Sonoma seeks to honor Chinese laborers who shaped wine industry

1. Who were the Chinese laborers who built California wine country?
2. What did Chinese laborers contribute to the wine industry?
3. What is the story of the wine caves?
4. How was this history erased?
5. What recognition efforts are underway today?
6. Frequently asked questions
7. Where to see this history today

Who Were the Chinese Laborers Who Built California Wine Country?

A full decade before the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Chinese immigrants were already working in the vineyards of Sonoma Valley. Most came from the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province, part of a wave of sojourners — men with an economic strategy to earn money abroad and send remittances home to support their families. They came to California during the Gold Rush, stayed to build railroads, and then found new employment in the vineyards and wineries of Sonoma and Napa.

They arrived in wine country through labor contractors — men like Ho Po of San Francisco, who in 1857 sent 150 workers to build Buena Vista Winery for Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy. Haraszthy was an early champion of Chinese labor; he publicly defended his employment practices in newspapers and agricultural groups even as political opposition mounted, and reportedly began carrying a gun to protect himself from threats. He eventually fled to Nicaragua in 1868 as the hostility became untenable.

By the 1870s, thousands of Chinese workers were employed across Sonoma and Napa Valleys. When the Napa Valley Railroad construction crews reached St. Helena in 1868, workers who had finished building railroad infrastructure in the Sierra Nevada mountains found new employment digging wine caves and tending vines in Napa. By 1880, a small Chinatown had emerged at the confluence of the Napa River and Napa Creek, with shops frequented by both Chinese and white residents. Smaller Chinatowns existed in Calistoga and St. Helena.

What Did Chinese Laborers Contribute to the Wine Industry?

The scope of what Chinese laborers accomplished in California wine country was not limited to a single task. According to UC Davis history professor Cecilia Tsu, who studies Asian Americans in the West, Chinese immigrants were “indispensable on multiple levels. They built roads, cleared land for farming, and planted, pruned, and harvested grapes. They did backbreaking, physical labor, as well as horticultural work that required significant knowledge and skill.”

The scale of this labor force was extraordinary. At its peak, Chinese workers made up an estimated 80% of the vineyard workforce in Sonoma Valley. The impact was equally remarkable: Sonoma’s wine production growth in the 1860s was directly enabled by the availability of this labor force. As historian Richard Street has written, Chinese labor allowed Sonoma to “leapfrog” other California wine regions in the critical early decades of the industry’s development.

What Is the Story of the Wine Caves?

The wine caves are where this history is most literally visible today. At Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, the original cave network — encompassing a Champagne cellar with three caves, a press house with two caves, and at least one sealed or collapsed additional cave — was excavated by Chinese workers in the 1860s. The 15-by-30-foot chambers carved through volcanic rock bear the pickaxe marks of the workers who dug them. Buena Vista’s general manager Tom Blackwood has noted plainly: “Workers literally dug the caves by hand. They still have the original markings. Those were the same skills they were using through the railroad.”

At Schramsberg Vineyards in Calistoga — where the sparkling wines served to presidents are still aged — the cave network was dug in 1870 by Chinese workers who had recently completed railroad work in the Sierra Nevada. A Chinese bunkhouse still stands on the Schramsberg property. Schramsberg’s website acknowledges the Chinese laborers who dug Napa’s first hillside caves for wine aging and storage — making it one of the few wineries to do so explicitly and prominently.

Both Buena Vista and Schramsberg offer visitors access to these historic spaces. Standing inside a cave that a Chinese laborer carved by hand more than 150 years ago is one of the few places in California wine country where this invisible history becomes physically present.

How Was This History Erased?

The erasure was both legal and social. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the only US law to bar immigration based on a specific nationality — ended Chinese immigration and made existing Chinese residents ineligible for citizenship, land ownership, or the documentation that would have preserved their stories. Workers who left California when conditions became intolerable took their possessions with them; they had no permanent stake in the land and no legal right to one.

Before the federal law arrived, organized local pressure had already been building for years. Anti-Chinese leagues formed across California, accusing Chinese workers of undermining wages — Chinese workers earned approximately $30 per month against $50 for white workers, a disparity that was used to justify both political opposition and periodic violence. In San Francisco and Santa Rosa and Petaluma, anti-Chinese agitation became organized and occasionally violent. In Sonoma Valley itself, Haraszthy’s determined defense of his Chinese workforce provided a degree of protection through the 1860s and early 1870s — historians have noted that organized anti-Chinese agitation was relatively limited in Sonoma Valley compared to surrounding areas. But once Haraszthy fled and the federal political tide turned with the 1882 Act, Chinese workers left wine country in large numbers. Some were starved out — contemporary accounts describe Chinese residents “chewing on weeds down by the riverbanks” as organized boycotts made it impossible to find employment or buy food.

What remained after the exodus was a history with almost no written record, because those who lived it had been denied the legal status that would have generated documentation. No known descendants of Chinese workers who labored in Sonoma Valley in the 19th century still live in the area. Most of the men were sojourners — single men who intended to return to China and sent their wages home. They left behind their pickaxe marks in the cave walls, some faded photographs taken by others, and a wine industry that has spent 150 years being attributed almost entirely to European immigrants.

What Recognition Efforts Are Underway Today?

A wave of recognition has been building since the mid-2010s and has accelerated significantly in recent years. The efforts are modest in scale relative to the history they acknowledge, but they represent a meaningful shift in how California wine country is beginning to tell its own story.

Buena Vista Winery has been active in this acknowledgment as well. Jean-Charles Boisset, whose family company acquired Buena Vista in 2011, has stated: “We feel it’s more important than ever to talk about the reason we exist and the people who contributed to it — Chinese, Hungarian, French.” Photographs of Chinese men working in the vineyards and bottling wine are displayed in the tasting room, and the historic cave tours explicitly address the labor history of the space.

Frequently Asked Questions About Chinese Labor and California Wine History

🍷 Where to Experience This History Today

Wineries and sites where Chinese labor history is visible, acknowledged, and accessible to visitors