In 1966, the US Senator and presidential candidate John McCain’s father, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. spoke about wine in congressional testimony: Gallo’s “Thunderbird,” to be exact. Yes, that “fortified” wino’s wine (20-21% ABV) that floated Gallo’s boat to such a degree it came to submerge competitors in the California wine industry. The 4-star Admiral berated the contemporary head of federal maritime affairs, Nicholas Johnson, who stated when appointed in 1964 that he “knows nothing about shipping.” Speaking with a Stars & Stripes reporter at a Japan Embassy event amidst the Vietnam War, Johnson had started rambling “about handling bulk cargos in shiploads […] and mentioned the wine tanker Angelo Petri.” The reporter asked whether he “drinks that lousy Thunderbird wine?” “No,” Johnson replied, “It tastes like it went around in a tanker.”
Beside himself, Admiral McCain specified:
To this committee, I cannot help but observe that any young man . . . who engages in this hind of undignified childish prattle simply does not have the judgment to carry on the duties of his office.
. . . Our people built [the Angelo Petri], and have repaired and overhauled annually each year [….] This tanker is a matter of some pride in our merchant navy. It is the only one of its kind under our flag. Probably the only one in the world exactly like it, with stainless steel tanks, piping, and valves, so that the wine never touches anything but stainless steel, a very expensive ship. The owners are proud of the ship, and very jealous of the quality of their product. You could eat a meal off the bottoms of those tanks, and this young man has the gall to point out that wine which he terms “lousy” tastes like it was transported in a tanker.
During the growing renown for finer-quality California “table wine,” American wine’s, and with it, the nation’s, Cold War reputation lay in the balance, publicly besmirched by the ineloquent maritime administrator (and to the troops no less). “This at a time,” continued McCain, “when President Johnson has ordered that all wines served in American embassies must be American wines.”
The Angelo Petri, however, did not belong to Gallo; nor did it regularly haul sticky Thunderbird through the Panama Canal Zone, where three generations of McCains once lived. Getting wine out of California to the rest of the country was the issue. Glass weighs a lot; bottling near local markets made sense, and, from today’s perspective, had environmental benefits. In fact, in the late 1950s, the new ship made the competitive Gallo brothers extremely nervous, though their company, and American wine drinkers, eventually benefitted from a lower cost product, helping create the wave of California wineries in the seventies.
Professor Maynard Amerine of the University of California at Davis suggested in 1971 that the Angelo Petri, built by United Vintners in San Francisco, impacted the advancing American “interest in table wines” between 1956 and 1970, a period when…
