The Fizz #86: Elaine Chukan Brown brings a historic perspective to The Wines of California
Wine educator and author Elaine Chukan Brown and I speak about their new book, The Wines of California, and how the history of California impacts our wine industry today.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Elaine Chukan Brown about their journey through the wine world and their upcoming book The Wines of California. Elaine was kind enough to send me a review copy of the book, which I absolutely devoured. If you know me, you know I have a vast wine book collection overflowing from multiple strained bookshelves. Thanks to the intersection of wine with culture, history, farming, geology, environmental science, and art, reading about wine never gets old. The Wines of California is an instant classic, moving beyond the standard recounting of grape varietals and winemaking trends. Elaine’s book speaks in depth to California history, telling a complete (and often unknown) story of the state of California wine.
In this interview, Elaine and I speak to their upbringing, their wine awakening, and the in-depth process of researching for The Wines of California. We touch on the Indigenous history of California wine, the impact of the farmworker movement, and the post-Prohibition era.
Margot: I definitely want to dive into the book, but I'd love to get to know you a little bit first. Was wine a part of your life when you were growing up?
Elaine: Not at all. I grew up in Alaska. My family migrated between two parts of the state. I'm the youngest of three. By the time I was born, my parents had decided to settle in Anchorage. That allowed us to go to a mainstream school, but with the family all together. Then like a quarter or a third of the year, we would migrate to the western coast of Bristol Bay, where my mom's side was from. Our family commercial fished for salmon. Before I was born, my parents had gone to Indian boarding school in the state. The generation before them—you would actually be taken out of the state to another part of the territory, but by the time my parents were growing up, the boarding schools were within the state, but a totally different area. For Native people at the time, it was hard to get work, so my parents actually worked in some of the schools.
They would have to move for jobs when my sisters were growing up. The goal had been to get to a place where they could stay and keep their family intact. They had grown up having to leave their family to get an education and they didn't want their kids to have to do that.
Margot: How did you get to a place where wine was interesting to you?
Elaine: It didn't even occur to me at the time, but it was almost like I'd mapped where I was going, but through smells. Alaska is this interesting place because in some ways you would think it's barren. You’d think there's not a lot of plant life, but actually there is a lot of it. It's just tiny. It's almost like wine—when the clusters are smaller, there's more concentration, and so a lot of the plant life actually has these incredible aromas, but the plants themselves might be almost hidden and then first frost changes how they smell completely.
I was always running around smelling things. When I left Alaska, that didn't really work anymore. There are smells in the city, but not in that same kind of way, and not as many and maybe not as pleasant too. The first time I went to a dinner and someone bought a good bottle of wine, I knew you were supposed to smell it first. The second I smelled it, I was like whoa. It was the closest I ever had to that original experience in Alaska. I was like, oh my God, I get it. I now I know why people are so into wine.
Margot: How old were you when that happened?
Elaine: I was in my early 20s.
Margot: How did you get from that point where you first smelled that bottle of wine to knowing this was something that you wanted to make a big part of your life?
Elaine: A few years later, I lived in Flagstaff for almost eight years, and a friend of mine ran the wine bar there. I was still faculty in the university at the time. I'd finish my day of classes and walk up the road to go sit at the end of the bar before anybody else was there. I would go sit with my friend before it got busy and he would pour me stuff. I had this glass of wine and for whatever reason it was shocking to me. I was so pulled inside this glass of wine. It wasn't just the smell. It was like there was this world that I could access through smelling and tasting this wine in a way that I hadn't experienced before. I was like, oh my God, what is this? It was a still red Pinot Meunier from Eyrie. These were vines planted in 1965. It was an older vintage where it really was just the older vines.
Shortly after that bottle, I started doing illustrations and putting them on a blog because I was so compelled that I started illustrating the wines I was tasting. Jason Lett of Eyrie ended up seeing those and he sent my illustrations to the media committee of the International Pinot Noir Celebration, and they invited me as a media guest. The idea that this big event would actually see me as media blew my mind. That's what got me thinking, oh man, I should find out what I can do here.
Margot: That’s amazing. How did you get to a point where you realized that there was space for a new book around California wine and that you were the right person for it?
Elaine: I actually was really skeptical. People would always ask if I would write a book because I have this unique background, and turns out the way that I talked about wine was distinct in the industry, which I didn't know, I just was doing what made sense to me. I've always been like, why would I write a book? I'm not going to write a book so that I've written a book.
Then a friend and I were talking about how people would ask me during my travels what California wine book I recommend, and I realized there wasn't one. The last supposedly complete California wine book came out in like 2011. It was just a digest. Then Jon Bonne’s book came out in 2013, but that's really his perspective on California. It doesn't have a complete set of information about California. My friend would pose this question—why do you think people don't write books about California wine? I would ruminate on it while I was driving between wineries or something. Then finally the publisher of my book asked if I would write a book on California wine.
