Wine Bricks

Section 29 of the Volstead Act was the farmer's price for supporting Prohibition. Under that clause he was permitted to continue making his own applejack or blackberry wine on the legal fiction that it was a non-intoxicating fruit-juice for home consumption. Soon shrewd vine-yardists seized upon Section 29 to supply the wine wants of city folk. Virginia Dare Vineyards, Inc. promised to ship a grape juice that would ferment into champagne in the home and thus be quite legal (TIME, Aug. 6, 1928). Seeking new markets for their grapes, seven California co-operatives in 1929 merged as Fruit Industries, Inc., joined the California Grape Control Board, obtained and shared a $10,000.000 loan from the Federal Farm Board, hired as their counsel Mrs. Mabel Walker Wille-brandt who knew every wrinkle of the Prohibition Law from her eight-year service as Assistant Attorney General. Last year Fruit Industries, on Mrs. Wille-brandt's advice, brought forth a liquid grape concentrate called Vine-Glo ("Just Pull the Bung") for urban vintners (TIME, Nov. 24). A client is supplied with a keg of nonalcoholic concentrate which Vine-Glo agents put down in his cellar. They dilute it, tend it for 60 days. By then it becomes wine of about 15% alcoholic content. Prohibition Director Woodcock explained again & again that he could prosecute only if an intent to violate the law was shown and intent was very hard to prove.

Two months ago an independent California concern went a step farther toward simplified wine making. They put on the market a patented grape concentrate in solid form about the size of a pound of print butter. Known as Vino Sano, selling at $2 each, these nonalcoholic wine bricks were flavored sherry, champagne, port, claret, muscatel, et al. Instructions came in the form of warnings against dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, adding sugar, shaking daily and decanting after three weeks. Unless the buyer eschewed these processes, 13%, wine would be produced. Vino Sano's "Don'ts" were designed to prove that the intent of each sale was not to violate the law.

Last week U. S. Dry agents, spurred by complaints of the Anti-Saloon League, raided Vino Sano's sales office on lower Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, where a land office trade was being done. Arrested were the manager and two salesmen; seized were 3.000 bricks.

Thus was started what promises to be a major court test of Section 29 and the flourishing business of urban wine-making in the home. Karl Offer, national manager of Vino Sano, wired Attorney General Mitchell from California that he alone was responsible for the wine bricks and wanted to be included in any forthcoming indictments. He also sought the legal assistance of Mrs. Willebrandt, Vine-Glo's counsel, in working up a defense for his employes, but that lady enigmatically replied: "Sorry, but I never take Prohibition cases."

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