July 12, 2017 @ 1:58 pm
Big Rick Hardly Strictly Wine Blog
The other day I asked Bob Pellegrini, owner of his eponymous winery, what date to affix to his family’s entrance into the wine game. He said his grandfather, Nello, and grandfather’s brother, Gino, told him the family grape brokerage started in 1925, but he added that chances are somewhere along the line, wine was being made and sold before that.
The brokerage business, he said, “sent grapes to the produce terminal in San Francisco, which had a crush pad, where you could buy grapes and they’d crush it for you, into your own containers … [During Prohibition], it was legal for the head of a household to make 200 gallons of wine for home consumption. The story was that my grandfather had 200,000 gallons for sale on Jan. 1, 1933.”