Wine comes to mind when dining at Italian, and French, restaurants, more so than with other cuisines. With the exception of some inexpensive sandwich and by-the-slice pizza joints, wine is, and has always been, an important part at Italian restaurants in this country – with the possible exception of the dark days of Prohibition, though even then at many, or most. This is because wine was a fundamental, and often needed component, of the daily table of the Italians who emigrated. Wine has been drunk throughout the Italian peninsula, and almost wherever grapevines grew in Europe, for well over a couple of thousand years as an activity of daily life. Largely because the “consumption of wine in the main European winemaking countries was part of the everyday diet largely because it was an important part of the caloric intake necessary to perform work activities,” noted an academic survey, A History of Wine in Europe, 19th to 20th Centuries.
That expectation for wine extended to life in America for those coming from Italy, even the calories provided by it was no longer as needed. Viewed almost as a liquid dish, wine had always been served at meals in Italy and continued in the new country. “Wine is food as well as drink to the Italian people,” as a piece in the New York Daily Tribune observed in 1904. It was on the table in Italy and was always found at Italian restaurants in the new country, even if the wine might not have been made nearby as in the home country. That wine served in American restaurants might have been imported from Italy or, more so, shipped from California, which was cheaper.
Though wine was expected by the Italians arriving on the shores, the eventual home-grown customers were less versed in the fruits of the vine. Wine was not part of the culture of the United States as it was in the wine-producing countries of Europe. In the U.S., for most of its history until recent decades, wine was the province of the more well-to-do and more sophisticated, as wine was not a widespread agriculture product and not nearly as ubiquitous. Wine was a staple for Italians, somewhat of a luxury for Americans.
Before Prohibition…
The wine offerings at Italian restaurants were rather limited compared to today in the years leading up to Prohibition, and well afterwards, for that matter. Most were humble table d’hôte establishments with a significant portion of the clientele the recent arrivals from Italy, until recently, peasants or laborers for whom wine was not much more than a requisite part of the meal. These customers were certainly not that fussy about the wine, as long as it was mostly palatable. Wine was almost necessarily included in the price at Italian table d’hôte restaurants, and all Italian restaurants then had a table d’hôte option. Though these have long gone out of fashion in favor of the a la carte menus, table d’hôte was a common type of restaurant and option before the Second World War where a multi-course meal, with no or a very limited of choices, was served at a fixed price.
A New York paper reporting about Italian restaurants in 1905 wrote that the wine “is mainly from California” and “often served with seltzer.” About a decade later, at the popular Buon Gusto in San Francisco, a customer was “served a pint of good table wine” as part of a six-course dinner for fifty cents – a feast for all of $16 in 2024 currency – and this was typical throughout San Francisco, New York and elsewhere.
As the grape varieties in the eastern part of country would not yield an acceptable product, that table d’hôte wine and all the most inexpensive wines came from California, sometimes shipped in bulk and bottled at the restaurant. Those might be around 40 cents, less than $10 in 2024, if purchased by the bottle or quart. The nicest domestic bottlings like Tipo, from Italian Swiss Colony in Asti, California, were a $1 a bottle at restaurants, around $30 today.
The wines that were imported from Europe were a little sturdier than the young wines that most of the immigrants had consumed at home. These had to last the trip and some additional lag before consumption, and more was to be made from exporting the better wines. These were from the more well-established wineries and regions: Asti Spumante, Barolo and an earlier spelling of Nebbiolo, Nebiolo, which was sometimes spumante, from Piedmont; Chianti in a couple hues from Tuscany; and the once-famous Lacrima Christi from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius – that in red, white, and sparkling in both red and white. The better Italian restaurants also served a fair number of wines from France, Germany and sometimes Spain. These imported wines were usually identified by the negociant rather than the producer, unlike today. Renganeschi in Manhattan had about forty wines on its list in 1916, the noted Guffanti’s, about seventy, each ranging from about nine or ten dollars to $130 in 2024 dollars, the most expensive being from Champagne, labels that are still popular today, Veuve Clicquot, Charles Heidsieck, Pommery. The Champagne region has always found a home at the nicest Italian restaurants, as in the nicest restaurants almost anywhere.
During Prohibition…
Though Italian restaurateurs thought Prohibition ridiculous and a serious threat to business, nearly all carried on, the popular Gonfarone in lower Manhattan being an exception, shuttering at its onset with the inability to serve wine legally. Wine was still served in most, though, if not so legally. Wine continued to be made, largely by non-professionals, with grapes being shipped from California to points east for manufacture. This home winemaking was not actually lawful; it’s illegality was just not enforced, and local municipalities sometimes even issued permits for it. The demand for grapes, especially from Italians, for this created a boom in grape growing causing an increase in acreage devoted to it by over 23,000 acres in California from the advent of Prohibition through 1924 and peaking in 1926. By mid-decade, the country was consuming about 150 millions gallons of the amateurs’ output. That often ended up in the dining rooms of Italian restaurants; likely not having to travel very far. The most popular grape traveling to the eastern cities was the thick-skinned, attractive and dark-juiced Alicante Bouschet, that made a mediocre wine, at its best, usually worse, as wines were also made after the initial press. But it was wine.
