Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market [Hardcover]

Jerome Tuccille (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009

Rising from abject poverty in the early 1900s to create the most successful wine company in the world, the Gallo family used hard work, strong values -- and crime -- to find their success. In Gallo Be Thy Name, biographer Jerome Tuccille takes readers through the Prohibition and Great Depression, following the Gallos as they ride the turbulent currents of history to triumph. But beneath the shiny steel surface of the Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery swirl rumors of murder and a sweeping story of passion and power.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jerome Tuccille is the author of 25 books, including biographies of Alan Greenspan, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump. He has also written or coauthored several novels and financial self-help books. A vice president at T. Rowe Price Investment Services and a former broker and analyst, Tuccille is an authority on American business.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix Books (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597775908
• ISBN-13: 978-1597775908
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jerome Tuccille is the author of twenty-seven books, including best-selling, award-winning biographies of the Gallo wine dynasty, Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Greenspan, and the Hunts of Texas, and several novels. Tuccille's latest biography is Gallo Be Thy Name, released by Phoenix Books in 2009, a history of the Gallo wine clan and its roots in organized crime. Gallo Be Thy Name has been named one of the best books of 2009 by Reason magazine, and one of the best business books of 2009 by University of California Library System. Other awards are pending. The author's true crime memoir, Gallery of Fools, has been optioned for a movie. A revised and updated edition was published in December 2010

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ugly People, Ugly Wine, Sloppy Writing, September 27, 2009

By 

Aceto "All knowledge is sorrow." (Meilhan Sur Garonne) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Gallo and Exxon have much in common. Gasoline is still a little cheaper, but their production volumes have a certain affinity for their markets. They both age. A little. Both face a glut. As for aroma and taste, well, in a blind taste test...no I will not spoil it.

This is a story of the Gallo family. Jerome Tuccille has some twenty-five books credited to him. He boasts several lines of business in books. If you like books that explore the broken headed families of those grasping for riches, you might enjoy this book. Do not come here for history, business or wine. There are some informative passages on California wine companies, government and advertising.

Book I is the nightmare story of the immigrant founding family, full of death and then cops and mobsters. Less than interesting as here written, but it explains how the second generation was deformed. Book II begins with an economics lesson. Before 1913, the government of the United States took in one third of its revenues from alcohol tax. We were very close to the Russians of the same period. The most interesting idea in this book is that Prohibition was repealed because the government revenues from the new Income Tax were shriveled by the Great Depression. Sounds familiar now, does it not?

By 1935. Gallo produced 350,000 gallons. Thy had storage for 350,000 gallons. Mr. Tuccille writes that Gallo sold 941,000 gallons. I wish he told us how.

Gallo did not age wine. They produced a syrup of what Mr. Tuccille calls Dago Red. It was illegal, but he does not give any details. Rather than cultivating, aging and caring, Gallo preferred additives like caramel, sugar, and stronger spirits. Gallo was a customer of the local coal-tar producer, but claimed never to have bought any. Good thing, because it causes cancer even as a topical application, let alone ingested.

World War II brought new opportunities for Gallo. This great Patriot went into the business of falsifying his costs to the War Department, for his sale of alcohol to produce synthetic rubber, among other of his ventures.

By the war's end, we are told Gallo controlled 3/4ths of the grapes grown in California. We are not told how. The 1946 harvest crushed 1.6 million tons of grapes, a 40% increase over the previous record. Mr. Tuccille does not say how. He does not bother to say what the effects were. Somehow, Gallo was able to "dictate prices" somehow, although the market price went from $1.75 to $0.38, he tells us. This is control? To further contradict himself, Mr. Tuccille says the grape growers banded together in cooperatives, the largest of which comprised 275 growers storing nineteen million gallons by 1950. Gallo stored a million and a half by then. Nothing adds.

Mr. Tucille is not so good with geography either. He has Ernest on vacation in Agliano d'Asti, driving north to Lourdes, France -- you know, where Switzerland used to be. Obviously of Italian heritage, he translates "bagna", as he says, "literally", as "sauce", not bath. Just a warning in case he invites you over.

A justifiable portion of the book is given over to the cheap sugary pseudo wines that fueled the empire. But our author goes after Red Foxx as touting on late night TV, being ripped on Ripple. How much effort was it to write that Mr. Fox was on a hit prime time sit-com where he really said he made Champipple from ginger ale and Ripple.

The rest of the book is given over to the insane, destructive family antics and warfare. This book is too careless to have proper notes and references. Instead we are given imprecise and chatty commentary for each chapter at the end.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Story of a Modern Day Wine Dynasty, December 13, 2009

By 

Valerie J. Wood "Author and Sports Journalist" (Maryland) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Gallo Be Thy Name is an unvarnished view of an American wine dynasty which rose from poverty in the early 1900's to become of the most successful wine companies in the world. Crime, cunning, and triumph, along with rumors of murder, is the background of this intriguing story. The Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery has a carefully crafted and polished image, which bespeaks a tale of passion, greed and ambition. An enjoyable read which gives a different perspective to an example of a rags to riches American family's success.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Uncompelling and poorly written, September 1, 2009

By 

brian d foy (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I'm not a wine person, but I grew up knowing about the Gallos from their television commercials. I was excited to read this book to find out what was behind the name on the commercials that I still remember.

I quickly became dismayed by the organization and poor writing of this book. The author starts in 1899 with the birth of Al Capone, and then simply relates everything in chronological order. Since I'm not a wine person, I'm not aware of the later significance of many of the events, and the author does nothing to draw out the important parts from the trivialities. Indeed, he highlights some of the unimportant parts with purply prose that reads like a high school freshman with a thesaurus.

The significance of the Gallo Brothers is their masterful marketing, but it's all just part of the timeline. I could have done less with the soap opera of their lives (I get that Earnest was an old-world brute of a man, so don't belabor the point on every page), and a lot more about their marketing campaigns, complete with pictures of the ads, the labels of the wines, and so on. Very little attention is given to the overall wine market and what other wineries were doing.

I also expected more about wine-making, and aside from the odd paragraph or two, it seems that all you do is squeeze some grapes and put the juice in bottles. Apparently the Gallo Winery did quite a bit of experimenting, but the book doesn't go into detail on the process. It's more interested in the petty dramas of their lives.

I kept hoping the book would pick up after the Gallos took over the national market, but it didn't. I was hoping to pass the book on to some friends after I was done, but I would be embarrassed to share this with anyone.