Vintage 1970s Small Black Zinfandel Crate Label 🍇 – Lodi, California

Remember Small Black Grapes? 🍇 Vintage 1970s Zinfandel Juice Grapes Crate Label, Delta Packing Co., Lodi, California

Size: 13" x 4"

Every fall, Lodi still packs grapes into boxes and sends them across the country to people who make their own wine at home. This is one of the labels that rode on those boxes: SMALL BLACK Brand Zinfandel Juice Grapes, packed by Delta Packing Co., 5990 E. Kettleman Ln., Lodi, California. These are new old stock: never glued to a lug, stored flat, colors still loud.

🏷️ What the Label Says

Reading left to right: REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. up in the corner, then a yellow scroll with SMALL BLACK in big white letters, BRAND under it, and PRODUCT OF U.S.A. below. In the middle, in its own white frame, is a painted baby sitting in green grass under a swirl of orange, pink and pale blue. On the right, a second scroll reads ZINFANDEL JUICE GRAPES in green, then DELTA PACKING CO., 5990 E. KETTLEMAN LN., LODI, CA 95240, and down in the corner NET WT. 36 LBS. / POIDS NET 16.3 kg. Grapevines and blue-purple clusters climb across the red ground, and the whole thing sits inside a hot-pink border.

📦 Delta Packing Co. of Lodi

Delta Packing was started in 1976 by Carl Elkins and Lee Mettler. The two of them owned and ran it until May 2001, when they sold it to the Costamagna family, who have been farming the San Joaquin Valley for more than three generations. Ernie Costamagna's son Berton and daughter Annamarie run it day to day now. Delta still packs California cherries in the spring and wine grapes and grape juice in the fall, working with more than 70 growers around Lodi, Amador, Paso Robles and Napa. It's still on Kettleman Lane too, at 6021 E. Kettleman Lane these days rather than the 5990 printed on this label.

A baby still turns up on Delta's boxes, too. Their Smiling Baby lug label, photographed in Lodi in 2015, swaps the painting for a photograph of a grinning baby with FRANKIE BOY printed underneath, next to a glass of red wine, and it's set up the same way as this one: juice grapes, 36 pounds, with the weight in English and French.

🍷 Where SMALL BLACK Came From

The SMALL BLACK brand is older than Delta. The same scrolls, vines and painted baby went out on lugs from Victor Fruit Growers, with Escalon on some printings and Victor, California on others. The Lodi Winegrape Commission's history of Lodi lug labels shows a SMALL BLACK label from Victor Fruit Growers of Victor packed with Alicante grapes at 26 pounds. Victor is a tiny place just outside Lodi with barely 200 people, and the old Victor Fruit Growers packing house on Victor Road was bought in 1999 and turned into Victor Vineyards. On this one, the brand carries Delta's name, a Lodi address with a ZIP code, and a 36-pound box.

📦 Why "Juice Grapes," and Why 36 Pounds

Prohibition is what built this trade. The Volstead Act let the head of every household make up to 200 gallons a year at home, and Lodi spent the 1920s filling boxcars with Zinfandel and Tokay for families back East: 9,133 carloads in 1921 alone, and more the year after. The home winemakers never went away. Lodi crews still pick straight into 36-pound lug boxes right in the vineyard rows, weigh each box beside the vines, and truck the grapes to the Midwest, the East Coast and cities in Canada. The 36-pound "half-lug" crate goes all the way back to 1908.

That's also why there's French on a California grape label. Look at the bottom corner: NET WT. 36 LBS., and right under it POIDS NET 16.3 kg. Canada's bilingual packaging law came into force in 1974, and lugs of Lodi juice grapes still head north every fall.

📅 Dating It

Delta Packing started in 1976, so this label can't be any older than that. It carries the five-digit ZIP code, the metric weight in French, and the old 5990 Kettleman Lane address rather than the one Delta uses today.

📍 Kettleman Lane

The street on the address line has a story of its own. Kettleman Lane is named for David Henry Kettleman, born in Germany on February 23, 1826, who came to America at 12 and then made the 149-day trip around Cape Horn, landing in San Francisco on August 3, 1849, right in the Gold Rush. He prospected at Mokelumne Hill, ran stores in San Andreas and Winters Bar, partnered with S.V. and J.P. Tredway in mining, and then went into cattle, which made the partners some of the wealthiest cattle owners in California. In the winter of 1871 he and his wife Margaret settled at the corner of Cherokee and Kettleman Lanes between Lodi and Stockton, and in 1875 he was treasurer of the Mokelumne Ditch and Irrigation Company. He died in February 1911. Kettleman City, the Kettleman Hills and Kettleman Station are all named for him too.

Lodi has a legend about the street as well. The story goes that a turkey named Tom claimed Kettleman Lane as his own and chased every car that dared cross his path, until a hit-and-run did him in one sad morning. Lodi poet Lyle Nachaund wrote him a poem in the Lodi News-Sentinel in 2015, and the way the poem tells it, every now and then someone still spots Tom Kettleman strutting down the street he was named for. 🦃

🖼️ Display

At 13" x 4" it's the classic long lug-end size, and the colors on these are loud in the best way. It looks great framed long and skinny over a wine rack or a home bar, and if you've ever made wine in the basement, or watched someone in your family do it, this is the label that came with the grapes. 🍇