And the wine was available. A news service sketch of lower Manhattan in 1929, nearly a decade with Prohibition, describes the area around Eighth and Fourth streets with “Italian restaurants where the wine, if young, is still wine.” Around that time in Chicago, a guidebook describes that the “obscure little restaurants and other similar places all over town, and some not so obscure, that have about as much respect for the Eighteenth Amendment as the eminent Mr. Capone has,” so that “you ought at least to find Dago Red. In case you're more fortunate, however, and come upon a wide assortment of table wines.” Joe Marchetti of the Como Inn, also in the Windy City, recalled years later: ”We had a lot of great years during Prohibition. You could get a glass of wine if you had to have one. What`s an Italian meal without wine?”
There was some risk in this, but the rewards seemed to outweigh these by a ways. At least two of the most well-known and highly regarded Italian restaurants in Manhattan were successfully raided by Prohibition agents to some notoriety. Guffanti’s, the first time in early 1922 when agents were able to purchase a quart of wine for a very steep $5. A certainly better bottle of Tipo red was $1 before the Volstead Act. A couple of years later, agents found alcohol there valued at an estimated $100,000 – that’s $1.6 million in 2024. In 1930, a squad of Prohibition agents, search warrant in hand, descended on Leone's – eventually known as Mamma Leone’s – “during the peak of the dinner rush-hour…seized $5,000 worth of wines, whiskies and liqueurs, and arrested Joseph Leone and his brother Celestine, two of the three proprietors, and three waiters,” and startling customers, “many to hurry away, some leaving their dinners untouched.” That wine and other intoxicants were served was widely known and somewhat protected as “admission to the restaurant is by card only” and it was recognized that Leone’s “numbers among its patrons some of the best known professional people in the country.” The raid on Leone’s was caused by a complaint by its neighbor, a Methodist church. Leone’s later purchased the church’s property, demolishing it for expansion in the 1940s. As for Guffanti’s proprietor, Joseph Guffanti, he died in 1929 with an estate valued at a million dollars, not all it from the proceeds of the restaurant.
A great many throughout the country still felt the need for some alcohol when out for an evening meal during the 1920s and into the 1930s. “Prohibition, with its lackluster speakeasy cuisine, had led many diners to investigate small foreign restaurants,” according to Michael and Ariane Batterberry in On the Town in New York, their historical survey of dining there. And those foreign restaurants were largely Italian, both in New York and elsewhere. Somewhat ironically, for such a wine-inducive cuisine during Prohibition, “as their prices remained within reason, the popularity of these little restaurants was cemented permanently by the Depression,” that carried on after drinking became legal again.
After Prohibition for many years…
The misguided experiment that was Prohibition help to destroy the domestic wine industry and also help to alter, ruin, American palates about wine. The wines made during those years were with far less skill than before and later, largely in basements and warehouses, not in wineries. It was also nearly entirely red. Vineyards in California were devoted to lesser grapes like the Alicante Bouschet – there was not much Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Chardonnay planted, with only 7,000 acres of white in the state by the early 1930s – and the taste of wine consumers was toward the inexpensive fortified wines, the poor person’s spirits. These were sold at a ratio of five to one when alcoholic beverages became legal again. Most of those with more disposable income drank mostly cocktails. Just after Prohibition, Americans consumed just over a quart of wine per person. In Italy, 24 gallons were consumed per person – that’s over 90 times more than Americans drank on average. Then the French, who were at their thirstiest at almost 40 gallons and continuing a spree that seemed to begin with the Armistice. It was not until 1967 did the per capita wine consumption in the U.S. hit one gallon. After repeal, three-quarters of the wine was sold in just five states: California, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan, all with large Catholic populations. And American’s were consuming wines that still largely sweeter at that point, not the best accompaniments to the dinner.
Italian restaurants began to stock wines again legally in the 1930s, sometimes including those sugary- and different-tasting wines likes Virginia Dare. The lists resumed similar outlines to that before 1920, with better lists in New York and San Francisco, as before, but generally shorter. Wine offerings might not have returned to the breadth of those pre-Prohibition years until maybe the 1980s at most Italian restaurants. Americans still were not big wine drinkers for decades. Piero Selvaggio commented about the early days of his landmark Valentino restaurant that “the few people that drank wine took us by surprise.” It was still the days of cocktails. The order was usually “the martini…in the 1970s that was what people drank with a meal…three of them was standard,” something much more American than Italian. And not the most ideal complement to the food.
