Label This is a UC Davis wine label project. You can see cool old wine labels and help make it easier to search!
Maynard Amerine, a professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis for nearly four decades, is widely considered to be the driving force behind the post-Prohibition wine industry in California. The over 5,000 labels he collected tell a story of the global wine industry from the 1800s through the 1950s.
from the Sacramento Bee
Today, his labels are stashed at the Peter J. Shields Library on the Davis campus. Anyone can see them online by visiting the Label This project whereby the public can help university officials develop a database so the Amerine collection some day – it’s hoped by year’s end – can be searched by keywords, such as “Chateau Latour,” “chardonnay” or “Napa.”
Visitors to the site can browse casually through the randomly arranged labels or join the university’s efforts to transcribe everything on each label to help develop the database, which university authorities see as benefiting historians, sommeliers, vintners and others eager to get a handle on the development of the wine trade.