Simone Cinotto's Soft Soil, Black Grapes unites business and ethnic history to describe Italian entrepreneurs in California's early wine industry. The book traces three companies, each founded between the 1880s and the 1930s by immigrants from the northern Piedmont region of Italy. The companies' founders were, in Cinotto's words, "authors of their ethnicity," strategically recruiting ethnic labor, catering to ethnic consumers, and using ethnic symbolism to navigate an otherwise risky industry.

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... Cinotto argues that "ethnicity, when applied to business, is best understood as a productive source of symbols, meanings, solidarities, and power, rather than as a resilient legacy in the face of the homogenizing forces of the capitalist market" (p. 11). For these entrepreneurs, ethnicity was thus a crucial form of social capital. Cinotto uses this approach to deconstruct the geographical and cultural determinisms found in popular histories of the topic. According to popular myth, California was a natural place for Italians to transplant their industry because it was "an American Mediterranean" (p. 47). But Italian immigrant winemakers did not bring specialized knowledge from Italy. In fact, none of them had previously been winemakers. Likewise, Cinotto asserts that California's landscape was unlike Italian wine country and that "immigrant winemakers actually transformed the land in California," remaking it in their own image of an ideal landscape (p. 52). They acquired land with "marginal, inferior soil," requiring arduous labor to bring into production (p. 55). This work was typically performed by working-class Italian immigrants recruited for the purpose. Indeed, labor control was one advantage for Italian winemakers, who enjoyed a conjuncture of low wages and low conflict among their workers. Cinotto argues that they achieved this by deftly manipulating both anti-Asian racism and "interclass national solidarity" among Northern Italians. Winemakers drew on the same notions of Italian heritage to attract customers, most of whom were the same urban working-class immigrants targeted by nativists. Indeed, Italians and wine were marginalized in interrelated ways through the parallel movements for temperance and immigration restriction. One of the most compelling ideas in Soft Soil, Black Grapes is that the risks-of being a foreign-born entrepreneur, of selling a marginally legal product, of growing