Hope you had a nice weekend. This is a new Now I Know, but if it seems familiar to you, it’s because I made a quick reference to it in a bonus fact more than a decade ago. (If you remember that, congrats — that’s impressive.) — Dan

Another Brick in the Wall of Prohibition

On January 17, 1920, just after midnight, the United States entered a period in its history now known as “Prohibition.” In an effort to end all sorts of societal ills, the states ratified a Constitutional Amendment that allowed the federal government to ban the production, transportation, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from sea to shining sea.

But of course, people still wanted to drink — and found ways to do so. Many of the workarounds were illegal and hardly all that innovative: backroom bars sprouted across the country, booze was smuggled into towns and cities near and far, and of course, people made their own alcohol in their backyards and bathtubs. But some ways around the ban were a bit more creative — and in at least one case, legal.

That solution, literally, started with a "grape brick,” like the one seen below.

The law that banned alcohol was called the “National Prohibition Act” or, more commonly, the Volstead Act, named for the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Andrew Volstead. But the law had a few loopholes, most notably Section 29. Per Wikipedia’s editors, “Section 29 of the Act allowed 200 gallons (the equivalent of about 1000 750-ml bottles) of ‘non-intoxicating cider and fruit juice’ to be made each year at home.” Initially ‘intoxicating’ was defined as exceeding 0.5% alcohol by volume, but the Bureau of Internal Revenue struck that down in 1920, effectively legalizing home winemaking.” Unfortunately for the home vintners out there, that was easier said than done. Most people don’t have a large supply of grapes at the ready, and the amount of grapes — and time and effort — it takes to create a bottle of wine is typically prohibitive (pardon the pun) to such an endeavor.

To make things even more complicated, the grape growers couldn’t help you do this either — at least, not explicitly. According to the Napa Valley Register, after the Volstead Act became law, many “vineyard owners tore out their vines and replaced them with orchards” — apples had lots of uses beyond making booze, but grapes did not. But some tried to stick it out. Per the Register, these growers “recognized the continuing marketability of grapes, since the sale and transport of fresh or dried grapes were not banned under the new amendment — although the law explicitly stated that if the shipper knew that the final buyer was going to use the grapes for making wine then both buyer and seller could be charged with conspiracy.” Section 29 allowed your customers to make wine from your grapes, and there was nothing under the Act that prevented you from selling them the grapes to do so. But if you knew what your customers were going to do, you ran the risk of running afoul of the law. You couldn’t ask, and you absolutely couldn’t instruct them as to how to turn your grapes into wine.

As a result, the vast majority of people didn’t bother entering the home winemaking biz.

But by 1929, some companies came up with a workaround. As Time Magazine noted in the summer of 1931, “an independent California concern went a step farther toward simplified winemaking. 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.” They weren’t the first company to do that — another one, called Vino-Glo had been doing the same for a couple of years — but both Vino Sano and Vino Glo had the same problem. The intent of the bricks was clear: you can use this to make yourself a bottle of wine or two — if you knew what to do. And therein was the conundrum. If customers didn’t know how to turn the brick into booze, they wouldn’t buy it. But if either included instructions for how to make the brick into an intoxicating drink, the government would have evidence of them violating the law.

So the two companies did something else: they told their customers what not to do. Time continues: “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.” Newspaper articles, strategically placed by grape concentrate sellers, issued similar warnings; here’s an example. And, in the case of the brick above (via the Daily Bulletin), the packaging tells consumers to“prevent fermentation, add 1/10 percent benzoate of soda.” But as the Daily Bulletin pointed out, “there’s no evidence of a rush for benzoate of soda in those days.”

Ridiculous? Yes, but apparently effective — for a while, at least. Some government officials tried to shut down Vino-Glo shortly after it came out in 1929, but the assistant U.S. Attorney General at the time, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, rejected the arguments. In 1931, Willebrandt resigned from the government and ended up taking a job with Vino-Glo’s parent corporation. Likely out of embarrassment, in October of 1931, the government ended up bringing an action against a Vino-Glo seller and won: the court decided that these “warnings” were (obviously) instructions in disguise, and barred the practice.

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More About Prohibition

Today’s Bonus fact: Prohibition’s most exploited loophole may have been the medicinal one: doctors could, and often did, write prescriptions for alcohol to patients who warranted such treatment. And Winston Churchill was probably thankful for that. On December 13, 1931, Churchill was struck by a car while visiting New York City. The future British Prime Minister had already developed a reputation for his penchant for drinking (although perhaps undeservedly), so his doctor made sure he was in good spirits (sorry!). The doctor, Otto Pickhardt, wrote him a note, seen here, saying that Churchill should be allowed access to alcohol without limit: “the quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters.”

From the Archives: Hoofing It: Want to run from the Prohibition police? Wear shoes that make you look like a cow.

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And thanks! — Dan