[New-Poetry] RIP Ernest Gallo (1909-2007)

[Halvard Johnson]

Surely this calls for a memorial round of cheap wine poems.  
Thunderbird must have
a little niche in American/Canadian poetry somewhere, doesn't it?

Hal

=====


March 7, 2007

Ernest Gallo, 97, Founder of Winery, Dies

By FRANK J. PRIAL
Ernest Gallo, who with his brother Julio started a winery seven  
decades ago that now sells one of every four bottles of wine that  
Americans drink, died yesterday at his home on Modesto, Calif. He was  
97.

“He passed away peacefully this afternoon surrounded by his family,”  
said Susan Hensley, vice president of public relations for E.& J.  
Gallo Winery.

Somber, secretive and seemingly humorless, with little more than a  
high school education, Mr. Gallo — working closely with his brother,  
Julio — created a wine empire that became one of the world’s largest.

While Julio, who died in an auto accident in 1993, preferred the  
winemaking, Ernest had a head for business. His entrepreneurial  
skills, instinctive command of marketing and distribution, and his  
compulsive need to be the best at what he did, created the large  
company that he controlled at the time of his death.

And the company, entirely family controlled, was indeed large.  
Industry analysts estimate that Gallo produces some 80 million cases  
of wine a year, which is about 220,000 cases or 2.64 million bottles  
every day. The company reportedly owns 10,000 acres of vineyards in  
California and buys grapes from hundreds of independent growers.

According to Forbes magazine, Gallo had sales of about $980 million  
in 2005 with a net profit of $44 million. In 2006, according to  
Forbes, Ernest Gallo was No. 283 on its list of the 400 richest  
Americans, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.

The company also imported wine from France, Italy and New Zealand  
and, last year, according to one estimate, exported some seven  
million cases of wine to some 85 countries.

Survivors include Mr. Gallo’s son, Joseph; five grandchildren; and  
three great-grandchildren. Mr. Gallo’s wife, Amelia, died in 1993. A  
son, David, died in 1997.

According to the legend, the two brothers, virtually penniless farm  
boys from the Central Valley of California, scraped together $5,900  
and started their winery in a rented shed in Modesto. It was 1933 and  
repeal of Prohibition was weeks away. Ernest was 24, Julio 23; the  
two knew nothing about winemaking, according to the story, and relied  
on a pamphlet from the Modesto Public Library to explain their trade.

But in fact, they were from the second generation of an Italian  
immigrant family long immersed in the wine business.

Ernest Gallo was born on March 18, 1909, to Giuseppe Gallo, known as  
Joseph, and Assunta Bianco Gallo, who was called Susie, in Jackson,  
Calif. The father, and his younger brother, Michael, had a business  
buying wine from small wineries and selling it in bars in Oakland and  
San Francisco. As early as 1906, they operated as the Gallo Wine  
Company.

Their mother’s family, the Biancos, were successful winemakers, and  
when their maternal grandfather died in 1916, he left 9,000 gallons  
of red wine ready to be sold.

In the 1920s, Ernest’s parents bought a farm near Modesto and like  
their neighbors, began to grow grapes. Their fruit was loaded on  
railcars and shipped east (private winemaking was still allowed  
during Prohibition). The railheads in Eastern cities, from Boston to  
the Carolinas, from Pittsburgh to Cleveland and Buffalo, were  
dominated by thugs who took a cut of whatever was sold. By the time  
he was 17, Ernest was traveling with the grapes to ensure the family  
received top dollar.

At first, Prohibition meant prosperity for the growers, but the  
Depression ended that. Ernest’s parents were saddled with a  
nonproductive farm and apparently heavily in debt. On the morning of  
June 21, 1933, in the kitchen of the farmhouse, Joseph Gallo shot and  
killed his wife and then himself, leaving three sons, Ernest, Julio,  
and their younger brother, Joseph, then 12.

That was also the year that Prohibition was repealed and the two  
older brothers, with $5,900, most of it borrowed from Ernest’s mother- 
in-law, opened a winery.

Hundreds of wineries were starting, but as Ernest said years later:  
“We could do anything anyone else could do, not because I was  
brilliant or well-educated, but because I was willing to devote as  
much time and energy as was necessary, regardless of the sacrifice.”

“We could afford one tractor,” he said, “and there were times when I  
drove it for 12 hours, then turned it over to Julio who drove it for  
another 12 hours.”

The brothers were successful from the start, but in those days were  
no match for industry giants like Petri, Cribari and Italian Swiss  
Colony.

But the company’s introduction of Thunderbird wine would change that.  
In 1957, the Gallos developed the brand, a concoction of inexpensive  
fortified white wine with added citrus flavors.

It was named after the Ford sports car and was aimed directly at “the  
misery market,” according to “Blood and Wine,” Ellen Hawkes’s  
unauthorized biography of the family. By the end of 1957, Ms. Hawkes  
reported, Gallo was making 32 million gallons of Thunderbird.

By the mid-1970s, the Gallos realized that the market for cheap table  
wines and the sweet fortified wine market would not sustain the  
company. America was moving upscale in its wines and Ernest insisted  
Gallo go along. Over the next 20 years. Gallo moved into the fine  
wine market.

Ernest himself, aside from his service on the Wine Institute, the  
industry’s promotional arm, usually kept apart from the rest of the  
wine business. Only in his last years did he begin to appear at wine  
events, often in the company of Robert Mondavi, another winemaker,  
who had long urged him to become more open to the trade and to his  
customers.

-----


"I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're
  cheaper than models and they don't move."
			--Georgia O'Keefe

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org

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