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1050 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 7, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Ernest Gallo, 97, Dies; He and His Brother Founded a California Powerhouse in Wines
BYLINE: AP
SECTION: Section C; Column 1; National Desk; Pg. 11
LENGTH: 925 words
DATELINE: BERKELEY, Calif., March 6
Ernest Gallo, who with his brother Julio started a winery seven decades ago that now sells one of every four bottles of wine that Americans drink, died yesterday at his home on Modesto, Calif. He was 97.

''He passed away peacefully this afternoon surrounded by his family,'' said Susan Hensley, vice president of public relations for E.& J. Gallo Winery.

Somber, secretive and seemingly humorless, with little more than a high school education, Mr. Gallo -- working closely with his brother, Julio -- created a wine empire that became one of the world's largest.

While Julio, who died in an auto accident in 1993, preferred the winemaking, Ernest had a head for business. His entrepreneurial skills, instinctive command of marketing and distribution, and his compulsive need to be the best at what he did, created the large company that he controlled at the time of his death.

And the company, entirely family controlled, was indeed large. Industry analysts estimate that Gallo produces some 80 million cases of wine a year, which is about 220,000 cases or 2.64 million bottles every day. The company reportedly owns 10,000 acres of vineyards in California and buys grapes from hundreds of independent growers.

According to Forbes magazine, Gallo had sales of about $980 million in 2005 with a net profit of $44 million. In 2006, according to Forbes, Ernest Gallo was No. 283 on its list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.

The company also imported wine from France, Italy and New Zealand and, last year, according to one estimate, exported some seven million cases of wine to some 85 countries.

Survivors include Mr. Gallo's son, Joseph; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Gallo's wife, Amelia, died in 1993. A son, David, died in 1997.

According to the legend, the two brothers, virtually penniless farm boys from the Central Valley of California, scraped together $5,900 and started their winery in a rented shed in Modesto. It was 1933 and repeal of Prohibition was weeks away. Ernest was 24, Julio 23; the two knew nothing about winemaking, according to the story, and relied on a pamphlet from the Modesto Public Library to explain their trade.

But in fact, they were from the second generation of an Italian immigrant family long immersed in the wine business.

Ernest Gallo was born on March 18, 1909, to Giuseppe Gallo, known as Joseph, and Assunta Bianco Gallo, who was called Susie, in Jackson, Calif. The father, and his younger brother, Michael, had a business buying wine from small wineries and selling it in bars in Oakland and San Francisco. As early as 1906, they operated as the Gallo Wine Company.

Their mother's family, the Biancos, were successful winemakers, and when their maternal grandfather died in 1916, he left 9,000 gallons of red wine ready to be sold.

In the 1920s, Ernest's parents bought a farm near Modesto and like their neighbors, began to grow grapes. Their fruit was loaded on railcars and shipped east (private winemaking was still allowed during Prohibition). The railheads in Eastern cities, from Boston to the Carolinas, from Pittsburgh to Cleveland and Buffalo, were dominated by thugs who took a cut of whatever was sold. By the time he was 17, Ernest was traveling with the grapes to ensure the family received top dollar.

At first, Prohibition meant prosperity for the growers, but the Depression ended that. Ernest's parents were saddled with a nonproductive farm and apparently heavily in debt. On the morning of June 21, 1933, in the kitchen of the farmhouse, Joseph Gallo shot and killed his wife and then himself, leaving three sons, Ernest, Julio, and their younger brother, Joseph, then 12.

That was also the year that Prohibition was repealed and the two older brothers, with $5,900, most of it borrowed from Ernest's mother-in-law, opened a winery.

Hundreds of wineries were starting, but as Ernest said years later: ''We could do anything anyone else could do, not because I was brilliant or well-educated, but because I was willing to devote as much time and energy as was necessary, regardless of the sacrifice.''

''We could afford one tractor,'' he said, ''and there were times when I drove it for 12 hours, then turned it over to Julio who drove it for another 12 hours.''

The brothers were successful from the start, but in those days were no match for industry giants like Petri, Cribari and Italian Swiss Colony.

But the company's introduction of Thunderbird wine would change that. In 1957, the Gallos developed the brand, a concoction of inexpensive fortified white wine with added citrus flavors.

