Thunderbird wine:
You won't find mention of Thunderbird at the Gallo company's Web page, or any reference to the companies [sic] roster of déclassé wines: Night Train, Ripple, Boone's Farm. Neither will you find mention of the Gallo company on the Thunderbird bottle, although you will find the helpful advice to "Serve cold." Gallo, with a portfolio that includes such premium wines as Brindlewood and Louis M. Martini, has gone upscale. Never mind Ernest Gallo's famous ”“ and famously downscale ”“ desire to be the "Campbell Soup Company of the wine industry," or the pleasure he took in a New Yorker cartoon in which two connoisseurs enjoyed his products, saying "Mort and I simply got tired of being snobs." E.&J. Gallo has spent a lot of time and money distinguishing themselves in the field of winemaking, and do not care to be reminded of their founder's lowbrow tastes. They want the snobs. . .
The American wine industry, which had enjoyed some inchoate success prior to Prohibition, was decimated in the 14 years that the United States was Constitutionally dry. In truth, this industry didn't earnestly begin to recover until the 1960s. After Prohibition, Americans had developed a taste for hard liquor, and those few remaining wine-lovers who wanted a truly fine wine looked abroad, mostly to France, for their fix. American wines, out of necessity, were fermented grape slurries or fortified ports, their only redeeming featuring being their cheap price. Their market was migrant laborers, street corner drunks, and skid row bottle gangs. Wine drinkers in America were disparagingly called winos, and were, to a great extent, poor and chronically inebriated. Fortified wine had one additional benefit for the chronically broke: It kills your appetite, which comes in handy when you have just enough for a sandwich or a drink. Fortified wines, by the way, are magnificently intoxicating, as the fortification comes from the addition of brandy. A standard bottle of wine usually clocks in at about 13 percent alcohol by volume. Thunderbird is a whopping 17.5 percent.
If all this leads you to believe that Gallo, and other American wine manufacturers, were making their profits by selling unusually potent potables to America's underclass ”“ well, you'd be exactly right. Ellen Hawkes wrote about the marketing techniques for Thunderbird in her book Blood and Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire, claiming that Thunderbird salesmen specifically targeted inner-city and alcoholic purchasers. "According to Fenderson's account, he and his staff 'arranged for street-sampling and Thunderbird parties in colored bars wherever we could,'" Hawkes wrote. "Gallo salesmen recalled that 'street-sampling' was perfected for Thunderbird in the ghetto. Bottles of Thunderbird were left on the backseats of salesmen's cars or were handed out in the neighborhood -- the idea was to give away free samples and saturate the market. Empty bottles of Thunderbird were thrown in the gutters of skid row streets to increase product awareness ”¦"
It must be noted that Hawkes' book has received its share of criticism, and some of her claims must be taken with a grain of salt . . .
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