“I went down to the Modesto Library and inquired of the librarian if she had any books on winemaking. And with her help, I looked through the library and there were none. After all, this was just on repeal of Prohibition, and it wasn’t a very popular subject. Then she thought, and “Well,” she said, “down in the basement there’s a stack of pamphlets. There might be some there from before Prohibition.”And she said, “Why don’t you go down there and see if there are any?” I did go down in the basement and went through an enormous stack of pamphlets and found two of them that were published by Professor Frederic T. Bioletti of Davis. One of them was entitled “The Fundamentals of Fermentation” and the other “The Fundamentals of Clarification.”
So this was what we needed, and I came up and I told her I had found these, and she said, “Well, you’re welcome to them.” So this was the beginning of our knowledge of the wine business — how to make wine. My brother and I then proceeded that year to make wine in conformance with these two pamphlets.”
From the just released interview Ernest Gallo gave to the California Wine Industry Oral History Series in 1969. Gallo died last week and only after his death was the interview allowed to be made public.
From those 2 pamphlets the Gallo’s created a wine empire. One of every 4 bottles of wine sold in this country is a Gallo wine.
Somewhere Andrew Carnegie is smiling. To know that a citizen of our country went into a free library and found the information needed to start a business and eventually create an empire would make the industrialist proud.
This is the argument for and the essence of libraries.