Wine History for Sale

Posted by Tom Wark on Jan 3, 2005

Wine Business Monthly is one of, if not the best, wine trade publication in America. Each monthly issue always carries a number of interesting articles on the state of the trade (they’ve even published me, but don’t hold that against them).

The most interesting thing in the latest issue of Wine Business Monthly, however, is not an article. It is a small classified ad in the back of the magazine. It reads:

What are you looking at? If you are a wine lover and have a bit of the history buff in you, then you are looking at a gold mine.

For decades, Wines & Vines Magazine was the trade bible of the California wine industry. It still exists and is still a vital publication. William Heintz is certainly the pre-eminent historian of the wine industry in Northern California. He has been at it for decades. His works include “California’s Napa Valley: 160 Years of Winemaking” and “Wine Country: A History of Napa Valley-1938 to 1920.”

One can only imagine the impressive nature of this collection of wine history being offered for sale. The Wines & Vines collection alone would easily tell the blow-by-blow story of how an industry went from shipping “Sauterne and Barbaresco” to New York in tank cars hauled by train to producing some of the finest Cabernet and Syrah in the world.