I have recently received feedback and suggestions from fellow travelers and other writers in the cosmic blogosphere, urging me and imploring me to “lighten up” my blog posts a pinch. Since I enjoy writing & speaking about quirky, idiosyncratic people, places & things, I will take steps towards more levity. In presenting my joys of living in the Golden State, I commence with “The Spot On Lite!”

Historian Thomas Pinney wrote extensively about Southern California wine history in his book, “The City of Vines: A History of Wine in Los Angeles. One of his opening remarks is, “For most of the19th century, California Wine meant Los Angeles Wine.”

In Stuart Douglass Byles’ book, “Los Angeles Wine: A History from the Mission Era to the Present,” Byles presents the following geographic & historical context of downtown LA. He suggested that If you were standing on the corner of First Street and N. Vignes Street where the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple stands today, you would find yourself surrounded by acres of lush vineyards and thriving fruit & vegetable patches, separated by fenced lanes dotted by willow trees.

The winding, willow-shaded Los Angeles River would have stood off in the distance to the east. And, looking upward at the area east of the LA River in Boyle Heights, one would encounter green space equally endowed with vineyards and lush vegetable plots. The greenery ran all the way up to the dusty plains east and south of the small town of Los Angeles to the west.

The only large downtown tree visible in those days was the great sycamore known as “el Aliso” growing on the site of Jean-Louis Vignes’ El Aliso Vineyards. His arrival in 1831 marked the beginnings of a nascent, but rapidly growing wine industry in California.

Numerous streets in the city bear viticultural forbearers’ names. From Vignes Street to Keller & Mateo Streets, Wilson Street, Hoover Street, Mesnager Street, Bauchet Street, Kohler, and Sansevain Streets, these vignerons from Ireland, France, Germany, and the American West set the stage for today’s extensive wine industry & holdings in Eureka Country.

In 1837, French immigrant Vignes opened his winery on the land near present-day Union Station surrounding “El Aliso,” building his cellar in the tree’s shade and naming his winemaking operations in the ancient sycamore’s honor. At its peak, El Aliso Vineyard was producing nearly 150,000 bottles of French-style wines each year. In 1855, Vignes’ nephews Pierre and Jean Louis Sainsevain purchased the winery and two years later produced the first California sparkling wine, which they shipped north to San Francisco.  By this time, El Aliso had become the center of a blossoming downtown Frenchtown, known for fine French dining and viticulture.

In 1857, the Sansevain’ brothers opened a store in San Francisco; and by 1858 they led the state with the production of 125,000 gallons of wine and brandy. In 1857, the San Francisco cellars of the Sansevain Brothers produced this first California “champagne.”

In 1865 the Sainsevain brothers bought part of John Rain’s Rancho Cucamonga holdings and cultivated a large vineyard site just below the San Gabriel Mountains. Later in 1868, Sansevain Claret won best wine at the Los Angeles County Fair. In 1870, the Sainsevain brothers physically moved to Cucamonga and ran the Rancho Cucamonga Winery & Vineyards there with Joseph S. Garcia.

By 1875, German immigrants purchased the old El Aliso winery and converted it into one of Los Angeles’ first breweries, the Philadelphia Brewery. El Aliso continued to anchor the brewery’s courtyard, its branches shading Vignes’ former cellar and now protecting German lager rather than French wine from the Southern California sun.

Earlier in 1849 in another part of town, Dr. Leonce Huber, a former military surgeon in Napolean’s army, moved to Los Angeles and shortly thereafter, changed his last name to Hoover. He became a well-respected Swiss-American vintner, known for cultivating the highest grade of quality wine grapes.

In the 1850s, Irishman Matthew “Don Matteo” Keller established vineyard holdings near present-day Matteo Street. By the 1860s, he  planted a vineyard and opened a wine production operation near Alameda & Seventh Streets, near his cotton and citrus holdings adjacent to old downtown.

And, in 1853, while supporting himself with his violin playing & teaching, German Immigrant Charles Kohler traveled to San Francisco to build a wine venture. During this time, his partner John Frohling journeyed southward to Los Angeles looking for suitable vineyard properties to grow their own wine grapes.  By this time, there were perhaps as many as 100 vineyards in the greater Los Angeles area that were producing wines for local consumption.

