on the brain. If Robert Mondavi deserves credit for introducing Americans to good wine, Gallo can be thanked for getting us drinking wine at all.

But don’t even think about messing with the name. For 800 years, the "Gallo Nero," or black rooster, has been the symbol of Italy’s Chianti Classico region. But you won’t see those words on American-bound bottles. A housewife and mother, with a website offering Italian ceramics in traditional patterns, "Gallo Verde," "Gallo Rosso" and "Gallo Blu,” was charged by Gallo attorneys with trademark infringement and dilution as well as unjust enrichment.

"I understand that Gallo means 'rooster' in Italian," the lawyers explained, "However, Italian is not the official language in the United States.”

Perhaps E & J Gallo’s finest litigation hour was in 1986, when they sued their younger brother Joseph for attempting to use his family name on a line of cheeses. Joseph’s countersuit claimed he’d been deprived of his rightful one-third of the winery, but it was dismissed and the brothers died estranged.

By now Ernest has no doubt discovered you can’t take it with you, which is a shame, because he’d probably really appreciate a pair of these socks. I’ve heard the ground can get kind of toasty where he’s going.

Order The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine