Vintage Sunview Grape Crate End Panel, Delano California, c. 1965–1980

The Piece

The end panel of a California table grape lug box, with the shipper's label still on the face. A piece of working packaging that became a sign the moment the crate came apart.

The board is plain sawn softwood, a shade over a foot and a half long and half an inch thick, clipped at all four corners so it would seat into the frame of the box. The back is bare timber, saw marked across the grain, with water shadows and a few dark knots. Nothing has been done to it, which is the point.

The label across the front is lithographed paper, laid on when the crate was made up. A deep navy ground with a green band behind, and two oval vignettes in pale blue cartouches. At the top a bunch of red grapes and a bunch of green gold grapes on the vine with the leaves drawn around them. At the foot a stylised sunrise, orange and rose over a purple ridge, with the vineyard rows running away below it toward the mountains.

Between them the type. SUNVIEW in tall outlined capitals shaded from white to pale blue, with BRAND spaced out underneath. Down the right hand edge, in yellow, THE BEST FROM THE WEST. In the middle, MARKO ZANINOVICH INC., EARLIMART AND DELANO, CALIF. 93215, a pink panel reading TABLE GRAPES, and at the bottom PRODUCE OF U.S.A. Two small red fleur de lys sit in the field between them.

History & Provenance

The Zaninovich name belongs to a Croatian family that put down roots in the San Joaquin Valley and went into grapes. Marko Zaninovich established what became Sunview around the middle of the last century, working out of Delano and Earlimart in the heart of the table grape country between Bakersfield and Tulare, and the firm is still there and still family run under the Sunview name. This label is from the years when the fruit went out of the valley in wooden boxes and the name on the end of the box was how a grower reached a buyer two thousand miles away.

Delano in those years was also the centre of one of the defining events in American labour history. The Delano grape strike and the national table grape boycott ran from 1965 to 1970 and made the town and its crop famous far beyond the produce trade. This label carries no part in that story one way or the other, and nothing here claims it does, but it comes out of that place in those years, and that is worth knowing when you look at it.

The ZIP code sets a hard floor. Five digit ZIP codes were introduced across the United States on 1 July 1963 and became mandatory for bulk mailers in 1967, and printers added them to commercial stationery and labels through the middle of that decade. A label printed with CALIF. 93215 cannot be earlier than the summer of 1963 and in practice belongs to the years after it.

Two things set the ceiling. The state is written CALIF. rather than CA, and although the two letter abbreviations were issued in October 1963 the older form held on in commercial printing into the seventies. More decisively, this is a paper label on a wooden lug. California table grapes moved off wooden boxes and onto corrugated cartons through the sixties and seventies, and by the eighties the wooden lug and the lithographed end label had both gone.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1965 to 1980. Three things would narrow it or confirm it: whether the label is an original lithograph rather than a later reproduction laid on an old board, whether nail or staple holes survive along the board edges from the crate it came off, and whether a packing or lot stamp survives anywhere on the back.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Fruit crate labels sell, and they almost always sell matted or framed under glass, which costs money and takes away the part that makes them good. This one is still on its board, so it leans on a shelf, sits on a picture rail or hangs on two nails with no framing at all, and the bare sawn timber around the paper does more for it than a mount ever would.

The graphics carry a room on their own. Deep navy, a hot orange sunrise and yellow display type is a palette that works against white plaster, against brick and against a dark kitchen wall, and at sixteen inches it fits in a galley, a pantry, a bar or a stairwell where a framed print would be too much.

And it is specific, which is what separates a good sign from a generic one. A real shipper, a real town, a real crop and a date you can argue from the printing. For a wine room, a kitchen, a California house or anyone who grew up near the valley, it is a better object than a reproduction of the same image would ever be.