I decided okay, having it all in one place does actually matter, but that’s not enough. It's supposed to be a wines of California book, right? But it serves its purpose in a way that only I could write it. I put a lot of thought into what would that mean, and when I started to realize I could put farming in a larger context, put history in a larger context, it became fun for me.
Margot: I think that's really eye opening about your book—having history as the front runner instead of it being a winery digest or an understanding from someone's perspective about how the leaders of the industry did this and that, or the wine trends of a time. History at the forefront is really meaningful. To me, the book reads a bit like A People's History of the United States of Wine. It brings out the stories from the folks who really carried the wine industry on their backs and made it what it is, and I really appreciate that.
I want to ask you a bit about the first part of the book. It's an insightful experience to read a wine book that brings in the story of how Indigenous people participated in the building of the wine industry. Have you had that experience of reading about American wine and saying, hey, there's a part of the story that's not being told here?
Elaine: I haven't seen any other book that actually addresses it, except more recently there was Grapes of Conquest, which is about empire and colonization in California's history. That came out after I started working on my book. I think people assume because I'm Indigenous, I wrote an Indigenous chapter and no—it's a hundred years! There's a way that it might have been easier for me to see that because I'm Indigenous, but it's the whole first hundred years of California history. Junípero Serra couldn't have planted all the vines across the southern half of California, right? One guy did not do this. He wasn't growing 160 acres by himself. So what happened there? How did this actually work?
How do we recover erased or covered histories? We avoid it—it's explicitly not in wine books. Even the California history wine books don't even mention that the Indigenous people were connected at all. To get to this, I just read really broadly. I read about the history of California, the history of Spain in North America, the history of colonization on the West Coast. Then I would deep dive into aspects of the broad history and come back out and look at wine books and piece together the timelines, find the connections and then I would see a link. Oh, this happened in California wine when this happened. I would try to find references that would help me see the link and how they interacted.
Margot: That work really comes across. The book brings wine into the broader context of American history. That one hundred year period is really interesting. In 1998, Tara Gomez was credited to be the first Indigenous winemaker in the United States.
Elaine: Yeah, California legislature gave that recognition.
Margot: Why the long gap between Indigenous folks having so much of an impact building the vine growing industry in California and such a long gap to Tara Gomez being credited as the first? Is it a socioeconomic reason or a cultural reason?
Elaine: It's a complex mix of politics and socioeconomics and culture, because by the end of the first chapter, there are barely any Indigenous people left in California, and the ones that are knowingly Indigenous have been isolated to reservations, separated from everyone else, essentially. There were still plenty of other Indigenous people around, but they had to not be seen as that, basically, to survive. Imagine that your entire culture is removed, which means your community of peoples who together create your foodways and your family structures and all of the things, they're all removed. Now there's just a few thousand of you isolated in a place that doesn't have the growing conditions you grew up in, which means the animals you ate, the plants you ate, all the things that you would have foraged and hunted and gathered, they're not there. And actually purposefully not there. You have to figure out how to survive and how to rebuild social connections.
The truth is, with the cultural piece, when you leave the reservation, are you even worth anything? There's this core sense in the United States founding that Native people are not worth anything. The truth is that sentiment is still woven into the fabric of the United States. We tell the story that the culture was founded by the revolution that we wanted our freedom from Britain. But actually the people that wanted their freedom from Britain wanted to create a world that was only for them. They were all the same background, they all had the same values, and the continent was already peopled, but the story is that we found a new land, and could make a world we wanted, which means the founding story is that Indigenous people are not people, they're irrelevant. As Indigenous people today, there's a sense of still grappling with that.
The latent anti-Native prejudice that's still in our culture, still has this kind of seed of thinking that Native people almost aren't real. That's a very long existential answer. Then things start to shift for some Indigenous groups in the United States. They start being able finally to have some kind of income to support their own communities. Well into Tara growing up, that starts to be true for the Santa Ynez Band that she's a member of and and still though, the idea that she would become a winemaker is really unusual. There haven't really been others, she was the one.
Margot: I want to move into the future a little bit, into Prohibition. During Prohibition, grape acreage increased but winemaking knowledge was halted. Do you see any impact from Prohibition on the wine industry today?
Elaine: Yes, I think the structure that California has of winemakers who buy fruit from growers, and that it's almost entirely that way, like that there are estates, but only specific people have them. That's Prohibition's established structure. Of course, there were some growers that weren't winemakers before that. But if you think about that—you go through this complete break, historically, of the winemaking side, but the growing side increases, but they're not making wine. So you've surged forward with this industry of growing fruit and none of them are making wine with it, or at least not beyond for their families. Now all of a sudden you have this new industry that reopens, which is the winemaking, except it's essentially in its infant stage all over again. Now it has to come catch up.
