Category: Food Industry

• The Grape Juice Church Plot

  The Grape Juice Church Plot was the belief that national Prohibition represented not only a moral and political victory for temperance reformers, but a hidden commercial victory for Welch’s and other grape juice interests that stood to benefit from the weakening of wine culture in the United States. In its strongest form, the theory argued that Protestant temperance activism, church adoption of unfermented grape juice, and Prohibition-era regulation combined to displace sacramental wine, damage the domestic wine trade, and normalize grape juice as the respectable religious and social substitute. The theory drew strength from the real pre-Prohibition rise of Welch’s as an alcohol-free communion product and from the real damage Prohibition did to American wine production, even though parts of the grape and wine industry adapted through legal concentrates and “wine bricks.”