There is a certain age group who will ask firstly, "Who the hell is Leon Adams?" And they would be right to do so. If ever there were a group of writers who routinely fails to vaunt and promote the classic literature of their genre, wine, beers, and spirits writers are absolutely the worst. We writers constantly think we are inventing the genre. Wine writers of bygone eras are rarely celebrated - a few - maybe Kermit Lynch's ADVENTURES ALONG THE WINE ROUTE (published in 1990) is the sole book I can think of that so many people read that's older than 20 years old. Yet there many that deserve reading. Kevin Zraly's WINDOWS ON THE WORLD WINE COURSE does count, because he's updated it every 3-5 years.
But, Zraly's ULTIMATE WINE COMPANION (published in 2010) attempted to recall the great writers of the past. (Full disclosure, I was involved in the project). Who were some of these greats? Hugh Johnson o Robert M. Parker, Jr. o Jancis Robinson o Lettie Teague o Alexis Bespaloff o Neal I. Rosenthal o Oz Clarke o Gerald Asher o Joshua Wesson o Andrea Immer Robinson o Molly Chappellet o Jay McInerny o Robert Mondavi o Francis Ford Coppola o Baron Philippe de Rothschild o Joy Sterling o Michael Broadbent o Clive Coates o Kermit Lynch o Tom Stevensono Joseph Bastianich o David Lynch and Burton Anderson o Frank Prial o Matt Kramer o Karen McNiell. The book was a success, but hardly made a dent in reviving interest in classic literature of the genre. Zraly, as recently as 2023, cited Adams in an interview with the Times-Union of Albany.
But what of poor Leon Adams? Ignored again. In 1995 his death was national news - carried by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA Times, and a multitude of other major newspapers.
Leon Adams - A Bio
According to Wikipedia, Leon David Adams was a much revered American journalist, publicist, historian and co-founder of the Wine Institute. In 1958, Adams book Commonsense Book of Wine was published, which sought to bring table wine into everyday life in the United States. His book Wines of America, published in 1973, is considered the "most thorough work on the subject," specifically regarding the California wine industry.
Leon Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1905. He was raised in Sonoma County. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley. As a young man, he worked for various news organizations, including the McClatchy News Service, the News and the Bulletin in San Francisco, and wrote stories on Prohibition and its repeal.
''I was a newspaper reporter,'' Adams told Frank Prial, ''and they wanted to make me an editor. I decided that working with wine would be a hell of a lot more fun.''
"As a professional denizen of San Francisco newspaper city rooms, he observed the ravages of alcohol at close range. As a wine enthusiast and a Californian, he knew the advantages of wine as a drink of moderation," continued Prial.
''I looked on America's involvement with wine as a great experiment even then,'' Adams recounted. ''I wanted to write the wine story, to conduct this great experiment of introducing it to the American diet, to see if we could make this a temperate nation. I still think of it as an experiment, a great laboratory experiment involving hundreds of millions of people.''
''As Prohibition was winding down, the wine people were all asleep,'' Adams told Prial. ''The distillers were well-organized; so were the brewers. But they thought of themselves as alcoholic-beverage producers. The wine people considered themselves agricultural.''
Adams advocated for farm winery laws which were passed in many states during the 1970s and 1980s. These laws helped grape growers open wineries and sell their wines through wholesale and retail. He founded the Society of Medical Friends of Wine, which brings together doctors for frequent wine tastings. He was also an advisor the US Department of State, who then oversaw the wine industry and a Grand Counselor to the Academie de Vin de Bordeaux.
Adams was also an avid fisherman and worked with IBM on tracking fish migration. "Adams, who had a lifelong love for fishing, also wrote the best-selling “Striped Bass Fishing in California and Oregon.” He was also the author of two other books on wine and the ghost writer for numerous wine industry autobiographies," recalled Dan Berger. He worked in California and lived in Sausalito. He died in San Francisco on September 12, 1995.
