The Grape

Sam Picalas made 60 gals, of elderberry wine. It contained 5% alcohol. He drank some, was not intoxicated. U. S. agents seized him. A U. S. court in West Virginia convicted him of violating the Volstead Act, which specifically permits the manufacture of "non-intoxicating cider and fruit juice" for home use. Last week at Richmond the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction, sent Sam Picalas and his elderberry wine back to West Virginia for retrial, with orders that a jury pass on whether or not this beverage was intoxicating in fact.

The effect of this decision, the first of its kind by an appellate court, was to transfer to the U. S. the burden of proving, not that home-made wine contains more than .5% alcohol but that it contains enough alcohol to make a person drunk and hence is outside the "non-intoxicating" clause of the Volstead Act and therefore illegal.

Significant was the decision not only for the U. S. Prohibition Unit but also for U. S. grape-growers, especially in California, who prepare legal grape juice for shipment to urban customers who, in turn, let it ferment naturally to wine. There was one catch: the court ruling covered only home-made wine from raw materials gathered on the homestead, not from materials purchased elsewhere.

While doling out Federal aid with one hand to grape men, with another hand the Government was probing them suspiciously.

Aid. The Federal Farm Board agreed upon a $9,000,000 loan, half from its own resources, half from California banks, to grape and raisin growers to assist them in marketing the 1929 crop. Since Prohibition the grape industry has boomed, vineyards have been doubled, overexpansion has occurred.

Some grape-growing industrialists resent the activity of vineyardists who sell their juice for winemaking. To the Federal Farm Board last week they sent as their representative Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, onetime Assistant U. S. Attorney-General, to explain such "questionable practices," to try to induce the Board to withhold loans to growers who attempt to evade the intent of Prohibition. Farm Board Chairman Legge explained that his Board had nothing to do with Prohibition.

Probe. Prohibition Commissioner James M. Doran reached California last week to see for himself just what the grape industry has become. Since 1920, California's vineyards have increased from 100.000 acres to 173,691 acres. It is Mr. Doran's duty, of course, to discover ways and means to prevent the diversion of legitimate grape juice into illegitimate wine. Last week he was ready to admit that legally it would be very difficult to stop. Politically it is a touchy problem, too. If the wet-voting city winemaker is prosecuted, for consistency's sake so must the Dry-voting country cider & wine men be prosecuted. The hair-splitting decision of the Court of Appeals last week, distinguishing between home-grown and market-bought beverage materials, may contain the basis of a solution.