Leon Adams, 90; Writer, Wine Institute Founder

Leon Adams, founder of California’s Wine Institute and the man who wrote California’s first quality codes for wine, has died at a San Francisco rest home at age 90.

Adams, who died Wednesday night, formed the Wine Institute in 1934, months after Prohibition ended. The following year he helped found the San Francisco Wine and Food Society.

In 1936, with the late attorney Jefferson Peyser, Adams crafted the state’s first quality wine standards, a code of practices and wine type specifications. He then had them enacted into a state law that still stands.

Adams founded the Society of the Medical Friends of Wine in 1939 and headed that group as executive secretary for 51 years.

For the Wine Advisory Board, which Adams founded as a division of the Wine Institute in 1938, he wrote dozens of publications discussing the medical benefits of moderate consumption of wine.

After he left the Wine Institute in 1954, he wrote one of the most successful wine books of all time, “The Commonsense Book of Wine,” published by David McKay in 1958. Adams then embarked on an extensive research project that culminated in the encyclopedic “Wines of America,” published by McGraw Hill in 1973 and now in its fourth revised edition.

Adams, who had a lifelong love for fishing, also wrote the best-selling “Striped Bass Fishing in California and Oregon.” He was also the author of two other books on wine and the ghost writer for numerous wine industry autobiographies.

A feisty man who always had an opinion, Adams once said, “Since wine is a food, it ought to be as cheap as milk.” He also is credited with saying, “All wine would be red if it could.”

He is survived by four children, Jerry, Brian, Tim and Susie.

A memorial service is scheduled for Sept. 30.