Vintage 1940s Talk O’ The Town Emperor Grapes Crate Label 🍇 from Ivanhoe, California

Talk of the Town? 🍇 Vintage 1940s Emperor Grapes Crate Label From Ivanhoe, California

Size: 13" x 4" ~ little to no wear.

A box of grapes dressed up like opening night. This label is a big-city street after dark - towers, a lit-up avenue, streetcars and automobiles - and the packer's name spelled out in little light bulbs like a theater marquee. TALK O' THE TOWN, it says, and they meant it. Every one I have is unused and unmounted.

It reads TALK O' THE TOWN, NET WEIGHT 28 LBS., EMPERORS, W. D. WINTON & SON, IVANHOE, CALIFORNIA, with the shipper's lines done in rows of pale-blue bulbs and the EMPERORS panel ringed in yellow marquee lights. There's no BRAND word and no PRODUCE OF U.S.A. anywhere on it, which is unusual, and a line of microtype runs along the bottom left - almost surely the lithographer's imprint - but it's too small to read.

🍇 Emperors

The label never says grapes; it just says EMPERORS, and back then that was enough. Emperor was the late-season California table grape, a grape that kept well enough for the long rail trip east, and Tulare County grew a lot of them - the Library of Congress has a photograph from around 1928 of Tulare County vines loaded with Emperors. A 28-pound lug of Emperors with a marquee on the end was meant to get noticed.

🏘️ Ivanhoe, Tulare County

Ivanhoe is a little farm town in Tulare County on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, northeast of Visalia. It takes its name from Sir Walter Scott - the story goes that the first school, opened in 1886, was named for Scott's novel Ivanhoe, and the name spread to the whole place. The neighbors took it to heart: the Ivanhoe Fruit Association named its brands after characters in the book - Ivanhoe, Lady Rowena and Robin Hood. Ivanhoe wasn't even counted as a place of its own by the census until 1950.

🏁 W. D. Winton & Son

W. D. Winton & Son packed and shipped out of Ivanhoe, and they liked a showy label. Talk O' The Town was one brand; another, WIN, shows a man waving a checkered flag as a race car roars past. Who W. D. Winton was, and who the son was, the labels don't say - they're about all that's left of the firm, which is one more reason to keep these.

🎬 The talk of the town

Talk of the town is an old saying for whatever everybody's buzzing about, and the 1940s had it everywhere - The New Yorker had been running its Talk of the Town section since the 1920s, and in 1942 Columbia put out The Talk of the Town with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman. Whether Winton was thinking of any of that, nobody knows, but a grape label drawn like a movie-house marquee sure looks like it.

🍇 About these

They're 13 by 4 inches, the long strip for the end of a grape lug. Hang one over a doorway or a home theater, put it with your other Ivanhoe and Tulare County labels, or give it to somebody who loves old movie palaces. The supply is finite - nobody's packing Emperors under Talk O' The Town again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.