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California’s Workaround… a Prohibition loophole…
August 3, 2026 by Laura Heilenman · Leave a Comment
When Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920, under the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, American grape growers and winemakers faced a philosophical crisis. Commercial production, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages were suddenly illegal, threatening to wipe out California’s thriving vineyards. Many growers considered ripping out their vines and planting other crops. Yet a crucial loophole in Section 29 of the Volstead Act offered a lifeline: households could legally produce up to 200 gallons of non-intoxicating fruit juices or cider each year strictly for personal home consumption. Demand for wine grapes soared almost overnight as people began crushing and fermenting them themselves, and prices climbed dramatically.
Enterprising producers soon refined this workaround into a convenient product known as grape bricks (or wine bricks). Companies such as Vino Sano (appearing around 1921) and later Vine-Glo compressed concentrated grape juice into solid, shelf-stable blocks that could be shipped anywhere and stored for months. Customers simply dissolved a brick in a gallon of water to create grape juice. The bricks came in flavors that conveniently matched popular wines—port, sherry, burgundy, claret, muscatel, and others—making the intended use obvious to anyone paying attention. An ad for these grape bricks, by the company Vine-Glo, is found in THE CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE for December 8, 1930.
This innovation kept many vineyards alive and even made some growers wealthy during the dry years. The most memorable feature of these bricks was the carefully worded “warning” printed on the packaging. Labels instructed buyers on how to reconstitute the juice and then solemnly cautioned them not to leave the mixture in a cool cupboard for twenty or twenty-one days, not to add sugar in certain amounts, and not to fail to add benzoate of soda—because otherwise the liquid would ferment into wine. These reverse instructions served as a thinly veiled recipe while allowing the sellers to claim they were only providing a legal non-alcoholic product. The wink-and-nod approach worked for years, turning grape bricks into one of Prohibition’s most ingenious (and widely enjoyed) workarounds until court challenges and the eventual repeal of the ban in 1933.