In his lifetime, Mr. Adams was honored by the California legislature and the governors of Michigan and Washington for his book's influence on the wine industry in North America. The fourth edition of Wines of America was published in 1990.
Today, the Viticulture & Enology Department of UC Davis (the nation's pre-eminent wine school) offers the Leon D. Adams Scholarship. According to the institution, "Many considered Adams to be the 'Dean of American wine writers' (A title bestowed on him by Frank Prial, an opinion instantly adopted by many). Adams penned two seminal volumes on wine: Wines in America and The Commonsense Book of Wine. He firmly believed that Americans should drink wine with meals, and further believed that America would not become of age as a wine drinking nation until wine became as cheap as milk."
The Leon D. Adams Research Scholarship was established in 1985 by the members of the Society of Medical Friends of Wine to commemorate the leadership provided by Mr. Adams since 1938 in establishing programs of research on the nutritional and therapeutic value of wine. This endowment is to support an outstanding graduate student studying viticulture or enology at UCD.
Changing the Landscape of American Wine
Like Frank Schoonmaker, who helped reshape the nomenclature of wine marketing after World War II, Adams was instrumental in re-establishing the wine industry after Prohibition. Adams was intent on creating a demand for wine in the US. "When Prohibition was ended, Mr. Adams organized the California Grape Growers League in 1934, which later became the Wine Institute, and in 1937 formed the Wine Advisory Board under the aegis of the State Department of Agriculture," reported SFGATE.com. The Wine Institute was the trade organization that represents California’s wine industry. "He founded the board's research program at several universities that tested and verified ancient health prescriptions of wine...."
"In 1936, with the late attorney Jefferson Peyser, Adams crafted the state’s first quality wine standards, a code of practices and wine type specifications. He then had them enacted into a state law that still stands," wrote Dan Berger in the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Adams was a seminal figure in the change from drinking Prohibition bathtub gin to what he liked to call "the civilized use of wine as a food with meals." From 1934 to 1954 Adams held various posts establishing and promoting the modern wine industry in California and elsewhere. He began his writing career in 1954 after leaving the board.
His importance in the scene was hard to simplify. He was part of America's post-war awakening to fine cuisine. He promoted American wine at the same time people like James Beard and Julia Child. He was both a contemporary, and loomed as large on the landscape as either of them.
Indeed, David Strauss wrote in Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934–1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) that "two California [Wine and Food Society] chapters tied themselves so closely to the state’s wine industry that they risked becoming unofficial public relations agents for the producers. The link between chapters and producers was the Wine Institute, run by Leon Adams, which California growers had established; Adams and his close friend Maynard Amerine, an oenologist at the University of California, Davis, were both members of the WFSSF. Together with wine producers, they assured donations of California wine to many chapter dinners and wine tastings; in the process they succeeded in securing the unofficial support of some members of the [Wine & Food Society San Francisco] WFSSF for their ongoing campaign to spread the consumption of California wines."
"In 1939, Adams and Amerine urged members of the WFSSF, who were doctors, to launch the Society for the Medical Friends of Wine. Modeled on the Médecins Amis du Vin, a French gourmet society, it was populated by doctors who advocated the moderate consumption of wine as a health measure; however, despite its French origins, the Society almost always served California wine," wrote Strauss. "After each dinner, a speaker presented research on the effects of wine on the human body and related topics. In the near future, Adams and Amerine hoped to organize similar societies for engineers and lawyers in other cities, but they never implemented their plan." Adams was a key advisor to the Wine & Food Society, hoping to link American wine, specifically California wine, to fine cuisine. It worked.
The History of Wine In America
Want to know the history of wine in New York? Maryland? New Jersey? California? Leon Adams knew it and wrote about it. No one doing serious research on the history of American wine can claim to have done so without consulting his work - no matter where in the US wine is being made.
"Leon D. Adams, considered by wine aficionados and the wine industry to be the seminal wine historian in the United States in the 20th century," reported the New York Times. "Mr. Adams was a prolific author of books, articles and pamphlets about wine, particularly North American wine...."
