I came across this story when looking through clippings of a column called “Off the Record” which appeared in the Chico Record during the 1940s. It was written by Mayor Paul Roberts, who was never an official mayor of anything, but was known as the “Mayor of Sandy Gulch,” for his prominence in the Sandy Gulch neighborhood, where he ran a grocery store. Sandy Gulch is the waterway now known in Chico as Lindo Channel.

Paul Roberts was a great collector of stories. He not only relayed old tales of Chico in his column “Off the Record,” but also collected the reminiscences of George Moses Gray, John Bidwell’s orchard foreman, and published them in his own weekly Sandy Gulch News.

This story appeared on June 6, 1947. Paul Roberts credits it to Joe Kennedy, Annie Bidwell’s nephew, who was well-acquainted with the Bidwells and their home. Joe Kennedy worked as a pharmacist at Lee’s Pharmacy.

As most of us know, ever since he married Annie Kennedy, John Bidwell was a staunch prohibitionist. Before he met Annie, he grew wine grapes and employed a wine maker. But he tore out all the wine grapevines and after his marriage only grew table and raisin grapes. According to Roberts:

The General was fond of eating and had the finest of food prepared by the best of cooks. He favored all kinds of fruits, vegetables and melons, but he liked desserts too, one of them being plum pudding with wine sauce. But when he turned prohib he banished the wine from the table and from the kitchen, and when it came time for plum pudding he told the cook to make the wine sauce from grape juice, it was just as good!

The cook tried her best with grape juice. She made several batches of wine sauce with juice but they were all failures. They just didn’t have the zing that real wine gives the sauce. What to do?

Time was getting short, the General would be home soon, and no wine sauce! Joe Kennedy came home to the Mansion about that time and the cook enticed him out to the kitchen, where she whispered to him about the grape juice failures.

Well, Joe was always practical, so he hurried back to the drug store and returned soon to smuggle in a gallon of fine claret wine, part of which helped produce that very important wine sauce and the rest was hidden away for future wine sauces.

Well, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The meal was served and at last came the plum pudding – with wine sauce. The General tasted it, tasted it again, smacked his lips and called across the table to his wife:“See there, Annie? Wine sauce from grape juice – just as good as any sauce ever made from wine!”

Joe Kennedy, seated at the dinner table, had to keep a straight face. So did the cook and the maid waiting table. And the General? “The General never knew that he enjoyed wine sauce that time and many another time made from grape juice which was grape juice once – before something happened to it!”