Catholic Bootleggers: How the Church Survived Prohibition by Making Sacramental Wine by Jeff Callaway

Catholic Bootleggers: How the Church Survived Prohibition by Making Sacramental Wine

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

A Deep Investigative Look at How the Blood of Christ Defied America's Noble Experiment

The smoke from gunfire still hung in the Chicago air on that first hour of Prohibition. Six armed men had just made off with one hundred thousand dollars worth of medicinal whiskey. America had gone dry at midnight on January 17, 1920, and before the clock struck one in the morning, the lawlessness had already begun.

But there was one drink they couldn't ban. One ancient wine that no government could outlaw without trampling on the Constitution itself. That wine was the Blood of Christ, and the story of how it survived America's most misguided social experiment is a tale of faith, loopholes, corruption, theft, murder, and the unshakeable truth that what God has ordained, man cannot destroy.

When America Banned the Cup of Salvation

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in January 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act, passed that same year over President Wilson's veto, gave teeth to the amendment. David Blair, the commissioner of internal revenue from 1921 to 1929, was a zealot for the cause. He publicly declared that every bootlegger should be stood against a wall and shot to death.

But Prohibition wasn't just about public health or morality. It was soaked in anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant hatred. The temperance movement grew from Protestant moralism and nativist fear of the flood of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Poland who brought their wine traditions with them. These were people for whom wine wasn't just a beverage but a sacrament, a connection to the divine, the very Blood of the Lamb.

The Protestant teetotalers who pushed Prohibition through couldn't stomach the thought of Italian coal miners sharing wine at family tables or Irish laborers raising glasses in celebration. But they made one fatal miscalculation: they couldn't ban what Christ Himself had commanded.

The Theology of Wine: Why the Church Could Never Surrender

To understand why wine was non-negotiable for the Catholic Church, you need to understand what the Eucharist is. This isn't symbolic grape juice. This isn't a nice gesture or a remembrance ceremony. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, when the priest consecrates the bread and wine during Mass, those elements become—truly, actually, substantially—the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it plainly: "By the consecration the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is brought about. Under the consecrated species of bread and wine Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner: his Body and his Blood, with his soul and his divinity."

This isn't metaphor. This isn't poetry. This is ontological reality. The substance changes while the accidents—the appearance, taste, smell—remain. The Council of Trent declared in the sixteenth century that this teaching was ancient, apostolic, and unchangeable.

Scripture itself demands it. At the Last Supper, Jesus took the cup and said to His apostles: "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matthew 26:27-29).

Note those words: "fruit of the vine." Not grape juice. Not a symbolic beverage. Wine, fermented from grapes. Canon 924 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law makes this requirement explicit: "The wine must be natural, made from grapes of the vine, and not corrupt."

The wine must be pure grape wine, naturally fermented, with nothing artificial added. It cannot have turned to vinegar. It cannot be made from anything other than grapes. To use invalid matter renders the sacrament itself invalid, null, void—no consecration, no Eucharist, no Mass.

This is why, when America tried to ban all alcohol, the Catholic Church had no choice but to fight for an exemption. The Eucharist is not optional. It is, as the Catechism says, "the source and summit of the Christian life." Every single Mass requires it. Without wine, there can be no valid celebration of the Eucharist. Without the Eucharist, the Church dies.

The Protestant temperance zealots didn't understand this. Many of them had long since abandoned any real belief in the Real Presence, if their denominations ever held it at all. Grape juice worked fine for their symbolic ceremonies. But for Catholics, there was no substitute, no workaround, no acceptable alternative. The Blood of Christ could not be replaced with Welch's.

The Loophole That Saved an Industry

Section 6 of the Volstead Act contained the exemption that would change everything. Sacramental wine for religious ceremonies was exempt from the ban. Wine could still be produced, transported, and used for legitimate religious purposes.

It sounds straightforward. It wasn't.

First, wineries had to obtain permits from the Prohibition director. Then a religious leader had to act as proprietor when it came to production and distribution, ensuring the wine was used only for religious purposes, not general consumption. Under no circumstances could wine be consumed at the wineries themselves.

David Blair's 1922 rules were designed to keep sacramental wine in the hands of the devout. They failed spectacularly.

Because a loophole is a loophole. And with houses of worship suddenly becoming one of the only legal outlets for alcohol, production of holy wine didn't just continue—it exploded. Grape production in heavily Roman Catholic California increased by seven hundred percent during Prohibition. Seven hundred percent.

Within the first two years of Prohibition, sacramental wine sales nationwide increased by nearly fifty percent. By 1925, the Department of Research and Education of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ reported that nearly three million gallons of wine had been withdrawn from bonded warehouses for sacramental purposes—an increase of eight hundred thousand gallons in just two years.

