Vintage 1980s Lugano Grapes Crate Label 🍇 Fresno, CA, American Classic

Lugano in Fresno? 🍇 Vintage 1980s Grapes Crate Label, Fresno, CA

Size: 13" x 4"

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A lake in Switzerland, a villa with a bell tower, sailboats on the water, and it's selling grapes from Fresno. I love these. This long, skinny Lugano label went on boxes of California wine grapes, and it's never been used.

🔍 What's On It

LUGANO™ in big letters, then California Grapes, FOR QUALITY WINE, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., and PACKED BY: TRI-BORO FRUIT COMPANY, INC., FRESNO, CA 93725. The picture is a lakeside: a villa with red-tiled roofs and a bell tower among the cypresses on the left, terraced vineyards and a village running back to blue-gray mountains, a boat with orange sails on the water, and a big cluster of dark purple grapes on the right. No printer is named anywhere on it.

That ZIP code helps date it. ZIP codes started in July 1963 and the two-letter CA came that October, so this one was printed after that.

🍷 For Quality Wine

Those three words tell you what the box was for. These weren't table grapes, they were grapes for making wine. California's Central Valley packers shipped crates of fresh wine grapes to home winemakers in the Midwest, back East and up in Canada, and a label like this was what those families saw when the boxes came off the truck.

Lugano itself is a real place, the largest city of Italian-speaking Switzerland, sitting on Lake Lugano, which straddles the border with Italy. The label doesn't say why they picked the name, but you can see the idea.

🌉 Tri-Boro Fruit Company

Tri-Boro is a great name with a great story. The company is named after the bridge linking Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, the Triborough Bridge, which opened in 1936 and was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008. As the California Museum tells it, the founder's macaroni factory in New York burned in the early 1930s, so he started buying grapes off the rail cars to sell, and then sent his son out to Fresno, who started the company. The family ran it from there.

They grew, packed and shipped wine and table grapes and dried raisins, and they had a whole family of brands. TRI-BORO and FANTASIA were registered trademarks in 1984, with the Tri-Boro name in use since 1967, and the California Museum in Sacramento has their Fresno Bella grape label in its collection. Lugano is one more of theirs. The company's address in those trademark filings is the same 93725 that's printed on this label.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1980s Lugano California Grapes crate label, For Quality Wine
• Packed by Tri-Boro Fruit Company, Inc., Fresno, CA 93725
• About 13" x 4", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's the perfect long shape to frame over a kitchen doorway or a wine rack, and a great gift for anybody who makes their own wine or has family in Fresno.