The Forgotten Chinese Builders of California Wine Country

The hand-dug wine caves, the dry-stone cellars and the terraced hillsides of Napa and Sonoma are among the most romantic sights in American wine. Almost none of them would exist without the Chinese immigrants who built them — by hand, for low pay — and who were then driven out of wine country and written out of its story¹.

It is one of California wine’s most important histories, and for a century it was very nearly forgotten.

Who built wine country

After the Gold Rush faded and the transcontinental railroad was finished, thousands of Chinese immigrants who had come for gold and railway work turned to agriculture². Through the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s they became the backbone of the labour force in the young Napa and Sonoma wine industry. At the peak in the 1880s, roughly a quarter to a third of the entire population of Sonoma Valley was Chinese³.

The caves at Buena Vista

The most striking example is Buena Vista, Sonoma’s oldest commercial winery. A San Francisco labour contractor named Ho Po sent around 150 Chinese workers to build it, and it was they who chiselled the winery’s storage caves straight out of the volcanic rock — by hand, with picks¹⁷. Those same tunnels still hold barrels today, and if you look closely you can still see the marks of their tools in the walls: a fingerprint of the men history left out, pressed into the living rock⁸.

Skilled hands, not just muscle

Their work went far beyond digging. Chinese labourers cleared the land and built the roads, laid the dry-stone walls and raised the grand stone wineries that still define the valleys, and did the skilled horticultural work of planting, grafting, pruning and picking the vines⁴. This was craft, not just brawn — and in a very real sense they did not merely work in California wine country. They made it⁵.

Backlash and the Exclusion Act

As the vineyards flourished, so did a vicious racist backlash. Anti-Chinese leagues sprang up across the West Coast, accusing Chinese workers of undercutting white wages, and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese immigration — the first U.S. law to exclude an entire nationality⁶. Boycotts, intimidation and outright violence followed. A few employers held out — Agoston Haraszthy’s successors and others refused for a time to dismiss their Chinese workers — but the campaign largely succeeded, and by the 1890s the Chinese had been forced out of wine country³.

Erased, and remembered

For most of the next century, the celebratory story of California wine simply left them out, crediting European pioneers alone⁵. That is finally changing: historians, journalists and the wineries themselves are restoring the record and honouring the men who built the caves and terraces². The pick marks in the walls of Buena Vista remain the quietest and most eloquent monument of all — a reminder that the roots of California wine, from Los Angeles to Sonoma, were tended by many more hands than the histories long admitted¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Sonoma: the true birthplace of California wine
• The beginning of vineyards in Los Angeles
• The origins of California wine

References

1. NPR, The Salt — Chinese Laborers Built Sonoma’s Wineries. Racist Neighbors Drove Them Out. www.npr.org ↩
2. KQED — The Chinese Roots of Northern California’s Wine Industry Run Deep. www.kqed.org ↩
3. ABC7 News — How Chinese laborers helped build Wine Country. abc7news.com ↩
4. NorthBay biz — An American Story: 19th-Century Chinese Laborers. www.northbaybiz.com ↩
5. Doug Chan (Medium) — Chinese Pioneers in California’s Wine Industry. medium.com ↩
6. Encyclopædia Britannica — Chinese Exclusion Act. www.britannica.com ↩
7. Buena Vista Winery — Timeline (the hand-dug caves). buenavistawinery.com ↩
8. Where Traveler — Go Underground to Discover the Wine Caves of Napa and Sonoma. www.wheretraveler.com ↩

Recommended reading

A History of Wine in America
Thomas Pinney
The definitive history of American wine, essential background to who actually built California’s vineyards.

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History
Iris Chang
A sweeping history of the Chinese American experience, including the labour and the exclusion that shaped the West.

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