One churchman admitted the obvious: "Not more than one quarter of this is sacramental. The rest is sacrilegious."

Where was all this wine going? It wasn't going into chalices at Mass. During this period, only priests consumed the Precious Blood. The laity received only the consecrated bread. Communion under both species for the congregation wouldn't be restored until after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

No, this wine was going into speakeasies. Into private cellars. Into the glasses of Americans who had discovered that if you had the right connections to the right priest or the right rabbi, you could get your hands on legal alcohol.

The Wineries That Survived on Sacred Wine

Some wineries saw the exemption coming and positioned themselves to survive. Others scrambled when Prohibition hit. A few thrived.

San Antonio Winery: Named After a Saint

In 1917, Santo Cambianica, a devout Italian Catholic immigrant, founded San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles. There were about ninety wineries in the Los Angeles area at the time. When Prohibition ended in 1933, only six were still standing. San Antonio was one of them.

Cambianica's survival strategy was simple and brilliant. As soon as the Volstead Act passed, he struck a deal with his local parish. San Antonio Winery became the official supplier of sacramental wine. The fact that the winery was named after a Catholic saint and that Cambianica himself had deep ties to the Church didn't hurt.

Before Prohibition, San Antonio produced about five thousand cases of wine a year, mostly red table wine sold in jugs to local Italian immigrants and five area churches. By the time Prohibition ended, production had quadrupled to twenty thousand cases.

Today, San Antonio Winery is the largest supplier of sacramental wine in the United States. Close to fifteen percent of its annual production is still altar wine. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles uses San Antonio's wines exclusively and goes through twenty-five cases a month—over three hundred bottles—at a cost of about fifteen hundred dollars. Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik calls the winery "a treasure."

Steve Riboli, vice president of San Antonio Winery and great-nephew of the founder, puts it plainly: San Antonio "was a faith-based company. Literally."

Beaulieu Vineyard: The Archbishop's Friend

If San Antonio survived Prohibition, Beaulieu Vineyard thrived during it.

Georges de Latour founded Beaulieu in Napa's Rutherford district in 1900. He was a practicing French Catholic, and more importantly, he was a friend of the Archbishop of San Francisco—first Archbishop Patrick Riordan, then Archbishop Edward Hanna. These weren't casual acquaintances. These were letters of recommendation, exclusive contracts, and a business relationship that would make Beaulieu the first national wine distributor to the Catholic Church in America.

Beaulieu had been making sacramental wine since 1908, twelve years before Prohibition hit. When the ban came down, de Latour was ready. Between 1920 and 1933, Beaulieu's wine production grew by four hundred percent. Four hundred percent. During Prohibition.

The winery rebranded itself as "The House of Altar Wines." With government permits obtained before the ban took effect, Beaulieu shipped wine in barrels marked "FLOUR" to protect the shipments from Prohibition enforcers. It supplied parishes across the country with officially exempted sacramental wine and continued producing altar wines for nationwide use until 1978.

But de Latour wasn't content to serve only Catholic parishes. He was entrepreneurial. He also created kosher wine for the Jewish market. Whether that wine ever actually reached synagogues or went straight into speakeasies, who can say? De Latour didn't ask too many questions. He was a winemaker, not a policeman.

While neighboring vineyards went bankrupt and sold their land for pennies on the dollar, de Latour expanded. He bought the old Seneca Ewer Winery in 1923, sensing correctly that Prohibition might eventually end and positioning himself to explode when it did.

After repeal in 1933, Beaulieu was one of only twelve Napa wineries still standing. It became a legendary name in California wine, and its Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is still produced today.

Wiederkehr Wine Cellars: The Swiss Immigrant's Ecclesiastical Permit

In the hills of Arkansas, far from California's vine country, another winery survived Prohibition on sacramental wine.

Johann Andreas Wiederkehr came from Switzerland to Arkansas in 1880 and settled in Altus, in the Arkansas River Valley. The landscape reminded him of home—rolling hills, well-drained soil, a climate that could nurture grapes. He built a wine cellar into the hillside and began making wine, first from local berries, then from grapes he planted himself.

When Prohibition came, Wiederkehr obtained an ecclesiastical permit from Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of the Diocese of Little Rock. That permit allowed him to continue producing sacramental wine for religious services. The winery survived. His son Herman carried on the tradition, then Herman's sons Leo and Alcuin built it into the largest winery in the Southwest by the mid-1980s.

Wiederkehr Wine Cellars is still operating today. It's the oldest continually operating winery in Arkansas, in business from 1880 to the present. The original hand-dug wine cellar, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, now houses the Weinkeller Restaurant, serving Swiss-German cuisine.

