The One Sentence in Prohibition That Let Italians Make Wine

Everyone remembers grandpa as the quiet outlaw with a demijohn under the stairs. He wasn't. The wine was legal, and one deleted word is why. When Section 29 of the Volstead Act was first drafted it said "nonintoxicating cider and wine." Dry members of Congress objected, so "wine" came out and "fruit juices" went in, and everyone in the room knew exactly what they were leaving behind. This video follows that one sentence from the drafting room to the California grape trains, into the cellar where your family crushed 40 boxes every October, through the congressman who got himself indicted on purpose to prove the point, past the federal prosecutor who switched sides, and out into a tax code that kept the words "head of a family" on the books until 1978. It also answers the question every Italian American family has been too polite to ask out loud: why grandpa's wine tasted the way it did. That one isn't his fault. It got on a train in California. Enjoyed this one? More Italian American history every week: https://www.youtube.com/@MulberryStreetMemo?sub_confirmation=1 Sources include the Volstead Act text, the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 and Public Law 95-458, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the Heinz History Center oral history collection, the US House of Representatives archives, TIME magazine's 1924 and 1932 reporting, the Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo County, and Daniel Okrent's "Last Call."