When the massive earthquake struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906, the initial tremors ruptured the municipal water mains, leaving chief engineer Dennis T. Sullivan's fire department virtually helpless against the rising inferno. With water pressure nonexistent, firefighters and panicked property owners turned to alternative liquid reserves stored throughout the city's vast commercial districts.
Near Telegraph Hill and the North Beach waterfront, massive wine storage warehouses held millions of gallons of fermented grape juice. At the A. Carmine & Co.
winery and the nearby Italian Swiss Colony storage facilities, owners and local volunteers breached giant wooden vats containing red wine. Pumping wine through hand pumps and buckets, teams sprayed thousands of gallons onto endangered wood-frame structures. In several neighborhoods, residents soaked heavy burlap sacks, blankets, and bedsheets directly in cabernet and zinfandel, using the wine-drenched textiles to smother embers landing on rooftops and wooden cornices.
At the famous Italian-American winery vats on Montgomery Avenue, an estimated two hundred thousand gallons of wine were sacrificed to extinguish advancing flames surrounding historic residential blocks. The sticky, caramelizing sugars within the boiled wine formed a crude flame-retardant layer over exposed timber frames, successfully saving several structures from total destruction. While the strategy left whole streets smelling of burnt sangria and turned brick walls purple, the improvisational logistics of substituting wine for water preserved crucial enclaves of San Francisco that would otherwise have burned to ashes before navy water tenders arrived at the bay docks.