In 1854, Frohling found an ideal spot, a 12-acre plot along the Los Angeles River and wired Kohler, “I’ve bought a vineyard.  Send me $4,000.”  ​They began making wine in 1854, with that year’s crop of mission grapes, making Kohler & Frohling the first commercial winery in the state.

In 1885, two immigrant French winemakers, Georges Le Mesnager and Pierre Durancette purchased land in Dunsmore Canyon from Dr. Benjamin B. Briggs, the founder of the city of La Crescenta. They also bought land in 1898, opened a winery in downtown Los Angeles, and then planted more vines on their new acreage, shipping the grapes to Los Angeles for processing. In 1905, Georges’ son, Louis, began building a unique two story building now known as Stone Barn Vineyard Conservancy, with its unique brand of winery storage on the building’s ground floor. Today, the wine grape known as Alicante Bouschet is still harvested and made into wine by members of the Stone Barn Vineyard Conservancy, part of the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley.

From the 1850s until the 1880s, the San Gabriel Valley itself was also by far the largest wine-producing region in the state. Rows of grapes once stretched for thousands of acres in what is now Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, San Gabriel and Arcadia, and beneath the streets and retail shops of Alhambra lies buried the foundation of what was once considered by many to be the largest winery in the world.

Viticulture in California truly began in the late 1760s with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries, who brought with them a variety of the common black grape that had originally been introduced to the Americas by Hernán Cortés in the 1500s. As they established the California mission system, they planted vineyards at each settlement from San Diego to Sonoma and then began producing sacramental wine for Catholic Masses, as well as for daily consumption.

In 1771 Father Junipero Serra founded the San Gabriel Mission in present-day San Gabriel. The vineyards there proved to be some of the most fruitful in the region. Porous alluvial soil combined with a Mediterranean climate and an abundant water supply from the Arroyo Rosa de Castilla, making an exceptional viticultural area for the “Mission Grape,” as it came to be known. By the early 1800s, the San Gabriel Mission was producing 50,000 gallons of wine a year.

For the Spanish, viticulture was intimately linked to their way of life. For early American settlers who migrated to Alta California in the 1840s, however, winemaking began to look like a profitable business venture to them.

Seeing the potential of a winemaking industry, Benjamin Davis Wilson, known as “Don Benito” by the local indigenous peoples, purchased a substantial part of Rancho San Pasqual in 1854. This area comprised much of present-day Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino and Alhambra. Since the land had water resources that would prove invaluable for agriculture, this region of the San Gabriel Valley truly thrived. Many of the vineyards from the San Gabriel Mission still existed, and with these, Wilson began to cultivate grapes, planting other varietals, such as Zinfandel, Grenache and Carignan.

Don Benito’s business grew steadily, allowing him to develop the property formerly known as “La Huerta de Coati” into Lake Vineyard, an elegant wine estate and a springboard to acquiring more land around this particular area in the early 1860s. Hiring skilled vintners to assist him, Wilson experimented with different wines and signed a contract with a San Francisco agent to distribute them to the rest of the country.

The backstory for Wilson’s Lake Vineyard wine estate begins with a Scotsman named Hugo Reid. Reid, who drifted to California and later married an Indian woman who possessed 8,500 acres of the Santa Anita Rancho, a former property of the San Gabriel Mission, was stricken with “wine fever.” By 1841, he had a walled vineyard of 22,000 vines at Santa Anita and boasted, “I consider myself a first-rate wine maker.” Reid owned a small property of some 128 acres, called La Huerta de Cuati, just to the west of his Santa Anita Rancho, marking the next step in the growth of San Gabriel Valley vineyards and Wilson’s later development of Lake Vineyard wine estate.

In 1867, Wilson’s daughter, Sue, married an enterprising young man from Baltimore named James de Barth Shorb. An adept businessman, Shorb saw great possibility in turning his father-in-law’s winemaking business into industry on a large scale.

Wilson took an immediate liking to the entrepreneurial Shorb, and the two soon became business partners under the name “B.D. Wilson & Co.” The partnership proved lucrative. By 1873, they had more than 230,000 grapevines and hundreds of orange, lime, lemon, olive and walnut trees.

Shorb was a master at corralling the region’s water resources. Using 300,000 feet of iron pipe — a novel idea at the time — and old tiles left over from Spanish dwellings, Shorb installed an elaborate irrigation system, complete with hydrants that could regulate the flow of water to crops. Selling these irrigation systems to neighboring farmers became a source of profit in itself.

