Italian Swiss Colony (wine)
Italian Swiss Colony was a nineteenth- and twentieth-century American wine company and brand. Based in Asti, California, Italian Swiss Colony was at one time the leading wine producer in California.
In 1881, Andrea Sbarboro founded an agricultural colony at Asti (named for Asti in Italy), primarily focused on grapes. Sbarboro's intent was to establish a profitable enterprise which would provide work for the many Italians who had migrated to San Francisco (although there were at first some Italian Swiss from Ticino, thus giving the colony its name, it soon became an entirely Italian-American enterprise.) The corporation had originally been organized to allow the workers to eventually buy ownership, but this never developed, and it remained a normal joint-stock company. In 1887, a collapse in grape prices forced the company to construct a winery and begin wine production itself.
Key personnel in these early years, besides Sbarboro, were Charles Kohler, Paolo de Vecchi, and Pietro Rossi. Rossi led the company to develop its own agencies to sell directly to eastern markets; soon after the wine was being sold in Europe, South America, and Asia. The huge wine cistern (capacity 500,000 U.S. gallons (1,900,000 L)) that Sbarboro had had built became a tourist attraction. By 1905, the wines had won medals at various international competitions. By 1910 the company owned over 5,000 acres (20 km2) in various holdings in the Central Valley.
As the movement for prohibition of alcohol in the United States grew, Sbarboro became a leading spokesman for wine and temperance, but lived to see the beginning of prohibition on January 16, 1920.
The Italian Swiss Colony operation (then owned by National Distillers) was acquired in 1953 by Louis Petri of Petri Wine (founded in 1886). Petri shepherded the growth of Italian Swiss Colony as a mass-market brand; wine was shipped in tankers to be bottled in New York. Television ads featuring Ludwig Stössel (voiced by Jim Backus; yodeling by Bob Oates) with the catchprase "The little old winemaker – me!" appeared regularly on American national television. (Dean Martin and others recorded a song titled on a parody of that line, "Little Old Wine Drinker Me".)
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