Everyone remembers the Pilgrims, those disgruntled English people who gave us Thanksgiving, the Mayflower, and unhealthy notions of sex, liquor, and love. They actually made great beer and they attempted, many times, to make wines out of native New England grapes. They failed. Those grapes produced sour wines or wines that tasted like raw maple syrup. After a few years, the Pilgrims gave up winemaking and did what they did best: tell other people how to live their lives.
A hundred and fifty years later, Spanish missionaries brought the first wine grapes to California, which is where American wine history was made. Like most of the people the Spanish missionaries served, the wine grape brought to California was a hybrid of grapes from different breeds and mixed in Latin America. Spain owned much of Italy for 250 years. One of the Italian grapes, the Minorca, made the trip to the New World and mixed successfully with native Mexican, Chilean, and Argentinian grapes to form another variety, known as the Criolla (Kree-oy-a). The Criolla came to California and, because of its association with the Spanish missionaries, it became known as the Mission Grape.
Although the first recorded harvest of grapes and California winemaking occurred at Mission San Juan Capistrano, it was at the San Gabriel Mission that winemaking became a California industry.
The climate in the San Gabriel Valley proved ideal for the Mission Grape. The San Gabriel Mission produced more grapes and wine than the other 20 missions in California. Often, wines from San Gabriel were CARE packages to other missions not able to grow as many grapes or make as much wine. Although the wine was to be used only for the Catholic Mass, so much wine flowed from San Gabriel that the missionaries developed a nice business selling wine to soldiers, their wives, and other colonists living nearby.
A few years after San Gabriel Mission was founded, King Charles III of Spain ordered an actual town be founded near San Gabriel to bring more Spanish colonists that would protect Southern California from those evil English and Russians (in the mind of King Charles, at least) to take away California from Spain, as Spain did to the Native Americans. When that town was founded in 1781 with the name of Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, not only did that town grow up to be Los Angeles, the San Gabriel missionaries gave the people of Los Angeles a house warming gift. Guess what that was? Mission grapes. You can imagine what happened then!
The Mission Grape grew more abundantly in Los Angeles than even at the San Gabriel Mission. There seemed to be more wine bottles per inhabitant than tortillas. As many of the residents grew wealthy, people with last names such as Verdugo, Sepulveda, and Dominguez added their private vineyards and wineries to their sprawling ranches. There is something inevitable about Los Angeles and liquor that Jose Maria Verdugo's private winery from 1795 stood where today's insanely popular Golden Road Brewery brews beer near the Los Angeles River, in Glendale.
It was only a matter of time that wine in Los Angeles went from private to commercial. A gift by priests at Los Angeles' mother church, Our Lady Queen of Angels, awarded some of its vineyards to its first Yankee American resident, Joseph Chapman, as a thank you for building the church. In 1824, Chapman opens the winery later known as Chapman & Sons on that site, the first commercial winery in the United States.
Under Mexican rule, Los Angeles attracted hundreds of French and Italian immigrants, many of whom grew grapes, made wine, and sold them profitably. After Los Angeles became American, many Croatian, German, Austrian, Greek, and Chilean immigrants opened wineries, making Anaheim and Cucamonga the premier wine producing regions of the United States for the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. Southern California grapes even saved worldwide winemaking when Cucamonga Mission grapes were the only ones resistant to the deadly (and decimating) phylloxera, almost making winemaking extinct. These local grapes saved the day for all of us to enjoy our California wines. There were 165 wineries in Los Angeles County alone. Where did they go? Why don't we see them today
Los Angeles marketed itself all too well as a Garden of Eden. Millions have made Los Angeles city and county home. Land companies made millions, too: millions of dollars buying vineyards and wineries, turning them into office buildings, tract homes, freeways, etc. Only the J. Filippi Winery in Rancho Cucamonga and the San Antonio Winery in Downtown Los Angeles remain from the original glory years of Los Angeles winemaking.
Good news! Los Angeles winemaking has made a major comeback only it is of the "less is more" variety. There are a dozen "microwineries" within a 45-minute drive from Downtown Los Angeles. These started out as "toys" of financiers who wanted to be winemakers so they bought existing or planted new vineyards that produced such good grapes that the owners built wineries and tasting rooms to publicize their new wines. Unlike J. Filippi or the San Antonio Winery, microwineries like Rosenthal (in Malibu), Cornell (on Mulholland Drive in Agoura Hills), and the Reyes Winery (in the shadow of Vasquez Rocks, outside of Santa Clarita) plant small batches of grapes and bottle small batches of wine. Cornell and Rosenthal are selling limited numbers of bottles in Los Angeles area wine shops but the best experience, the true L. A. winemaking experience as the Verdugos, Sepulvedas, and other early iconic families did: out in the open, at a winery, next to the grapes that produced them.
Mr LA Tours had such great success with its first bus tour taking adventurers to three local microwineries that, by popular demand, the next motor coach/bus tour, Valentine to LA Wineries Tour, will start and end at the granddaddy of L. A. wineries, the San Antonio Winery, on Sat. April 2, 2016, from 10 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Visit: www.mrlatours.com for more information or call (323) 452-2743 for more details.
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