One such neighbor was Leonard J. Rose, a German immigrant, who in 1879 built the Sunny Slope Winery in Lamanda Park, with 1,000 acres of grapes and a winery with a capacity of 500,000 gallons. Rose planted more than 35 varieties of grape, and his brandy quickly became a household name. Another was Los Angeles mayor Prudent Beaudry, who owned substantial land near the Arroyo Seco, which he used to open the San Rafael Winery around 1875.

Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had made his fortune in the Gold Rush and owned 63,000 acres, followed suit, planting a 1,200-acre vineyard and building a successful winery in what is now Arcadia.

Gradually, Shorb assumed his father-in-law’s responsibilities, and after Wilson’s death in 1878, Shorb inherited the company. He wanted to expand further, so in 1882, he decided to build a new, larger winery. Backed by English investors, and utilizing inexpensive Chinese laborers, Shorb dynamited a hillside on his property and constructed the San Gabriel Wine Company. It cost $500,000 to build — more than $11 million in today’s dollars.

By any standards, the winery was massive. It had a capacity of 1,500,000 gallons, was capable of crushing nearly 250 tons of grapes a day, and had a telephone and its own one-and-a-half mile extension of the Southern Pacific Railroad leading to the winery’s warehouse. To save time and labor, the winery was built on a slope, so grapes harvested on the vineyards uphill could simply be dumped into slides, which carried them straight to the crushing facilities. Many visiting journalists (and Shorb himself) proudly proclaimed it the largest winery in the world.

By the mid-1880s, there were hundreds of winemaking businesses in the San Gabriel Valley and other parts of Los Angeles County. Wine production in the region peaked somewhere between 1870 and 1885, and for a few years, it seemed that California’s wines might begin to rival Europe’s.

In the late 1880s, however, the local industry began to fall victim to “Anaheim disease” (later called “Pierce’s Disease” or Xylella fastidiosa), an insect-transmitted bacteria, which affected grape vines and other plants. At the same time, vintners began to grow wine in Northern California, using more modern methods and employing European immigrants, who were more familiar with viticulture than the Chinese and Mexican laborers of the San Gabriel Valley.

While the blight was not catastrophic, the panic it created led many investors to think grape-growing too risky an endeavor, and soon other crops, such as oranges and walnuts, had supplanted grapes.

Leonard Rose, perhaps foreseeing tough times ahead, got out of the business early, selling Sunny Slope to a British firm in 1887. Around the same time, Prudent Beaudry sold San Rafael Winery and the adjacent land to the Campbell-Johnston family of Pasadena.

Shorb struggled to keep the San Gabriel Wine Company afloat. He had made steady profits from 1882 to 1888, but the blight destroyed many of his vineyards, and in 1892, he was forced to close after just ten years in operation. Shorb died four years later, and the buildings were sold and converted into a felt factory in 1903. The last of the original buildings was demolished in 1987.

Of the wineries that survived the blight, many took a second hit with the passage of Prohibition in 1919. Showing its commitment to the new amendment, Los Angeles County enacted a law banning vineyards in all but industrial areas.

Strangely, one winery was able to survive and even thrive during the period. The Sierra Madre Vintage Company of Lamanda Park, incorporated in 1885, lasted well into the 1920s, through a loophole allowing wine production for religious sacraments, and by switching to production of table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. By the 1930s, however, nearly every major winery in the San Gabriel Valley had ceased operations.

Today, almost no trace remains of Pasadena’s viticultural heritage. Nevertheless, if you drive through the Lamanda Park neighborhood of Pasadena, you will find clues buried in the street names — Del Vina Street, Vine Aly, Vinedo Avenue, Vineyard Street.

A story or legend, perhaps apocryphal, goes that a bottle of 1891 Cabernet from Shorb’s winery survived until 1955, when a lucky connoisseur came across it, and upon tasting it, declared it “a wine to be savored with pleasure and respect.” Sadly, the vineyards that produced it have been all but forgotten.

Latter parts of the blog post are direct quotes, photos, and excerpts from the July 11, 2017 post entitled, “Cultivating California: The History Of Wines In Los Angeles.” This blog was originally featured in the summer 2017 edition of Edible LA.  Thanks to “artbites: Cooking Art History,” art bites.net for this illuminating article!