About the California Wine History Files
The California Wine History Files are part of Winefiles.org. They consist of citations mainly to the trade journals, government publications and newspaper literature dealing with the business and technology of grape growing and wine making in California from 1849 through 1999. They are the work of Charles Sullivan.
Winefiles.org is a project of the Sonoma County Wine Library to make its files of articles on wine, wine making, grape growing, wine business and the history of wine accessible on the World Wide Web.
Using funds from a Library Services and Technology Act Grant, the Sonoma County Library purchased a database built by Charles L. Sullivan , historian and author of The Companion to California Wine and other books.
Charles Sullivan's work was intended to be a personal reference. We have taken considerable time and effort to make the database approachable by the public. However some citations may remain incomplete.
Availability of Items Cited
If you want to get at the full text of the items in the database, there are several ways to do that. Some of the items cited are in the collections of the Sonoma County Wine Library, and you may contact us about their availability. Many of the items, however, are NOT in the Sonoma County Wine Library, but are in the collections of various other libraries where Charles Sullivan did his research over the years. These Libraries include the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, or the Napa Valley Wine Library, and the San Francisco Public Library. You may inquire at these libraries about the availability of the items cited in this database.The items cited are often primary source historical documents. Many of these items are archival, and may not be available via interlibrary loan. Some, especially the more recent items, are more readily available, either from the sources mentioned above, or from your local library.