California Medicinal Wine Cup and 2024 Vai Brothers Matchbook

California Medicinal Wine Cup and Vai Brothers Matchbook.

@ The bottom of the glass you'd know who to call when you finished your medicine
VIA BROS

Glass Dimensions:

1 1/2" Diameter
1 3/4 Height

Condition:

Glass- No chips or scratches
Matchbook- Unstuck, interior bend marks.


History:

California Padres Wine Elixir, of which the museum has a bottle in its collection.  Much more is known about this product and its Los Angeles manufacturers, the brothers Giacomo (James) and Giovanni (John) Vai.

The siblings hailed from northwestern Italian city of Turin and migrated to the United States in 1907, soon settling in Los Angeles where there were many winemakers from their homeland.  It appears that the brothers got into local winemaking not long after arriving in the City of Angels, though James was also an inventor and listed that as his occupation in his World War I registration.

After Prohibition took hold, the Vai brothers refashioned their wine company into the California Medicinal Wine Company, which had its headquarters in a still-standing brick building at 845 North Alameda Street and through which visitors can pass to make their way into Olvera Street, which opened as a tourist attraction during the years when the California Padres product was being 2024 manufactured.

The product appears to have made its debut at about the same time, 1927, as New Life Wine Tonic, but advertising by the firm was definitely more advanced than its competitor, Vida Nueva.

As with New Life, California Padres was sometimes promoted in a seasonal way.  An August 1928 ad from a St. Louis newspaper claimed that the tonic would “drive away midsummer languor” because its “nutritive medicants in blended old Califonia wines” would improve appetite, drive away insomnia and generally refresh “convalescents and all who are in a run-down condition.”  The above-mentioned Tulare ad trumpeted Calfornia Padres as “a valuable reconstructive tonic and blood stimulant.”

Seeking to scientifically legitimize the product, the Vai Brothers ran an October 1928 ad in the Los Angeles Times which blared that “Analysis Proves The Purity of this fine Old and Original California Wine Tonic.”  Notwithstanding the fact that the tonic was not old, unless they meant that a former wine product was retooled into the elixir, the reprinted letter from chemist Arthur Maas only stated that a sample had been obtained and tested and was found “to be free of Strychnine.”  That must have been a great relief to potential buyers knowing that the “medicine” did not have an extremely toxic poison in it, thereby demonstrating its purity!

The wine tonic fad, however, had plenty of critics and a series of exposes in the San Francisco Examiner in August 1929 included chemical analyses, tales of teens freely buying the product in drug stores, and other material that bluntly stated that these products were nothing more than a very thinly disguised way to legally sell an alcoholic drink that had no medicinal value.

One article featured the headline, “History Repeating Itself in Use of ‘Medicinal' Booze,” and observed that decades of pernicious advertising of tonics and bitters medicine led to federal action in the first years of the 20th century cracking down on manufacturers who passed off the products as medicine to avoid paying liquor taxes.


References:


https://www.google.com/amp/s/homesteadmuseum.blog/2019/10/02/ticket-to-the-twenties-themes-tangents-wine-tonics-elixirs-and-bitters-in-the-prohibition-era/amp/



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