Things would eventually improve concerning wine at Italian restaurants.
Renganeschi's Saturday Night by John Sloan, 1912 - Art Institute of Chicago
That expectation for wine extended to life in America for those coming from Italy, even the calories provided by it was no longer as needed. Viewed almost as a liquid dish, wine had always been served at meals in Italy and continued in the new country. “Wine is food as well as drink to the Italian people,” as a piece in the New York Daily Tribune observed in 1904. It was on the table in Italy and was always found at Italian restaurants in the new country, even if the wine might not have been made nearby as in the home country. That wine served in American restaurants might have been imported from Italy or, more so, shipped from California, which was cheaper.
Though wine was expected by the Italians arriving on the shores, the eventual home-grown customers were less versed in the fruits of the vine. Wine was not part of the culture of the United States as it was in the wine-producing countries of Europe. In the U.S., for most of its history until recent decades, wine was the province of the more well-to-do and more sophisticated, as wine was not a widespread agriculture product and not nearly as ubiquitous. Wine was a staple for Italians, somewhat of a luxury for Americans.
Before Prohibition…
The wine offerings at Italian restaurants were rather limited compared to today in the years leading up to Prohibition, and well afterwards, for that matter. Most were humble table d’hôte establishments with a significant portion of the clientele the recent arrivals from Italy, until recently, peasants or laborers for whom wine was not much more than a requisite part of the meal. These customers were certainly not that fussy about the wine, as long as it was mostly palatable. Wine was almost necessarily included in the price at Italian table d’hôte restaurants, and all Italian restaurants then had a table d’hôte option. Though these have long gone out of fashion in favor of the a la carte menus, table d’hôte was a common type of restaurant and option before the Second World War where a multi-course meal, with no or a very limited of choices, was served at a fixed price.
A New York paper reporting about Italian restaurants in 1905 wrote that the wine “is mainly from California” and “often served with seltzer.” About a decade later, at the popular Buon Gusto in San Francisco, a customer was “served a pint of good table wine” as part of a six-course dinner for fifty cents – a feast for all of $16 in 2024 currency – and this was typical throughout San Francisco, New York and elsewhere.
As the grape varieties in the eastern part of country would not yield an acceptable product, that table d’hôte wine and all the most inexpensive wines came from California, sometimes shipped in bulk and bottled at the restaurant. Those might be around 40 cents, less than $10 in 2024, if purchased by the bottle or quart. The nicest domestic bottlings like Tipo, from Italian Swiss Colony in Asti, California, were a $1 a bottle at restaurants, around $30 today.
The wines that were imported from Europe were a little sturdier than the young wines that most of the immigrants had consumed at home. These had to last the trip and some additional lag before consumption, and more was to be made from exporting the better wines. These were from the more well-established wineries and regions: Asti Spumante, Barolo and an earlier spelling of Nebbiolo, Nebiolo, which was sometimes spumante, from Piedmont; Chianti in a couple hues from Tuscany; and the once-famous Lacrima Christi from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius – that in red, white, and sparkling in both red and white. The better Italian restaurants also served a fair number of wines from France, Germany and sometimes Spain. These imported wines were usually identified by the negociant rather than the producer, unlike today. Renganeschi in Manhattan had about forty wines on its list in 1916, the noted Guffanti’s, about seventy, each ranging from about nine or ten dollars to $130 in 2024 dollars, the most expensive being from Champagne, labels that are still popular today, Veuve Clicquot, Charles Heidsieck, Pommery. The Champagne region has always found a home at the nicest Italian restaurants, as in the nicest restaurants almost anywhere.
During Prohibition…
Though Italian restaurateurs thought Prohibition ridiculous and a serious threat to business, nearly all carried on, the popular Gonfarone in lower Manhattan being an exception, shuttering at its onset with the inability to serve wine legally. Wine was still served in most, though, if not so legally. Wine continued to be made, largely by non-professionals, with grapes being shipped from California to points east for manufacture. This home winemaking was not actually lawful; it’s illegality was just not enforced, and local municipalities sometimes even issued permits for it. The demand for grapes, especially from Italians, for this created a boom in grape growing causing an increase in acreage devoted to it by over 23,000 acres in California from the advent of Prohibition through 1924 and peaking in 1926. By mid-decade, the country was consuming about 150 millions gallons of the amateurs’ output. That often ended up in the dining rooms of Italian restaurants; likely not having to travel very far. The most popular grape traveling to the eastern cities was the thick-skinned, attractive and dark-juiced Alicante Bouschet, that made a mediocre wine, at its best, usually worse, as wines were also made after the initial press. But it was wine.
