The Chinese Roots of Northern California’s Wine Industry Run Deep

A Chinese character engraved on the stone wall of a press house. A knocker on a wine cellar door in the shape of a koi fish. A long abandoned Chinese bunkhouse now used to store winery signage.

These are all traces of a nearly forgotten history. Though it’s rarely spoken of today, a majority Chinese labor force planted Northern California’s iconic wine country.

The immigrants worked in all aspects of the vineyards: clearing the land, planting the vines, digging the cellars and making the wine. A full decade before the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Chinese laborers were toiling in the fields of Sonoma Valley.

“By the 1880s, Chinese were 80% of the labor force in agriculture of that region,” said David Lei, a board member of the Chinese Historical Society of America.

Lei is one of a growing number of historians and activists attempting to preserve this vital chapter of California’s history. The stories of these Chinese wine workers, they believe, offer a compelling counterpoint to the prevailing notion that wine country was mostly the creation of European immigrants. In today’s political landscape, Lei said, the contributions Chinese immigrants made in building our country have never felt more important to highlight.

“Agriculture is what makes this state great,” Lei said. “And the Chinese laborers that were here were often more skilled than their bosses, because they came from a background of agriculture.”

Census records show that Chinese Americans made up more than 25% of Sonoma County’s population by the 1880s; today that figure is less than 1%. Over the course of 30 years in the late 19th century, Chinese laborers helped build the wine industry from the ground up — and then they were almost entirely forgotten.

A Sonoma start 

The first Chinese laborers working in wine country came to Sonoma Valley, where many of them were contracted by labor broker Ho Po to work at the Buena Vista winery.

Labor brokers like Po were paid by the head to place workers where they were needed most, said Lei.

Count Agoston Haraszthy, the founder of Buena Vista who is heralded as the Hungarian “father of California viticulture,” employed the Chinese labor force to plant 70,000 vines in 1860 and 135,000 vines in 1861, according to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society.

“He taught the Chinese everything,” Lei said of Haraszthy. Winemaker Charles Stuart, who became one of the largest producers in the state, also hired Chinese laborers at his nearby Glen Oaks Ranch and later spoke eloquently in their defense at the California Constitutional Convention of 1878–79: “Tell me; tell me; oh, tell me, why they are not protected like others in their honest toil? Or is this to be the final sum of all villainy? I call upon our Government to give them the ballot, that they may protect themselves.”

There were many benefits to hiring Chinese workers, Lei said. Chinese laborers fulfilled their contracts and tended not to strike. While some indulged in opium, they mostly didn’t drink — so there was less violence and no hangovers.

They were paid about a third less than their white counterparts, and employers didn’t have to provide room and board, since the Chinese workers ate their own food and stayed in their own camps.

The workers’ eating habits, in turn, ensured their health: porcelain dishware didn’t absorb contaminated water and boiled tea water kept bacteria at bay.

When Jack Ding — current Sonoma City Council member and former mayor — first moved to the area in 2008, he knew nothing about the legacy of Chinese labor in the vineyards. But people kept coming up to him and telling him stories, like about how Haraszthy would carry a gun not only to protect himself but his Chinese workers.

Photographs on display at Buena Vista today — by celebrated photographer Eadweard Muybridge, famous for capturing horses’ hooves in motion for the first time — show Chinese laborers working in the winery. The caves the Chinese workers dug by hand are still used to house wine barrels today. “It took 200 workers three months to dig the wine cave,” Ding said.

Some of the stories Ding has heard veer into legend — like the Chinese laborers who were rumored to have died digging underground tunnels to connect Buena Vista to the town of Sonoma. None of this was ever confirmed, but in a history where sources are scarce, every piece matters.

Growth — and erasure

Napa Valley’s development as a wine region followed Sonoma’s — and so did its story of Chinese labor. In the 1870s, the work force that had finished building the Transcontinental Railroad found new employment in Napa wineries.

“They needed this source of labor and because the Gold Rush was still going on, they couldn’t get a white labor force,” said John McCormick, author of Chinese in Napa Valley: The Forgotten Community That Built Wine Country.

McCormick, who grew up in Napa Valley, wrote his master’s thesis on the region’s Chinese history. “It was this perfect storm of this incredible vacuum of available labor and this need for labor.”