The Christian Brothers: Mont La Salle and the Teaching Order

The De La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order, had been making wine in Martinez, California since 1882. In 1930, they purchased property on Mount Veeder in Napa Valley and moved their operations there, constructing a mission-style complex they christened Mont La Salle, after their founder, St. John Baptist de La Salle.

Because the Brothers produced sacramental wine, they were permitted to maintain production during Prohibition. They not only survived but grew, marketing commercial wines after repeal under the Christian Brothers label. Profits supported their schools, the formation program for new Brothers, and care for aging Brothers.

Brother Timothy Diener became winemaker in 1935 and served for over forty-five years. He was one of the most respected vintners in California and helped train a generation of winemakers including Robert Mondavi, Mike Grgich, and Joe Heitz. The Christian Brothers wines became one of the most successful and high-profile brands of the mid-twentieth century.

In 1989, the Christian Brothers sold their winery operations to Heublein, but the sacramental wine brand was purchased by four former Christian Brothers winery executives. Mont La Salle Altar Wines continues production today, along with Cribari Premium Altar Wines accounting for ninety percent of sacramental wine sales in the United States.

The Underground Economy: Priests, Bootleggers, and Thieves

Not every priest was a bootlegger, but enough were that the numbers tell the story.

In the first two years of Prohibition, sacramental wine consumption increased by eight hundred thousand gallons despite the fact that the laity wasn't even receiving Communion wine at that time. Edward Behr, in his book on Prohibition, concluded bluntly: "The amounts were so huge that it is clear that most of the priests must have been bootleggers as well."

William Faulkner's personal bootlegger was allegedly a young New Orleans priest who took customers' orders in the belfry of St. Louis Cathedral.

But the religious exemption didn't just create Catholic bootleggers. It also created fake religious leaders. Jewish congregations ballooned overnight. One synagogue in New York grew from eighty families to nine hundred families between 1920 and 1921. The number of rabbis exploded. Unlike the Catholic Church, which had formal ordination requirements, anyone could claim to be a rabbi. As writer Daniel Okrent noted, "If you said you are a rabbi, who was going to say you weren't a rabbi?"

By June 1922, the American Jewish Committee was documenting widespread abuse. Fake rabbis were obtaining wine permits "not only to obtain wine for family use, but also for illicit purposes, bootlegging, to call the traffic by its proper name." The committee's counsel testified that there were "Irish rabbis and rabbis of every description," and that "not only wine, but whiskey, and in some cases, champagne are released for religious uses."

The Federal Council of Churches admitted the obvious in 1925: most of the nearly three million gallons of sacramental wine being withdrawn from warehouses wasn't being used for sacraments at all.

And then there were the thieves.

Church warehouses became targets because they were the only legal repositories for large quantities of wine. In late December 1919, a New York wholesaler discovered that nine barrels of wine had been siphoned through a seventy-five-foot pipe from his basement to another cellar. He had a government permit to keep the wine for sacramental purposes, which protected him from Prohibition agents but not from criminals.

In 1921, four teenagers broke into a church in west Tampa and stole sacramental wine. They drank it, hoping to get drunk. They were disappointed by the quality but admitted "it was fine."

The violence got worse. In South Bend, Indiana, Father Florian Chodniewicz, a sixty-five-year-old pastor of St. Florence's Roman Catholic Church, was shot and killed by a bandit he surprised while the thief was looting the church's sacramental wine storeroom. The priest was shot in the hip and died. The killer was never caught.

The aged priest died protecting the Blood of Christ from a thief who saw only profit.

The Moral Paradox: Faith, Profit, and Survival

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the sacramental wine exemption saved the California wine industry, but it did so by creating a massive underground market that made a mockery of both religious sacrament and secular law.

Some bishops and priests genuinely struggled to obtain enough wine for legitimate liturgical use. Rural parishes in particular faced shortages as enforcement crackdowns made it harder to get permits and transport wine legally. There are documented cases of bishops writing desperate letters to federal officials seeking clarification and help.

A few parishes even resorted to using non-fermented grape juice, though this violated Canon Law and rendered the sacrament invalid. The Church teaches that valid matter is non-negotiable. To use invalid matter is to celebrate no Mass at all. Some pastors faced the terrible choice of using questionable wine or ceasing to offer Mass.

But the vast majority of sacramental wine wasn't going to struggling rural parishes. It was going to speakeasies, private homes, and the cellars of people who knew how to work the system. Permits issued to congregations were sold to bootleggers. Wine shipped to churches was diverted to illegal markets. The sacred and the profane became hopelessly tangled.