According to the Times, he was most widely known for "The Wines of America" (McGraw-Hill), a history and survey of wine and wineries throughout the country. It was first published in 1973 and was up-dated through four editions.
"I started working at Benmarl Vineyards in either 1972 or 1973, doing vineyard work and processing grapes when the day was over. I remember when Leon Adams came to visit us at Benmarl, around 1973, to see the Miller Family i.e. Mark and Dene Miller, and their sons Eric Miller and Kim Miller," recalled winemaker and grape historian Stephen Casscles. "As I remember (again, I was new and in 9th grade), Leon was a person who wanted to hear what others had to say about their vineyards and winery operation. It was big doings when Leon came to visit Benmarl. I think that Adams was one of the first wine writers who was receptive to making any kind of wine from any kind of local grapes, be they Northern Native American, Muscadines, and French-American hybrids, so he was not a vinifera snob. I also got the impression that he was open to the making and consumption of many different wine styles."
"In his travels, Leon covered the newly re-emerging wine regions in New York State, New Jersey, Ohio, New England, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and those smaller wine regions of the Mid Atlantic States, and the American South that were becoming re-vitalized," explained Casscles. "For many of us "The Wines of America" was our tour book and introduction to a Nationally based wine industry. I remember many of the winemakers from other parts of the US who came to visit us at Benmarl had a copy of the Adams' book with them and used it as a guide for the wineries to be see and people to meet. It was our Michelin Guide and helped to frame and introduce many of the people and places that would ultimately become the leaders of our national wine industry, esp. on the East Coast."
As Casscles pointed out in conversation, Adams had no internet to rely on. He assembled his histories by traveling and speaking with local winemakers. There was no cutting and pasting. Adams apraoched it like the newspaper man he was - boots on the ground, shaking hands, drinking wine, talking with locals.
As Prial pointed out in the New York Times, "[B]etween the appearance of the second edition in 1978 and the third, this year (1985), 450 new wineries began production in 32 states and three Canadian provinces. There are those, and they are legion, who say that many of those wineries - indeed, many of the more than 1,000 wineries in this country -owe their existence to Leon Adams."
"With the first edition of his book," said Warren Winiarski, the owner of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, in California's Napa Valley, "Leon gave the wine industry a hard-as-nails, unsentimental look at what was happening nationwide. We were in the dark about wine growing in the U.S. He organized our sense of who was growing what and where."
Prial recounted that Adams had long been "an unflagging supporter of the farm winery bills" across the country. "Half a dozen years or so ago, there were only 19 states with farm winery laws. Now there are 39 and more are pending," Prial pointed out in 1985.
''With these new laws and with new wineries popping up regularly, the climate is much different than it was 70 years ago,'' Adams told Prial. ''What makes the wine business strong these days is the fact that agriculture is behind it. Agriculture is what gets the farm-winery bills through opposition from the liquor retailers and other groups. Wine growing is agriculture, and agriculture is always stronger than liquor.''
''Nebraska is considering one, for heaven's sake,'' Adams commented back then, ''and Kansas just got one.'' When Adams called to congratulate one of the leaders of the successful farm-winery-law campaign in that state, the man retorted, ''Why hell, Leon, I only did what you told me.''
He was unapologetic in his opinions. “Anyone who tries to make you believe that he knows all about wines is obviously a fake,” he once said. He also is credited with saying, “All wine would be red if it could.”
A New Appreciation
Of all the "wine writers" (and Adams was surely more than that), Leon Adams deserves a more revered place in the annals of American wine. He helped invent the modern wine industry.
* He helped re-established and grow the American wine industry - first in California
* He helped create the modern wine industry as an organizer and spokesperson
* He advised numerous states, by promoting and helping states pass their separate Farm Winery Acts
* He promoted wine as a sensible part of the culinary experience
* He wrote the history of American wine
Each time you toast wine anywhere in America, and we are at the zeitgeist, you should be mentioning Leon Adams. Now, you have no excuse.
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