And the wine was available. A news service sketch of lower Manhattan in 1929, nearly a decade with Prohibition, describes the area around Eighth and Fourth streets with “Italian restaurants where the wine, if young, is still wine.” Around that time in Chicago, a guidebook describes that the “obscure little restaurants and other similar places all over town, and some not so obscure, that have about as much respect for the Eighteenth Amendment as the eminent Mr. Capone has,” so that “you ought at least to find Dago Red. In case you're more fortunate, however, and come upon a wide assortment of table wines.” Joe Marchetti of the Como Inn, also in the Windy City, recalled years later: ”We had a lot of great years during Prohibition. You could get a glass of wine if you had to have one. What`s an Italian meal without wine?”
There was some risk in this, but the rewards seemed to outweigh these by a ways. At least two of the most well-known and highly regarded Italian restaurants in Manhattan were successfully raided by Prohibition agents to some notoriety. Guffanti’s, the first time in early 1922 when agents were able to purchase a quart of wine for a very steep $5. A certainly better bottle of Tipo red was $1 before the Volstead Act. A couple of years later, agents found alcohol there valued at an estimated $100,000 – that’s $1.6 million in 2024. In 1930, a squad of Prohibition agents, search warrant in hand, descended on Leone's – eventually known as Mamma Leone’s – “during the peak of the dinner rush-hour…seized $5,000 worth of wines, whiskies and liqueurs, and arrested Joseph Leone and his brother Celestine, two of the three proprietors, and three waiters,” and startling customers, “many to hurry away, some leaving their dinners untouched.” That wine and other intoxicants were served was widely known and somewhat protected as “admission to the restaurant is by card only” and it was recognized that Leone’s “numbers among its patrons some of the best known professional people in the country.” The raid on Leone’s was caused by a complaint by its neighbor, a Methodist church. Leone’s later purchased the church’s property, demolishing it for expansion in the 1940s. As for Guffanti’s proprietor, Joseph Guffanti, he died in 1929 with an estate valued at a million dollars, not all it from the proceeds of the restaurant.
A great many throughout the country still felt the need for some alcohol when out for an evening meal during the 1920s and into the 1930s. “Prohibition, with its lackluster speakeasy cuisine, had led many diners to investigate small foreign restaurants,” according to Michael and Ariane Batterberry in On the Town in New York, their historical survey of dining there. And those foreign restaurants were largely Italian, both in New York and elsewhere. Somewhat ironically, for such a wine-inducive cuisine during Prohibition, “as their prices remained within reason, the popularity of these little restaurants was cemented permanently by the Depression,” that carried on after drinking became legal again.
After Prohibition for many years…
The misguided experiment that was Prohibition help to destroy the domestic wine industry and also help to alter, ruin, American palates about wine. The wines made during those years were with far less skill than before and later, largely in basements and warehouses, not in wineries. It was also nearly entirely red. Vineyards in California were devoted to lesser grapes like the Alicante Bouschet – there was not much Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Chardonnay planted, with only 7,000 acres of white in the state by the early 1930s – and the taste of wine consumers was toward the inexpensive fortified wines, the poor person’s spirits. These were sold at a ratio of five to one when alcoholic beverages became legal again. Most of those with more disposable income drank mostly cocktails. Just after Prohibition, Americans consumed just over a quart of wine per person. In Italy, 24 gallons were consumed per person – that’s over 90 times more than Americans drank on average. Then the French, who were at their thirstiest at almost 40 gallons and continuing a spree that seemed to begin with the Armistice. It was not until 1967 did the per capita wine consumption in the U.S. hit one gallon. After repeal, three-quarters of the wine was sold in just five states: California, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan, all with large Catholic populations. And American’s were consuming wines that still largely sweeter at that point, not the best accompaniments to the dinner.
Italian restaurants began to stock wines again legally in the 1930s, sometimes including those sugary- and different-tasting wines likes Virginia Dare. The lists resumed similar outlines to that before 1920, with better lists in New York and San Francisco, as before, but generally shorter. Wine offerings might not have returned to the breadth of those pre-Prohibition years until maybe the 1980s at most Italian restaurants. Americans still were not big wine drinkers for decades. Piero Selvaggio commented about the early days of his landmark Valentino restaurant that “the few people that drank wine took us by surprise.” It was still the days of cocktails. The order was usually “the martini…in the 1970s that was what people drank with a meal…three of them was standard,” something much more American than Italian. And not the most ideal complement to the food.
Things would eventually improve concerning wine at Italian restaurants.
Renganeschi's Saturday Night by John Sloan, 1912 - Art Institute of Chicago
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