After Prohibition, the company had a brush with Nazi German wine interests. Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentopp, had married into the family that owned the winery, and he had sold the products in Europe. But he never invested in the St. Louis business.

Because World War II completely stopped the importation of French wines, business among American winemakers boomed, and sales in September 1941 were up 95 percent at the American Wine Co. There were 100 workers at the plant, twice as many as before the war.

Their cellars snaked through an area about a block square about 50 feet underground, with a spring flowing into one of them.

The company closed in the 1950s, and the building was turned over to a vinegar company, which eventually shut down.

Preservationist Larry Giles of the National Building Arts Center in Sauget was there in the 1970s when workers demolished the building, and he still has the carved stone “American Wine Company, 1859” panel that was on the facade. He was familiar with the cellars, most of which had flooded.