"Italians have played a major role in shaping the California wine industry, as is clear by the profusion of vowel-ending names among the state's wineries. In fact, many of the Italian American wineries that now dot the map of California's wine regions are third-generation immigrant operations whose heritage goes back to men and women who left Italy for the Golden State at the turn of the twentieth century.

Italian grape growers and winemakers have not been alone in making California wine a quintessentially immigrant industry: when they first started arriving in the 1880's, they joined already established German, French, and Scandinavian immigrant winemaking ventures.

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Source: http://www.wine-searcher.com