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Spring 2002 Newsletter
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Special Report: Under Visionary John De
By Kathie Fowler
 In his quarter century with the Wine Institute as President and CEO, John De Luca has presided over the most tumultuous time in the industry's history, which from an historical perspective alone would make interesting reading. But De Luca himself is so articulate and impassioned about his work, and brings such a global perspective to it, that any understanding of today's wine industry must include De Luca's role in shaping it. At the beginning of his tenure he formulated a vision, and in the course of implementing that vision the wine industry was changed forever.
At first glance, De Luca seems an unlikely candidate to lead the wine industry into the 21st century — or to be the recipient of the 2001 "Agriculturist of the Year" award. Born of immigrant parents from Sicily and reared on the Lower East Side of New York, De Luca quips that his first introduction to agriculture was "my mother giving me a small pot of basil and parsley to water on the fire escape." In 1948, when John was 15, the family moved to Los Angeles, then a largely agricultural community. "My father loved the orange groves and vineyards and open spaces," De Luca recalls. "It reminded him of Italy. We would get Zinfandel grapes from Cucamonga, and he would crush and ferment them in barrels that he'd brought from New York. After high school, De Luca graduated from UCLA with Phi Beta Kappa honors in political science. He received his Master's Degree in Soviet Studies from Harvard in 1958 and his Ph.D. in International Relations from UCLA in 1967. In 1959 and ‘62 he traveled throughout the Soviet Union with several U.S. Exhibits attached to the Embassy's Cultural Section, and in 1965-66 he served as White House Fellow in Lyndon Johnson's administration. During this time he worked on national security matters and served on various State Department coordinating committees. His political contacts eventually led him to San Francisco, where he served as Deputy Mayor under Joseph Alioto from 1968-75. "My job morphed dramatically from opening doors in Washington to governing a city," he remarks. "The police and firefighters were on strike, the SLA had kidnapped Patty Hearst, the Black Panthers were out in force, and we were dealing with the Zebra killings. It was one of the most turbulent times in San Franciso's — and indeed the country's — history." In 1975, when Alioto's two-term limit was up, Jo De Luca encouraged her husband to turn to the private sector. The head of the San Francisco-based Wine Institute was leaving, and after extensive discussions, De Luca was offered and accepted the position. At the time the Wine Institute was primarily engaged in public relations and marketing activities such as sponsoring tastings, conducting seminars and publishing cookbooks. Wine was promoted as the beverage of moderation, a legitimate slogan but an inadequate marketing tool to fight the growing anti-alcohol movement which De Luca, in a white paper written in 1977, had termed "neo-prohibitionism." "My studies showed that our adversaries were repositioning us as a 'sin' that should be taxed. That wine was a 'gateway drug' of choice right along with tobacco, crack and hard drugs. The wine industry didn't realize this. They thought everyone knew us and liked us." Indeed, the entire alcohol industry was being perceived as a public health hazard by such government agencies as the Dept. of Health & Human Services, the FDA, and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism. Anti-alcohol groups wanted the "War on Drugs" to take on a political agenda involving health scares, warning labels, "sin" taxes, advertising controls and litigation incentives. "It became clear to me that we couldn't counter these charges through public relations channels," De Luca reveals. "If we were going to be attacked on health issues, we had to counter-attack from a public policy standpoint. We needed to find independent proof that wine in moderation was nutritionally beneficial." When asked how, in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he believed he could accomplish this, De Luca answers, "I trusted science. After all, it's a matter of history. Look at Crete, Cypress, Sicily — the whole Mediterranean. People have been following the same principle for thousands of years with wine: a little is good, a lot is not." In 1991, when the Wine Institute changed from a trade association to a public policy advocacy group, the move was extremely controversial. "A lot of members felt that we rebuilt ourselves after Prohibition with good PR, and that I was throwing it all out the window by switching over to public policy," De Luca recalls. "Out of a total membership of 500, 150 resigned. It was a gut-wrenching experience. But it led to all of the positive things that have followed — the scientific approach, dietary guidelines, all of the achievements that place us on the side of diet, lifestyle and nutrition instead of street drugs and punitive laws and regulations." (Today, totaling 585 members, the Institute represents 92% of California's wine production.)  The first break had already come in September of 1986 with an excerpt in Reader's Digest from an article called "The Mediterranean Diet – Ancient Secrets of Modern Nutrition," by Carol and Malcolm McConnell, in which wine was listed as part of a healthy diet. The article was later expanded into a book, and De Luca accompanied the McConnells around the country participating in seminars on the book. He then went to BATF. "Here is third party corroboration that wine can be part of a healthy lifestyle," he argued. "The Wine Institute has a First Amendment right to disseminate this information to the public — not for self-promotion or advertising, but as public policy." After two years of correspondence, the federal agency agreed.
The next break came on November 17th, 1991, with the airing of a report on "Sixty Minutes" titled The French Paradox. Interviews were featured with international medical experts showing a connection between regular, moderate wine consumption, particularly red wine, and low heart disease rates among the French, despite a lifestyle of a high-fat diet, smoking and little exercise. Research was presented from Boston University School of Medicine, the Lyon unit of INSERM (the French equivalent of the National Institute of Health), and the Harvard School of Public Health. In the four weeks following the broadcast, red wine purchases in supermarkets increased by an astounding 44% over the previous year. But the real turning point, according to De Luca, occurred as a result of a Washington press conference announcing the government's new dietary guidelines. All major media were in attendance and on January 3, 1996, the front page of the New York Times declared, In an About-Face, U.S. Says Alcohol Has Health Benefits.  The article began, "In a new set of dietary recommendations, the Federal Government acknowledged for the first time today that consuming some alcohol can be healthful."
The "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," which are printed every five years, included the suggestion that moderate drinking may lower the risk of heart attacks, and Dr. Philip Lee, Assistant Secretary of Health, is quoted as saying at the press conference, "In my personal view, wine with meals in moderation is beneficial." "Between coverage from network television and major media, we estimate that 125 million people heard about the new guidelines," De Luca confides. Today, the Wine Institute is the pre-eminent public policy advocacy group for wine in America and has been praised as a model of social responsibility on the floor of Congress. It represents an industry whose California wine sales last year totaled $13.4 billion in the U. S. alone, and currently staffs seven regional offices in the United States, 10 overseas offices and employs 45 contract lobbyists. The future is bright, though De Luca acknowledges that there are still serious challenges ahead. Promoting sustainable farming, combating the glassy-winged sharpshooter, fighting for wineries' rights to ship direct to consumers — these are among the complex issues facing the Wine Institute today, and their resolution will be as crucial to the industry's survival as anything that has gone before. |
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