I'll drink to that: Prohibition repeal turns 75

But many shut up shop.

At the start of Prohibition there were about 700 wineries operating in California. By its end there were about 40, said Fredrikson.

Some credit Prohibition with giving organized crime a stronger foothold, though Pinney says that's a hard question to answer definitively. Some unfortunate people died during the period from drinking bad liquor or methyl (wood) alcohol.

It's highly unlikely that Prohibition itself would make any kind of comeback. Many groups are devoted to helping people cope with alcohol abuse, but even a group as big as Alcoholics Anonymous says it takes no stance on issues such as alcohol bans, a spokeswoman said, focusing instead on helping people.

In the end, the Depression helped hasten the end of Prohibition.

“It was a sort of no-brainer. 'Of course, we'd better get back to producing legal alcoholic drink instead of letting bootleggers make all the money,'” said Pinney.

Unfortunately, a depression is no time to start up a capital-intensive industry like the fine wine business.

Wineries that had survived the dry years by selling grapes already had switched to tougher-skinned fruit that traveled better, but made inferior wines.

Meanwhile, all that Chateau de Basement cooked up at home hadn't exactly stoked appetites for refined wines

So what poured out from California after repeal were sweet, fortified wines that went by the labels "port" and "sherry," though they had little in common with the fine vintages produced by Portugal and Jerez, Spain.

“Table wine almost disappeared for the first decade after repeal,” Pinney said. “It took a long, long time to alter that.”

It wasn't until the late '60s, about the time fine wine champions like Robert Mondavi were emerging, that quality domestic wines made a comeback.

For today's wine country visitors, Prohibition is just a memory to be glimpsed in the crumbling ruins of "ghost wineries," that folded under the triple threat of a late-19th century outbreak of vine disease, Prohibition and the Depression.

But the past is much more concrete at the Regusci Winery where the 1878 Occidental-Grigsby winery that went bust in the Depression still stands. This is a sturdy "ghost" made of walls two-feet thick and still in use for barrel storage.

At dusk, the setting sun gilds the building's elegant facade, picking out the lettering of the old winery name etched in the hand-cut lava stone.

Regusci likes the idea that winemaking is still going on here.

“It's kind of taking this piece of property back to where it originally was," he said, "except it's legal.”

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