Did the wineries know? Of course they knew. Did the bishops know? Many of them must have known. Georges de Latour wasn't expanding Beaulieu's production by four hundred percent because Catholics suddenly started going to Mass more often.

Were they complicit? That depends on how you define complicity. Were they saving an industry and preserving jobs? Yes. Were they ensuring that when Prohibition ended—as it inevitably would—there would still be vineyards and vintners capable of producing quality wine? Absolutely. Were they looking the other way while sacred wine flowed into unholy uses? Almost certainly.

Some Catholics felt the law was unjust and saw no moral problem with circumventing it. If your grandparents came from Italy or Ireland or Germany and wine was part of your cultural and religious heritage, why should Protestant teetotalers have the right to criminalize your traditions? If the government was going to grant an exemption for religious use, why not take advantage of it?

But the Church's own teachings were clear: legitimate authority deserves obedience, and lying and theft are sins. St. Paul wrote in Romans 13: "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established."

The sacramental wine trade during Prohibition existed in a grey zone between survival and sin, between preserving sacred tradition and profiting from legal loopholes.

Prohibition's End and the Church's Legacy

On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition. The Noble Experiment had failed spectacularly. It had created an explosion of organized crime, corrupted law enforcement at every level, turned millions of ordinary citizens into criminals, and fundamentally failed to reduce alcohol consumption.

But the Catholic Church's sacramental wine exemption had accomplished something remarkable: it had kept alive an entire industry that would have otherwise died.

Of the 380 California wineries that existed when Prohibition was repealed, most had survived by producing sacramental wine, selling grapes for home winemaking, or finding other creative loopholes. The knowledge, the vines, the winemaking tradition—all had been preserved through thirteen years when they should have been destroyed.

After repeal, California's wine industry exploded. The vineyards that had been planted during Prohibition to meet the demand for home winemaking grapes were already mature and producing. Winemakers who had honed their skills making altar wine now turned their expertise to commercial production.

The theological truth remained unchanged: wine is essential to the Eucharist. Canon 924 still requires natural grape wine. The Catechism still teaches transubstantiation. The Catholic Church still believes that what appears to be wine is, in substance, the Blood of Jesus Christ.

San Antonio Winery still produces sacramental wine—about fifteen percent of its total production. Mont La Salle Altar Wines and Cribari Premium Altar Wines together supply ninety percent of the sacramental wine used in American Catholic churches. The legacy of Prohibition lives on every Sunday in every Catholic church in America, in every chalice raised by every priest, in every drop of wine that becomes the Precious Blood.

The Lessons for Today

What does this strange chapter of American history teach us?

First, that religious freedom is non-negotiable. When the government tries to regulate religious practice—even indirectly—it inevitably creates conflicts, compromises, and corruptions. The sacramental wine exemption was necessary because the Eighteenth Amendment was unjust. A government that bans the matter of a sacrament is a government that has overstepped its authority.

Second, that loopholes in unjust laws will always be exploited. Human nature being what it is, people will find ways around rules they consider illegitimate. The fake rabbis, bootlegging priests, and diverted sacramental wine were predictable consequences of trying to ban something millions of people wanted and saw no moral reason to abstain from.

Third, that the Church's commitment to the Eucharist is absolute. Even in the face of hostile laws, political pressure, and cultural opposition, the Catholic Church would not compromise on the necessity of wine for the Mass. The bishops didn't cave. The priests didn't substitute grape juice. The faithful didn't accept a symbolic ceremony in place of the Real Presence.

The Blood of Christ could not be outlawed. The sacrament survived. The Church endured.

And in enduring, it preserved something more than just its own liturgy. It preserved an industry, a tradition, and a culture that would have been lost. The California wine country we know today—Napa, Sonoma, the Central Coast—exists in part because Catholic bishops insisted on their right to consecrate real wine, because winemakers pivoted to produce altar wine, and because the government, for all its Prohibition zeal, couldn't quite bring itself to ban the Blood of Christ.

There's a deeper truth here, one that goes beyond wine and vineyards and loopholes. It's the truth that what is sacred cannot be profaned by secular law. What God has ordained, man cannot destroy. The Eucharist was instituted by Jesus Christ Himself at the Last Supper. It is the source and summit of Christian life. It is the Real Presence of God among us. It is not subject to amendment, compromise, or revision by any government, any court, any legislature, any popular vote.

Prohibition tried to ban the cup of salvation. It failed. The wine continued to flow, from vineyard to cellar to warehouse to church to chalice to priest to God. The transubstantiation continued. The miracle continued. The Church continued.

And when Prohibition ended, the vines that had sustained the sacrament became the foundation for an industry that would make California wine world-famous. The sacred preserved the secular. The Blood of Christ saved the California vintage.

That's not irony. That's providence.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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