Ernest Gallo 1909-2007

It is with sadness that I report that Ernest Gallo has died. I have had my hand on the keyboard and eyeballs on the computer screen all day and was unaware of this event until just now. To paraphrase the CNBC announcement that just played in my background, "Ernest Gallo took a recipe for wine that he found in the Modesto Public Library and turned E & J Gallo into the world's largest winery". That's the embodiment of the American Dream.


Here's how Gallo changed the industry. Gallo was the first wine company to hire and train a sales staff spefically to market its brands in individual markets. For example, let's say I sell Chateau Alan at a retail store in New York. I speak to a rep for the New York distributor if I have questions. That rep also sells 300 other wines form all over the world. He gets Chateau Alan from another company in California who has about 50 different wineries they represent. With Gallo, there's a Gallo salesperson in all markets, who is responsible for Gallo products and that's it and he or she works for Gallo. That's the case a little more often with other large wineries and wine conglomerates, but Gallo was first.

I found this amusing write-up from the James Beard Foundation:

"After the war, Ernest devised a bold new advertising campaign for the company, transforming America's relationship with wine with his famous "lifestyle" billboards and ads. And in 1945, he brought his little winery to national attention by convincing Life magazine to attend a grape crush at the winery (the key selling point was a scantily-clad woman bathing in wine). But Ernest's success was due as much to little things as to big ones. He constantly visited stores across the country that stocked his wine, checking on bottle positioning, displays and sales. (He was, as Anthony Dias Blue of Bon Appétit recalls, once arrested in a tiny town in Texas for lurking in local liquor stores. When he explained that he was Ernest Gallo, the sheriff reportedly replied, "and I'm George Washington," and carted him off to jail). Ernest was tireless-and effective. Between 1948 and 1955, sales rose 400%. He set down his precepts in a three-hundred-page secret marketing "Bible" that the family still uses. He is, Dias Blue asserts, unquestionably "a marketing genius."

Here is the E&J Gallo Press Release.

So, raise your next glass to a wine industry innovator and legend who lived the American Dream to the fullest...