There's a way in which I think in California, it's like the two never quite came back together. You still have this sense that winemakers, most winemakers in California, people are going to hate me for saying this, but most winemakers in California are not actually that connected to the vineyards. Obviously, there are beautiful exceptions, but generally speaking, the link a winemaker has to the vineyard is pretty nascent and just enough to be able to decide when to pick.
Margot: When you talk about that wine making knowledge being halted and some of it being lost, can you help me understand what kind of knowledge you're talking about?
Elaine: In one sense, it's a very simple know how. I think we assume what we do are simply tasks and we can learn them. And if that's all it is, you just pick them up again. Maybe you have this slight learning curve. I think we forget that something like an actual job, where a lot of people interact to make it happen, that's actually a way of life. All of your thinking and your activities are all intertwined, but so are your interactions with other people. Having a wine industry is actually having a culture that you don't simply pick up again, you have to rebuild it.
Margot: Wow, yeah that definitely makes sense—it’s more than just the work. It’s the culture and community. In the book you touch on the farm worker movement and the grape boycott in the 60s. Obviously farmworker issues are still prevalent today with many farmworkers experiencing really unsafe and awful conditions. I think back to the horrible photos from the fires in California a couple years back. Is there any aspect of that history that we can learn from today?
Elaine: Yeah, I think a lot of it. The grape boycott set up the farmworker movement of the 1960s. First of all, it did connect to wine, they were also farming wine grapes, not just table or raisin grapes. A lot of the companies that they interacted with at the time did both, some of them were just wineries and distilleries. It was actually a wine movement, not just a fruit movement. Their activities and the ultimate effectiveness of them, sometimes people toss aside as just a contract question. Oh, they created the right to have a union and for workers to sign contracts and people don't even do that anymore. From that perspective, it's unclear that they were successful because we don't still do the unionizing and contracts for grape workers in that same way. But if you look at the impact of them getting to where we could have legal unionization and contracts for farm workers, the impact is massive and there's a way in which California is far ahead of the game on safe farming practices, anti-pesticides, recognizing organics matters, recognizing people are part of how we get food, not just the one guy asking what safety measures on farms actually look like, asking what safe working conditions for farm workers actually look like.
Like you said, there's a lot that needs to be done still, but until the 1970s, we didn't even say that there had to be water on site for workers. That's how monumental the farm worker movement was! We have to legally offer a bathroom now. Imagine that. Until the 1970s, workers might not even be able to take a break to go to the bathroom. As I point out in the book, we credit Rachel Carson for her book, Silent Spring, and she deserves credit for that book, but her research came from these other women who took a lawsuit against the government, first in history of its kind. The reason the book had effectiveness to change the laws around pesticide use, was actually because farm workers had raised public awareness. It wasn't one person. Rachel Carson connected to this whole network of people that together had an impact big enough that we now know certain pesticides are poison.
Margot: What can we learn from that?
Elaine: When I get into the epilogue of the book we're talking about how there's all these things that are scary now, and we think, oh, my God, we might lose the wine industry. It's certainly the case that businesses are going to go out of business. One of the things I really learned very clearly from working on this book was just how we, as a state, one of the triumphs of California is that we have faced so many devastating challenges and consistently people have paused to assess, come back together, come up with innovative solutions and then move forward—and then they disperse again. I think we have to remember that the history of California demonstrates again and again that when people come together and come up with solutions, it actually changes the world.
The farmworker movement of the 1960s, they were leaders with absolutely no money. They were living in poverty and none of them had a traditional education as we would see it now. One of the huge impacts of the farmworker movement is the recognition that people, uneducated, poor people of color can actually be effective enough to change state and national laws in a way that changes what massive corporations and corporate power are demanding. In fifteen years, they changed the whole system.
Margot: You've been a writer, an educator, you were a philosophy lecturer, you've been an illustrator, you're a mentor, you're constantly traveling. I'm wondering where that continual energy comes from and how do you nurture your interests without burning out?
Elaine: I do burn out sometimes. The thing that keeps me going is a drive toward understanding. Wait, what is this thing? What are you saying to me? How does this work? The whole complex of things I want to understand. What's kept me going is that all of these different things were things I could keep learning through the link to wine. From my perspective, Wines of California covers such a big range of things all in one place and part of what was satisfying about it was, figuring out how to communicate the synthesis of all these things.
Margot: Thank you so much for your time. I’m a big fan of the book, and of your work.
You can pre-order ‘The Wines of California’ – A Revolutionary Journey through California’s Wine Legacy by Elaine Chukan Brown from Academie Du Vin Library. Use the code WINECAL15 for 15% off during the pre-order period. Support your local bookstore by asking them to stock The Wines of California! It’s easy, and helps strengthen your local community of book sellers. Follow Elaine on Instagram to keep up with their work.