Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (Nation of Nations)

Amazon.com Price: $23.00 (as of 06/05/2019 09:34 PST- Details)

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Description

Winner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Book Design

 
From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italians have shaped the history of California wine. More than another group, Italian immigrants and their families have made California viticulture one of The united states’s most distinctive and vibrant achievements, from boutique vineyards in the Sonoma hills to the massive industrial wineries of the Central Valley. But how did a small group of nineteenth-century immigrants plant the roots that flourished into a world-class industry? Used to be there something particularly “Italian” in their success?
 
In this fresh, fascinating account of the ethnic origins of California wine, Simone Cinotto rewrites a century-old triumphalist story. He demonstrates that these Italian visionaries were not skilled winemakers transplanting an immemorial agricultural tradition, even supposing California did resemble the rolling Italian countryside of their native Piedmont. As an alternative, Cinotto argues that it Used to be the wine-makers’ get right of entry to to “social capital,” or the ethnic and familial ties that bound them to their wealthy wine-growing heritage, and not financial leverage or direct enological experience, that enabled them to develop any such successful and influential wine business. That specialize in one of the crucial most important names in wine history—particularly Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallos—he chronicles a story driven by ambition and creativity but realized in a complicated tangle of immigrant entrepreneurship, class struggle, racial inequality, and a new world of consumer culture.
 
Skillfully blending regional, social, and immigration history, Soft Soil, Black Grapes takes us on an original journey into the cultural construction of ethnic economies and markets, the social dynamics of American race, and the fully transnational history of American wine.

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