The work the Chinese laborers had begun in Sonoma continued in Napa, where by 1880 a small Chinatown had emerged at the confluence of the Napa River and Napa Creek. Filled with shops frequented by both Chinese and white people, many of the buildings were built on stilts due to the frequent flooding, filled with shops and laundries. A little further to the north, Calistoga and St. Helena also had their own Chinatowns.

Evidence of the Chinese laborers’ work is visible today in places like Schramsberg Vineyards and Cellars in Calistoga. Pickaxe marks are visible inside the caves where the winery now stores the sparkling wine it has served to presidents. A Chinese bunkhouse still stands on the property.

Yet after decades of work in Sonoma and Napa Valleys, everything changed in 1882 with the introduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law abruptly ended all Chinese immigration — and erased the story of the labor force that built wine country, too.

Many of the early wineries went out of business in the 1890s, McCormick said, because of an economic depression and the early precursors of the Prohibition movement. Since the Chinese weren’t allowed to own property, they couldn’t take advantage of the vineyards for sale at bargain prices — but Italian immigrants could. “The Italians then became known as the founding ethnic group of Napa Valley,” McCormick said. “You could completely ignore the Chinese contribution, because they were gone.”

Many of the laborers eventually moved back to China. The vast majority who stayed were single men who had come alone and never had children who could pass down their stories.

While the workers were often literate, the Chinese laborers left behind no writings and few physical artifacts. That means researchers have to rely on sources like newspapers and official records, which often have a prejudicial slant or downplay the very existence of the workers.

“Though they all made a huge contribution, they list them all in the census as John Chinaman, no specific name,” Ding said.

“But history is just like a puzzle,” he said. “If you’re missing a piece you can’t tell the story.”

Memory and future 

It’s against that sea of anonymity — and in honor of everything this labor force accomplished — that a wave of memorials has been initiated to acknowledge this history. A plaque looking out over Napa’s former Chinatown was installed in 2023 to honor the laborers who worked in wine country, and a memorial tombstone to the Chinese laborers buried in the St. Helena cemetery was dedicated in 2024.

There are additional plaques planned for Calistoga and St. Helena, as well as an honorary pavilion in Sonoma. Both Ding and McCormick spoke of the idea of creating heritage trails based around the memorials that could be a tourist destination for visitors interested in learning more.

“Wine is this great Western enterprise of our California culture,” said Connie Young Yu, the author of Chinatown, San Jose, USA. “But the acknowledgement has never been to the laborers who built it. We were the primary force in developing agriculture in the West, but people think of us as laundrymen.”

Chinese contributions to the wine industry are not just a static totem of the past; they are part of a vibrant present. When Paul Gee, the first Chinese American vintner in the U.S., bought a 16-acre vineyard in the Napa Valley around 1980, he was the only Asian around. But unlike the immigrant labor force in the 1860s, Gee didn’t feel like he was treated any differently because of his ethnicity — and he partnered with his Kentucky-born friend James “Harry” St. Clair to begin his venture.

“It’s the beauty of an all-American and a Chinese American working together to plant this vineyard,” said his daughter, Stephanie Gee.

At 87, wearing a perpetual smile and a maroon Grape Grower hat, Paul Gee doesn’t seem in search of any label or recognition — though he’s received plenty of honors over the years.

“In China, we had a little rice field,” he said. “So it’s from the rice field to the grape field.”

Winemakers like Gee are the target audience for a newly formed group by Susan Lin, a certified Master of Wine and president of the nonprofit Asian Wine Association of America, which she founded last year.

“There’s something for Mexican American vintners and something for African American vintners, so we asked ourselves — why isn’t there something for Asians?” she said. “A lot of people really liked that idea.”

The group has signed on members like Napa’s first Vietnamese-owned winery and the Thai-Japanese Sunset Cellars. Yet obstacles remain.

“One of the biggest challenges is Asians tend to want to put their head down and assimilate,” Lin said. Education remains a central opportunity — and a hurdle.

Northern California’s wine industry draws more than 3 million tourists and $2 billion of spending into the region annually. As those visitors sip their Chardonnay, they may not realize the grapes in their glass were planted by Chinese hands. But perhaps, with more time and effort, they will.

“Most people just don’t assume Asian and wine together in the same sentence,” Lin said. “But we’ve always been a fact of the industry.”