Word: wine
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Christmas Day a few bottles of wine belonging to Graziano Taite of Jersey City disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Graziano got very angry, and in the resultant brawl a giant Negro called "Smiling Joe" Thomas was stabbed in the heart. Smiling Joe, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds, was rushed to a hospital at Kearny, N. J., where doctors cut through his chest wall, opened the pericardium or heart envelope so that the heart lay visibly beating before their eyes, and delicately extracted a three-inch piece of broken knife blade. They took care...
...when Franklin Roosevelt began promising the country light wines & beer, California wine-men formed a Grape-Growers League (now the Wine Institute) and hired a tiny, hard-working Scotsman, Harry Arthur Caddow, as secretary-manager to help repair the damage of the Prohibition years. Today California makes 97% of U. S. wine and the Wine Institute represents the producers of 75% of California's wine. Little Harry Caddow, still the Wine Institute's secretary-manager, has a hard job getting his temperamental French, Italian, German, Swiss, Hungarian, Armenian and Scottish members to hang together. Biggest Institute wineries...
This vast gallonage obviously cannot be consumed by any small group of connoisseurs. It must have a mass market. This fact does not lessen pungent little Harry Caddow's contempt for those who still disdain California for French wine. He does not like to think about cosmopolites who know the best French vintage years and can afford to buy chateau-bottled wines. Recently he exclaimed: "It makes the skin roll up your back like a window shade...
...California, he says, the weather is always equally good so the vintage years are always the same. When he is accused of plagiarizing French wine names he claims indignantly that Burgundy is as much a descriptive word as whiskey. He also enjoys pointing out that when the disease Phylloxera virtually wiped out European vineyards between 1870 and 1880, the only thing that saved them was grafting European grape vines on the root stock of the wild vine of California...
...even Mr. Caddow, however, would maintain that a cheap young run-of-the-wine-press California claret is the equal of Château Mouton Rothschild 1929. What he does think and many sound wine critics concede is that in its class California wine does not have to bow to the snobbish claims of foreign wine. And even connoisseurs are no longer so outraged as they were once when they heard cheap foreign wines selling at $1 or so a bottle compared with California wine selling for $1 or so a gallon. In short much of the vin ordinaire...