This biography is shared with permission from Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser, author of Message in the Bottle: A Guide to Tasting Wine. The content is based on a presentation by Ron Merlino, entitled “Prohibition, Suffrage, and Early Women Winemakers in 19th and 20th Century America.”
Born: 19 August 1859, United States
Died: 1946
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The brilliant journalism of Frona Eunice Wait, without whom most of the written history described above would have been lost. Wait was born in the gold rush territory in 1859. Early on she displayed a gift for journalism, landing her first job with the Santa Rosa Republican. Her talents were soon noticed by William Randolph Hearst and in 1887, at age 28, she was hired by Hearst as the first female staff journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers.
Two years later Wait published the first of two seminal books on the California wine industry: Wines and Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine Drinking (1889). It was immediately hailed as a definitive contemporary work on California wine. In writing the book, she interviewed every winemaker she could find, visiting vineyards, cataloguing grape varieties, explaining production methods, and listing the unique accomplishments of each and every vintner and producer. It’s only because of her work that we have such a vivid and accurate picture of what wine in California was actually like at the time. Wait went on to publish a second book on California wine, as well as a book on Spanish wine and several other history works. In 1897 she published a novel, Yermah the Dorado, which many consider to be the very first science fiction work ever written.
With the mention of “ethics of drinking” in the title of her first book, it comes as no surprise that Ms. Wait was an avid anti-Suffragist and anti-Prohibitionist. She actively campaigned against both initiatives. Her pamphlet, 80 Percent of the Women in California Do Not Want the Vote, was printed in 1915 at the height of the resistance efforts to both amendments. The work was immensely popular and reprinted and distributed on the East Coast and across the South.
Wait’s writing is full of life and teems with character even when focused on mundane things such as soil and vines. She is truly one of the great—and controversial–figures of California wine in the early 20th century. Today Wait reminds us that there are many hidden, yet extraordinary women in the history of American wine in the challenging and profoundly important years leading up to Prohibition and Women’s Right to Vote. And that the story is never black and white but rather full of shades and nuances. Most importantly, the story of women in California wine history deserves a great deal more attention, advocacy, and voice–even if it doesn’t fit comfortably into the accepted narrative as we have come to know it. But it’s truly an American story; one of courage and belief in one’s convictions, one of innovation and creative spirit, and one of conflict and challenge. Thanks to Wait’s work we have the opportunity to raise our glasses to these unheralded women and know that their legacies will live on.