It was named after the Ford sports car and was aimed directly at ''the misery market,'' according to ''Blood and Wine,'' Ellen Hawkes's unauthorized biography of the family. By the end of 1957, Ms. Hawkes reported, Gallo was making 32 million gallons of Thunderbird.

By the mid-1970s, the Gallos realized that the market for cheap table wines and the sweet fortified wine market would not sustain the company. America was moving upscale in its wines and Ernest insisted Gallo go along. Over the next 20 years. Gallo moved into the fine wine market.

Ernest himself, aside from his service on the Wine Institute, the industry's promotional arm, usually kept apart from the rest of the wine business. Only in his last years did he begin to appear at wine events, often in the company of Robert Mondavi, another winemaker, who had long urged him to become more open to the trade and to his customers.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (93%); WINE (90%); WINERIES (90%); ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES (89%); CHILDREN (89%); ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE INDUSTRY (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); IMPORT TRADE (75%); COMPANY EARNINGS (72%); GRAPE VINEYARDS (71%); EXPORT TRADE (69%); FARMERS & RANCHERS (68%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (67%); INDUSTRY ANALYSTS (67%); COMPANY PROFITS (65%); SECONDARY SCHOOLS (57%) Deaths (Obituaries); Alcoholic Beverages; Wines; Biographical Information
COMPANY: E & J GALLO WINERY (57%)
ORGANIZATION: Gallo, Ernest & Julio, Wine Cellars
PERSON: Julio Gallo; Frank J Prial
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (79%); SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (92%) CALIFORNIA, USA (97%) UNITED STATES (97%); NEW ZEALAND (79%); FRANCE (53%)
LOAD-DATE: March 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Ernest Gallo founded E.& J. Gallo Winery with his brother Julio. (Photo by The Modesto Bee, via Associated Press)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1051 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 7, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

The Professional Pull of Toffee
BYLINE: By Florence Fabricant
SECTION: Section F; Column 3; Dining, Dining Out/Cultural Desk; FOOD STUFF; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 103 words
Laurie Pauker took things into her own hands when she could not find toffee that she liked. After a year of study she began making toffee sticks dipped in dark chocolate, with just the right balance of sweet touched with salt. She produces the toffee, which she named Lush, at a commercial kitchen set up for small entrepreneurs, Mi Kitchen Es Su Kitchen, in Long Island City, Queens. The toffee, in three- and five-ounce boxes, are about $5 and $7 at Mani Marketplace, and $5.50 and $9.99 at the Boyd's on Columbus Avenue, both on the Upper West Side; and $5.99 and $7.99 at Butterfield Market on the Upper East Side.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: FOOD INDUSTRY (84%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (54%) Candy; Prices (Fares, Fees and Rates)
PERSON: Florence Fabricant; Laurie Pauker
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (73%) NEW YORK, USA (78%) UNITED STATES (78%) New York City
LOAD-DATE: March 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo (Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1052 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 7, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Some Like It Hot (He Likes It Steaming)
BYLINE: By WILLIAM GRIMES
SECTION: Section E; Column 6; The Arts/Cultural Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 921 words
Tales From the Torrid ZoneTravels in the Deep TropicsBy Alexander Frater 384 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

It's the heat and the humidity. Alexander Frater settles that question early on in ''Tales From the Torrid Zone'' as he wanders, in seven-league boots, across the earth's fat, sweaty midsection, swatting flies and mosquitoes all the way. That's not even the half of it. Along with the palm trees and the beaches and the relentless heat, the tropics also feature ''extreme weather, geological instability and a whole host of ghastly afflictions,'' Mr. Frater writes.

And yet he counts himself a ''tropophiliac,'' a lover of warm, wet countries, where disease, poverty, political chaos, decay and inertia are the rule rather than the exception. He cannot help himself.

''I sat and listened to a fitful southerly trade leafing through palm fronds, heard the occasional whump of a falling coconut and knew again the pleasing sense of being parked in one of the world's lay-bys,'' he writes after a hard day in Fiji. ''Those of us born in the tropics have lassitude bred into our very bones, and now, yielding to it, I felt the old waypoints -- sunrise and sunset, the rhythm of the tides -- quietly reimpose themselves.''

This is clear evidence of what the French call the coup de bambou, a mild mania for the tropics that grips Mr. Frater and animates his diverting, loose-limbed tour of the earth's hot zones.

