Vintage 1940s Small Black Brand Zinfandel Crate Label 🍇 — Victor Fruit Growers, Escalon California

Remember Small Black Zinfandel? 🍇 Vintage 1940s Crate Label, Victor Fruit Growers, Escalon California

Size: 13" x 4"

Packers in the northern San Joaquin Valley boxed wine grapes in 36-pound lugs and shipped them across the country to home winemakers, and the lugs from Victor Fruit Growers carried a label like this: SMALL BLACK Brand ZINFANDEL, from Victor Fruit Growers of Escalon, California. It is a long lug-end band label, 13 inches by 4, from the 1940s. New Old Stock, unused and unmounted, stored flat, little to no wear.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.
• SMALL BLACK and BRAND
• ZINFANDEL, on a banner of its own
• PRODUCT OF U.S.A.
• VICTOR FRUIT GROWERS, with the full stop set well clear of the final S
• ESCALON, CALIFORNIA, with no ZIP code

ZINFANDEL is the grape and SMALL BLACK is the brand, and that is worth knowing, because the same brand name went on other grapes too. The Lodi Winegrape Commission shows a SMALL BLACK label on fresh-packed Alicante Bouschet grapes, and a later version of the same brand was packed by Delta Packing Co. of Lodi, with NET WT. 36 LBS. printed on it. A baby sits at the center of the artwork.

🍒 Victor Fruit Growers: Three Towns, Three Brands

The San Joaquin County Historical Museum's product label collection files three Victor Fruit Growers brands together, Beaver, Small Black and Victor's Best, and says the firm shipped from Escalon, Manteca and Victor, packing cherries and grapes (Carignane, Flame Tokay and Zinfandel among them). That explains why a company named for the tiny town of Victor, near Lodi, has Escalon at the bottom of its label.

The Beaver brand is the best documented. Its trademark file gives a first use of March 16, 1920, and the registration came through on January 7, 1958, for fresh fruits and vegetables. It was renewed in 1978 and 1998, and the mark ended up with Dole Bakersfield, Inc. Victor Fruit Growers, Inc. itself merged on March 31, 1972, and California's records show it electing to dissolve in 1978 and formally dissolving on April 16, 1979.

The old packing house is still there. Rob Lawson bought the historic Victor Fruit Growers packing facility, which sits beside the old railroad line (now abandoned) along Victor Road, and it now makes wine as Victor Vineyards.

🚂 Escalon, the Stepping Stones

Escalon is a Spanish word meaning stepping stones. The founder, James W. Jones, is said to have seen the name in a book in the Stockton Free Library. He laid the town out in 1894 on land from his father, John Wheeler Jones, who had arrived in 1852. The first Santa Fe train pulled in during the spring of 1896, and Escalon incorporated on March 12, 1957.

🍷 Why Anyone Wanted a Lug of Zinfandel

Home winemakers were the customers. The Volstead Act, in Prohibition, let a household make up to 200 gallons of fermented beverages a year, and Lodi's fresh-packed grapes went out nationwide in 36-pound lugs. A Cal Poly Pomona archive lists a Victor Fruit Growers Small Black label at about 1930 to 1940, so the brand was in use by then, and I date this printing to the 1940s.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and in my opinion the lithography behind them has never been matched. Museums and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them. Picture one on your own wall instead of in a museum.