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

Wed Mar 7 16:11:45 EST 2007

All I can think of for the moment is Homer and his frequent reference to the
 "wine-dark sea".

In news story this morning on the radio, it said the Gallo boys got their start
in winemaking from a recipe they found in the public library. 
Finnegan 

-----Original Message-----
From: halvard at earthlink.net
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 10:46 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] RIP Ernest Gallo (1909-2007)

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 

= 
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
________________________________________________________________________
AOL now offers free email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070307/7672e64e/attachment.html