As a travel writer for The Observer in London, Mr. Frater has set foot in some 70 of the 169 countries and territories that lie wholly or partly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the two belts on either side of the Equator. Some he counts as home. The son and grandson of Presbyterian missionaries, originally from Scotland, he grew up in present-day Vanuatu, and at least half of his book deals with the islands scattered like loose change across the South Pacific.

His unstructured itinerary also takes him up the Amazon, down the Irrawaddy, across the ocean to Zanzibar and onward to dozens of other remote locations, where he observes, describes and ponders. Part memoir, part travelogue, ''Tales From the Torrid Zone'' is a pleasing grab bag of a book, a jumble of funny encounters, strange sights, forgotten history and really bad food.

Mr. Frater, a genial tour guide and a stylish writer, makes excellent company. He maintains his composure on decrepit airplanes spewing oil and gasoline. He dines complacently on stewed flying fox. Best of all, he keeps his eyes open. In an airport in Vanuatu, while conversing with a manic American, he spies an elegantly dressed woman approaching the check-in counter with a sleeping piglet in a basket. When the piglet wakes up, ''making noises like a fire alarm,'' its owner calmly pops a Ferrero Rocher chocolate in its mouth.

In a bar on the island of Paama, he looks up long enough from his book to take in a terrific fight around the pool table, which he recounts economically.

''A huge woman grasped a billiard cue in a two-handed axman's grip, and, as if splitting a log, brought it down on the bald head of an old, wrinkled man,'' he writes. ''He went 'Ungh!' and slumped to his knees. Both sexes began trading blows, the females punching harder and meaner and lower. Soon the males began limping back to the table where the women, impassive, joined them; quietly they resumed their game.''

Mr. Frater can listen too. On the island of Pentecost, a local entrepreneur extols the virtues of the local beverage made from kava root. Drinking kava, he claims, has allowed his grandfather to live to the age of 200. That means that Grandpa is almost old enough to have seen Captain Cook, Mr. Frater points out. ''I think he has mentioned him,'' the man replies coolly.

In Burma a plaintive pop singer captivates Mr. Frater. ''Her anguish had a kind of Wagnerian resonance,'' he writes. The song, he finds out, is ''Mummy, My Car Has Broken Down.'' Rain comes off the leaves of the palm tree, he observes, ''in an interesting tonal way.''

Mr. Frater takes his comedy where he can find it. As often as not, he turns up in the midst of lethal political conflicts or surveying the miseries of failed postcolonial states crippled by disease, poor education, bad roads and bleak economic prospects. Palm trees are not enough.

One of his more fascinating chapters describes, with a certain relish, several of the 40 tropical diseases that flourish in the torrid zone. He listens in fascination as a French doctor tells of transporting a woman to a hospital with an ax in her head.

More often than not, corrupt leaders preside over misery with serene indifference. Mr. Frater pays a visit to one of them, the King of Tonga, who speaks vaguely of earning billions by extracting natural gas from seawater. ''He wore a gold Rolex on either wrist and, occasionally, would glance at both to indicate I was asking dumb questions in two time zones, or lapse into one of his famous transcendental silences,'' Mr. Frater writes. The audience is brief.

Mr. Frater has a wonderful plan for a tropical afterlife. He would like his ashes to be buried under a palm tree. ''That would not only help nourish one of the world's most bountiful trees, but perhaps even allow me to wander eternally through the Torrid Zone,'' he writes.

Fleets of bobbing coconuts go on voyages lasting for years, riding the ocean currents for thousands of miles before washing up on dry land. Mr. Frater's best trip may lie ahead of him. He certainly deserves it.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: GEOLOGY & GEOPHYSICS (70%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); BOOK REVIEWS (78%); LITERATURE (68%) Books and Literature; Reviews
PERSON: William Grimes; Alexander Frater
GEOGRAPHIC: LONDON, ENGLAND (53%) PACIFIC OCEAN (79%); EQUATOR (79%) VANUATU (90%); FIJI (79%); UNITED STATES (79%); ENGLAND (53%); UNITED KINGDOM (53%)
LOAD-DATE: March 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Alexander Frater (Photo by Anne Miller)(pg. E6)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1053 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 7, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

What's So Bad About Big?
BYLINE: By MATTHEW L. WALD
SECTION: Section H; Column 2; The Business of Green; RENEWABLE ENERGY; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1788 words
''SMALL is beautiful,'' wrote the economist E. F. Schumacher almost 35 years ago. In most areas of the economy, he reasoned, production had become too big and too centralized.

