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This video from ReasonTV shows you an interview with Jerome Tuccille about his book 'Gallo Be Thy Name'.

Transcript

Jerome Tuccille on Gallo Be Thy Name Reason TV Nick: I’m Nick Gillespie with reason TV and today I’m very happy to be talking with Jerome Tuccille author most recently of Gallo Be Thy Name the inside story of how a secretive but well connected family rose to dominate the U.S wine market. We’re talking about the Gallo brothers. Jerome: The Gallo family right. The Gallo wine family started Earnest and Julio where the two patriarch I might say that their parents started before prohibition making wine in California they had an uncle who is known as the Alcapone of the west cost he’s name is Michael Gallo they denied— Ernest denied it up until he died about a year and a half two years ago but they were running a wine during prohibition to the Capone mob I think they were doing a public service supplying the public with wine. Nick: Well if nothing else there were a lot of masses that needed Sacramento wines. Jerome: And that was exact, sacramental wine was exempt. Nick: This book I think what’s fascinating about it is that it’s a social history pegged to a family and immigrant family or family of an Italian family with retails where and you’re talking about a product that has come in the past 50 years or the past 60 years to really kind of define and exemplify a very large shift in American sensibilities where we went from maybe having drug and wine ones in a while and beat neck poetry reading to now we love really rarified great tasting wines from all over the world. This is the story of immigration, of commerce of technological innovation of globalization. What was the wine world like before prohibition in America? Jerome: There was a palate for wine in the United States before prohibition back in the 1890s people dressed up to go out, they put on suits and ties and fedoras and they drank with wine. We’ve enjoyed wine in this country since the days of Thomas Jefferson. We tried to grow wine in Virginia and imported wine from Italy and France. Prohibition killed the American palate for wine. It was illegal so it was easier to make beer and gin in your bathtub so this became a beer and whisky drinking country. It took a long time to develop that palate again and the Gallos of course came from Italy where wine an everyday thing, good wine was an everyday affair. They would even think of consuming a meal without having a glass of wine to go with it but unfortunately as they tried to make good wine right after prohibition ended in1933 but there was resistance out there they couldn’t sell it. Julio particularly was the wine maker Ernest was the tough guy in the marketing agent a good salesman. So what do they do to get a niche into the market, they make Thunderbird, all the garbage slot out there big gallons of… Nick: And thunderbird was a sweet fortified wine. Jerome: Yes it was a sweet wine tasted more like port but they actually put lemon in it to cut back on the sweetness. Nick: So I mean they didn’t want to make this wine but they knew how to serve the market. They also made ripple is that right? Jerome: Ripple is another one of theirs. Nick: Boons Farm. Jerome: Boons Farm, Apple wines, they had all kinds of fruit. Nick: By the way we don’t have to stop because I’m having flash backs to my adolescence now but well I mean so the Gallo brothers in a weird way are like you know they are the start of family of people now who drink good wine so of which has made brother Gallo family over. Jerome: Some of which is made by the Gallo family today. The problem for the Gallo’s is that people don’t trust the Gallo label so when they as the youngest generation right now Gina and Matt Gallo the grandchildren of Julio are really making top shelf wines at a low price but people won’t buy it because of the Gallo label so what they’ve done to get around that is they board up high end wineries like martini. Llouis martini fry brothers, they bought good labels from Chile and Argentina and Italy and you won’t see Gallo’s name on them but if you see bottled or distributed in Modesto California that’s a code name for Gallo I mean the Gallo’s own Modesto California. Nick: What’s the large narrative of the Gallo family saga? What’s the gallo family tragedy or epic tale? Jerome: Well it’s not just a biography, it’s also a history a saga of American social history and it’s also a true crime story. The book actually starts with the murder of Ernest and Julio’s parents in Fresno, California. The police covered it up but went down. You know father goes crazy, kills his wife and then shoots himself. The circumstantial evidence has convinced me that it was a mob hit that they owed money to the wrong people so members of the Gallo family have told me that. So there’s the true crime element so from that and from the ashes of prohibition Ernest and Julio come along the first generation Americans and they have the knowledge of wine making which they started, they had a tough time after prohibition because you had to do the right depression but they competed with the likes of Modavi and Sabastiani these were established names of California. Wine making and at some point 10 to 12 years later they actually out competed them. They out competed them by making Thunderbird and by making ripple and later on Boons farm and Bartlett’s and James and all the things that Americans wanted to drink and at that point Julio insisted that let’s get into the fine wine feel then they tried and tried and had a lot of time trouble overcoming that stigma of their early years. The new generation as I mentioned has had a more success in doing it but not as great a success in marketing it. There’s still resistance against that but they’ve also used the political system to further their ends. They were giving a lot of money to the Clinton campaign and they got several bull tax treatment Bob Dole republican called it the Gallo tax amendment so they started giving a lot of money to Bob Dole they actually became his number one political kind of campaign contributors. After that dole shut its mouth and went along for the ride. They tried to keep train lines in the farm once out of the United States they succeeded for a couple of years but then finally the flood gates opened and all of a sudden the real good wines at low course points that are coming in from Australia and else where and so the Gallo’s were smart enough to respond by buying and establishing foot holds in foreign markets to the point where they control maybe 30 labels you don’t know what’s even Gallo. Nick: So this is I mean their family saga is kind of micro chasm or a slice of American life and not like the Godfather and half of Italian-American I feel like I can make unsavory Italian references but I mean there’s a crime at the beginning of a dynasty which then you know goes through tough times becomes entrepreneurial and not just in a business sense but also in a political sense so we get to a point where we are in America where we are all richer, we’re all well connected and we are all more discriminating in our tastes for virtually everything. Jerome: Right, we got great American success story I grew up in a Bronx in a working class neighborhood. My father was a cab driver, my mother’s father owned a bar and a restaurant and the story of people who have come form even more poverty stricken backgrounds than that and gone on to achieve in Gallo’s plays billions has always been fascinating to me that people can pull themselves up. The system allows that, we have a lot of complaints about the government and restrains on Freedom and that’s all true but it’s still possible and are always has been to lift yourself out of the ghettos and go on in and achieve great wealth and great fame. I look at Gallo and I think previous writers have failed to capture him and people who love to hate Ernest Gallo. He was a thug, he was a tough guy but the man was also a genius and I think a lot of people have love to hate Ernest Gallo missed the genius there. You don’t achieve what he achieved without having a great sense of the market place of being a visionary and where cultural trends heading and positioning yourself and out competing some major competition along the way so there was a combination here of thug tough guy and also genius and what I try to do on this book is capture both sides of this man. Nick: Well I want to thank Jerome Tuccille for talking to reason TV about his new book Gallo be Thy Name a rich social history of family business that’s right out the—that tells a lot about America over the past 100 years. Thanks Jerry. Jerome: Thank you.