San Franciscans would hardly have been surprised. Like the rest of the nation, they'd had a year's warning that the moment the calendar flipped to January 17, Americans would only be able to own whatever alcoholic beverages had been in their homes the day before. Up in the Napa Valley to the north of San Francisco, grape growers were ripping out their vines and planting fruit trees. "A remarkably original account of the Prohibition era, a fourteen-year orgy of lawbreaking that permanently transformed American social life."