But he might have been wrong about the subject he knew most about: energy. When it comes to alternative ways of generating power, big may be better.

Wind, solar and other renewable-energy technologies that were once considered more appropriate for single homes or small communities are reaching levels of scale and centralizing that were formerly the province of coal- and gas-fired plants and nuclear reactors. In other words, green is going giant.

The companies that are building or dreaming up large projects argue that there are economies of scale to be gained.

In the desert north of Tucson, Arizona Public Service, an electric utility, is using an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight and heat mineral oil up to 550 degrees; the heat vaporizes a liquid hydrocarbon, which runs a generator to make electricity.

But this is no rooftop operation. There are six rows of mirrors, each nearly a quarter-mile long, totaling nearly 100,000 square feet. The project produces one megawatt of power -- enough to run a hospital or a large shopping center -- but the company that installed it, now called Acciona Solar Power (formerly Solargenix), expects to open a 350-acre plant in Boulder City, Nev., soon, producing 64 megawatts with similar technology. And Arizona Public Service is one of about a half-dozen utilities that is considering a joint project to build a 250-megawatt plant based on the same technology.

Such projects run counter to some ideas of how alternative energy should be developed. Jeremy Rifkin, the author and futurist who believes that millions of people will soon be generating their own hydrogen from renewable energy, said that waste was built into large central projects because of electrical transmission losses.

''If you go and put it in the desert and bring it back in, you lose 7 to 9 percent on the way,'' he said.

More to the point, Mr. Rifkin said, home-grown energy is going to be cheaper. ''It's a question of who owns and controls it at the end of the line,'' he said. ''If you own it on your own, it's going to be at a cheaper price than if the utility company is going to sell it to you.''

But it is not just corporations that are finding that bigger may be better.

Hull, Mass., is about as far from an oil or gas well as it is possible to get in the United States. Its municipal utility decided in the early 1980s to build a wind turbine, making an asset from the strong breeze coming off the ocean north of Boston. The machine it built could generate 40 kilowatts, enough for a handful of homes.

Five years ago, Hull tried again, still wanting to cut energy costs and also the emissions of greenhouse gases that might one day cause the Atlantic Ocean, which surrounds the town on three sides, to creep up the beaches. It built a wind machine 16 times larger, 660 kilowatts. While the 1985 turbine was on a structure that looked a bit like a ham-radio operator's antenna, the new one, named Hull 1, was on a 150-foot tower.

But it was too small. Last year the town installed Hull 2, which at 1.8 megawatts is three times larger. Now Hull is considering four new turbines that can produce 3.6 megawatts each. ''The small one we have, purely aesthetically, is kind of an ugly thing,'' said John B. Murdock, manager of the municipal electric system. With their slow-moving, graceful blades, he said, ''the big ones are much more attractive.''

They also make better economic sense, he said. Earlier this year, the town put up a tiny turbine, 1,800 watts, as an educational tool, for $15,000. If 1,000 families in the area put up such machines, they would have the same output as Hull 2, at a cost of $15 million. Hull 2 cost about $3 million.

Hull's economics are being repeated around New England and the world. Farther down the Massachusetts coast in Nantucket Sound, for example, entrepreneurs are trying to build the Cape Wind project, 130 turbines producing 3.6 megawatts each.

At Siemens Power Generation, which builds equipment for wind turbines and other generators, Randy Zwirn, the chief executive, said that the only limit to wind-turbine size might be how long a blade could be transported to the site. The company's 3.6-megawatt machine uses a blade that is about 175 feet long.

Other companies want to build even bigger wind turbines with capacities as high as seven megawatts. A larger machine would be even higher -- perhaps 250 feet -- and could take advantage of the fact that winds are 20 percent stronger at 250 feet than at 150 feet, said Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, an associate professor at Stanford's department of civil and environmental engineering.

But in Nantucket Sound, 3.6-megawatt turbines are considered big enough. On a windy day, the 130 machines would produce as much power as a modest-size plant burning coal or natural gas.

There is certainly no point in making the project smaller, said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind.

''You've got costs that include staging, marine construction, placing an electric transmission infrastructure below the seabed, acquisition of maintenance vessels, use of a port facility, spare parts, storage, manning an operations center, insurance and taxes,'' he said.

