100
GAME CHANGERS
W
hat moved the North American wine industry forward during the last 100
years? Events as big as Prohibition and as seemingly small as a television
news report on "60 Minutes." People as prominent as winery founder
Robert Mondavi and as modest as cold-climate grape breeder Elmer Sw-
enson. Innovations as complex as membrane filtration and as simple as a collection of
plastic tubing called drip irrigation.
As Wines & Vines enters its 100th year of publishing, we want to acknowledge and
celebrate the contributions made by 100 Game Changers described in the following pages.
They were critical in transforming the wine industry since 1919 from a depressed, practi-
cally hopeless scattering of wineries and vineyards about to be outlawed by a U.S. consti-
tutional amendment to a thriving, growing industry that now generates $47 billion in sales
per year of U.S. wines and has a $9 billion economic impact in Canada.
Our editorial team compiled the admittedly subjective list of Game Changers based
on our own knowledge and judgments aided by several industry members. Our goal was
to recognize people, events and innovations that significantly altered the course of wine
production and grapegrowing. We hope you enjoy paging through the mini-articles that
follow. They are not ranked in order of importance but are meant to provide a winding
tour through the history of our industry.
The articles were written by Andrew Adams, editor; Stacy Briscoe, staff writer; Linda
Jones McKee, Wine East editor; Peter Mitham, Northwest correspondent; Laurie Daniel,
contributing writer; and myself.
— Jim Gordon
