Vintage 1950s Sunset Brand California Grapes Zinfandel Crate Label 🍇 — Packed by Joseph Gazzara, 1270 Linden Ave., Fresno CA

Who Packed Sunset Grapes? 🍇 Vintage 1950s Zinfandel Crate Label, Joseph Gazzara

Size: 13" x 4 1/4" ~ little to no wear.

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This 1950s Sunset Brand Zinfandel grape crate label carries the name of its packer, Joseph Gazzara of Fresno, California. Measuring 13" × 4 1/4", it represents mid‑century San Joaquin Valley wine‑grape packaging in an elongated strip format.

The label remains New Old Stock, unused and unmounted, with no wear. Color remains strong with clean edges and an intact surface.

Elongated strip crate labels were commonly used for side‑panel branding on grape crates and are valued for their bold graphic presence when preserved in unused condition. This example is well suited for collectors of California agricultural history and crate label art.

🏷️ What Is Printed on This Label

• Net Wt. 32 Lbs.
• SUNSET BRAND
• CALIFORNIA GRAPES
• ZINFANDEL
• PRODUCE U.S.A.
• PACKED BY
• JOSEPH GAZZARA
• 1270 LINDEN AVE.
• PHONE 2-5412
• FRESNO, CALIFORNIA
• REG. U. S. PAT. OFF.

The sheet carries a full street address and a period telephone number — 1270 LINDEN AVE. and PHONE 2-5412. That short phone form is older than the two-letter exchange numbers that local numbering plans moved to from the late 1940s through the 1950s, and it is a dating handle in its own right. Fresno numbers were still being printed in that same short style in 1956 (a Fresno High School yearbook ad that year reads PHONE 2-8063), and by 1960 Joseph Gazzara's Crest View Winery outside Fresno was listed as CLinton 5-0431, exchange name and all.

ZINFANDEL sits in a separate pale-green panel at the lower left. A different Sunset sheet reads CALIFORNIA FRUITS, is packed by Joseph Gazzara & CO. at P. O. Box 931, and carries a Stecher-Traung imprint this one does not.

The picture is a full-width sunburst — a red sun on the horizon at the right throwing yellow and orange rays across a cream and orange sky, over a dark blue mountain ridge with green highlights and a deep blue foreground band — with the brand running across it in pink-red display letters. Net Wt. 32 Lbs. is the printed grape-lug weight. No printer's imprint appears anywhere and there is no printed date.

And Joseph Gazzara was a real grape-and-wine man with a story. Ernest Gallo wrote that in 1925 a Chicago grape buyer named Joe Gazzara asked his father to ship the family's grapes to him on consignment. In Chicago, Joe was one of the two partners in the Sunny Hill Wine Company, which Louis Petri called the biggest brand in the Chicago area. That name mattered: Jack Riorda's little Sunny Hill Winery in St. Helena, where a young Robert Mondavi went to work, was renamed Sunny St. Helena because the winery did business with Joe in Chicago and he already had the Sunny Hill name there. The Petris eventually bought him out, and Joe moved to California. John B. Perenchio, grandfather of Jerry Perenchio (the Hollywood talent agent who went on to buy Univision), had built the Crest View Winery out on McCall between Fresno and Sanger in 1935; Gazzara bought a part interest a few years later and owned the whole place by 1942. Fresno wine man Lucius Powers remembered that Joe put in a lot of new equipment and modernized it, and summed him up simply: "He was very successful." John Melville's 1960 Guide to California Wines adds that he was born in Italy into a wine-growing family, learned the trade there and in France, was in the business in this country before Prohibition, sold sacramental wine through the dry years as the law allowed, and started up again after Repeal. I love finding a name with that much history behind it on a grape strip like this one.