History and Prohibition

Several weeks ago, I was at the Westlake Historical Society at Clague Park Museum.  Westlake, originally known as Dover, was the second largest shipping point for grapes in the United States in the 1800s. Collamer, east of Cleveland, was first.  Wine-making went underground during Prohibition, and when it ended, restaurant owners bottled and labeled their own fortified wines made from local juice or brought in from California. Some of the wineries started mass-producing wine with new equipment, but the wines of Ohio, like all of the eastern United States, was mostly sweet and made from native lambrusca grapes, until wine makers began to experiment with hybrids.