For many of those items, if the project were 50 percent larger or 50 percent smaller, the costs would vary little. ''These are things that you're going to have to do, whether it's a very small or a very large offshore wind farm,'' Mr. Rodgers said. ''The best bang for the buck is go to large.''

While mirrors in the desert cannot operate at the rooftop scale, the kind that can, photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight into energy, may also work better on a big scale, experts say.

A single-home installation is fine, they say, but not cost-effective. It can become so through large-scale deployment of the kind envisioned by Bud Annan, who was the solar program director at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.

Mr. Annan said that the cost of a rooftop solar project was divided between the manufacturing of solar cells and installation. Some progress has been made in reducing manufacturing costs, but both parts of the equation must come down in price, he said.

Now living in Scottsdale, Ariz., Mr. Annan is working with a utility and local real estate developers to try to incorporate solar roofs into 10,000 new houses, all at once. That way, he said, the installers can go from house to house the way carpenters, plumbers and electricians do. ''He can standardize his installation, and that whole second half of the equation becomes more manageable for him,'' Mr. Annan said.

Clusters of houses might share a bank of batteries, so that they could guarantee a steady power output. Power that a utility can count on is worth more than power that is unpredictable. Solar energy that is connected to a battery system is available even after the sun sets, making it sell for a higher price.

Roger Little, chief executive of the Spire Corporation, a solar cell manufacturer near Boston, said his systems cost $7 or $8 per watt of installed capacity when put on rooftops, which means that the equipment needed to light a 100-watt bulb would cost $700 to $800. Half is for the cells and half is for the rest of the system, including mounting brackets and external wiring.

Mr. Little said he could lower the price to $3.60, but that the first step would have to be replacing typical solar panels, which produce about 160 watts of electricity each, with a 1,000-watt panel. The big panel would require less support material per watt than the smaller ones, he said.

But that panel would be 200 pounds, too heavy to haul up to a roof. The solution, he said, is to install it on the ground, in a big flat spot of desert -- which, by the way, would be a wonderful place to build the solar-cell factory, cutting delivery costs to zero. And the bigger the installation, the lower the cost, per watt, of the other equipment required, he said.

Mr. Little is negotiating with the Tucson Electric Company to build a factory in Arizona that would produce 100 megawatts of cells a year, and run it for 10 years or so. Other cities and companies are considering similar ideas. Mr. Little said that at some point his project would turn into a ''breeder,'' its electric production paying for its operation.

His company already runs factories that make 50 megawatts of new cells a year. The viability of the project depends mostly on whether Congress extends the production tax credit given to renewable and nuclear energy, he said.

Arizona Public Service, which operates the solar generator north of Tucson, seems to be on a campaign to show that there is no green approach that does not work well on a corporate scale. Last year, it started raising algae, feeding them carbon dioxide from a natural-gas-fired power plant, Red Hawk, west of Phoenix. It used the algae to make biodiesel, a vehicle fuel that is more commonly made from soybeans or corn. The company is now installing bigger equipment to test the process on a larger scale.

Even for renewable energy like heating with wood (an idea that has been around for much longer than the term ''renewable''), the scale is growing. For example, the University of South Carolina would like to reduce its carbon footprint and lower its natural-gas bill of $6.5 million a year. So this spring it plans to open a plant that will use wood scraps to make electricity, and use steam from the system's waste heat to warm the campus.

This is not some wood-fired boiler. It is an $18 million gasification project that will heat the wood, mostly chips and bark, to produce a flammable gas, which will be burned in a turbine that resembles a jet engine. And the university will not run it on clippings from trees at the Columbia campus; it will take 14 tractor-trailer loads a day, about 55,000 tons a year.

Because the wood is gasified but not burned, the system, which is similar to one used in Burlington, Vt., produces less nitrogen oxides and less soot than a boiler would, said Jonathan S. Rhone, chief of the Nexterra Energy Corporation of Vancouver, British Columbia, which built the gasifier. But being that clean requires an industrial-size system.

There is another reason that it is not the kind of project that works on a small basis: it will take about 14 years to pay for itself. ''We've been here 200 years,'' said Helen Zeigler, the university business manager. ''We can afford to make investments like this.'' A 14-year payback would never work on a family budget, she said.

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