The City of Vines: A History of Wine in Los Angeles

By Thomas Pinney

The author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California’s wine trade in the once isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles.

Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award!

With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim’s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles’s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781597144261

Thomas Pinney

Thomas Pinney is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pomona College. He is the author or editor of several books including the two-volume A History of Wine in America (UC Press). The second volume of this definitive wine history won the 2006 International Association of Culinary Professionals Award for best book on wine, beer, or spirits.

Book preview

IllustrationIllustrationIllustration

The original seal of Los Angeles, in use from 1854 to 1905, identifying it as the City of Vines. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Illustration

The publisher is grateful to the Wine Librarians Association for its generous support of this project.

© 2017 by Thomas Pinney

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pinney, Thomas, author.

Title: The city of vines : a history of wine in Los Angeles / Thomas Pinney.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday ; San Francisco, California : California Historical Society, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047274 | ISBN 9781597143981 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Wine industry--California--Los Angeles--History.

Classification: LCC HD9378.L67 P56 2017 | DDC 338.4/7663200979494--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047274

Cover Art: Workers in the vineyards of the Sierra Madre Vintage Company. Courtesy of the California Historical Society at the University of Southern California.

Cover and Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

Printed in East Peoria, IL, by Versa Press, Inc.

Orders, inquiries, and correspondence should be addressed to:

Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709

[phone], Fax [phone]

www.heydaybooks.com

To Catharine Alexander

Illustration

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources and Works Cited

Index

About the Author

About the California Historical Society Book Award

About the California Historical Society

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Original seal of Los Angeles

Vitis californica

Mission grape

Mission San Gabriel

Title page, Agricultura General

Head-pruned vineyard

Brick lagares

Andrés Pico

Original plan of Los Angeles

Map of San Rafael grant

Antonio Lugo

Manuel Requena

Winery of Juan Domingo

Jean Louis Vignes

El Aliso winery

Thomas Larkin

Juan and Ysidora Bandini

William Wolfskill

Dalton winery

Ord and Hutton map of Los Angeles

Los Angeles in 1847

Jean-Louis Sainsevain

Ad for Sainsevain sparkling

Matthew Keller

Keller’s Los Angeles winery

Keller’s business card

Menu, Keller’s Vintage Ball

Julius Weyse’s Fernheim

Charles Kohler

Sheet music, The Wines of Los Angeles County

Perkins, Stern catalog cover

Benjamin and Margaret Wilson

Map of the Huerta de Cuati

Lake Vineyard house

Notice of Hobbs, Gilmore as Wilson’s agents

J. DeBarth Shorb

B. D. Wilson and Co. burgundy label

San Marino house

L. J. Rose

Sunny Slope winery

First harvest at Sunny Slope

Perkins, Stern announce agency for Sunny Slope

General George Stoneman

San Gabriel Valley map

E. J. Lucky Baldwin

Seal of Los Angeles Vineyard Society

George Hansen

Plan of Anaheim

Benjamin Dreyfus

Home of Theodore Reiser

Letterhead of B. Dreyfus and Co.

Dead Vineyard in Anaheim

Title page, California Vine Disease

Dreyfus Winery

Eugene W. Hilgard

Shorb on steps of San Marino

San Gabriel Wine Co. buildings

San Gabriel Wine Co. ad

Letterhead of Marschall, Spellman and Co.

Henry Huntington’s mansion

Santa Fe train south of Pasadena

Los Angeles in 1887

Interior of Pelancoli Winery

Secondo Guasti

Ad for Secondo Guasti Los Angeles winery

Southern California Wine Co. ad

McClure’s Sunnyside Winery

Chinese workers picking grapes

Interior of Sierra Madre Vintage Co.

Workers in Sierra Madre Vintage Co. vineyards

Ad for Etienne Brothers winery

Monte Vina Winery, Sierra Madre

Jules Hugues Winery, Pomona

Fred J. Smith

Pomona Wine Company

Italian Vineyard Co. ad

Charles Stern and Sons ad

Would Crush Her cartoon

Andrea Sbarboro pamphlet

Paul Garrett

Where are you going my pretty maid? cartoon

Asti ads from early and late years under Prohibition

Ad for 3.2% wine

Old San Gabriel wine made in 1926 for sale in 1934

Piuma’s Orange Wine

Santa Fe Wine, 1949

Ad for Burbank Winery

Wine tasters ostensibly in Los Angeles

Current seal of Los Angeles

PREFACE

The most striking fact about the history of winemaking in Los Angeles, city and county, is the completeness with which it has been forgotten. The trade has left hardly any material traces. If any buildings survive, they have been converted to other purposes so that their origins are unrecognizable, and the vineyards themselves have long since been swept away under the tide of housing. No one writes about the tradition of Los Angeles winemaking, few local histories make anything of the subject, and most people have no idea that the region was once the main source of California wine. When I tell people that I am writing about winemaking in Los Angeles, the invariable response is one of skeptical surprise: Whoever heard of that? And what can I find to write about?

Yet Los Angeles is where it all began, and where, for years, the main action was to be found. California wine meant Los Angeles wine. The whole California wine establishment descends directly from Los Angeles, and long after Los Angeles, city and county, had been outpaced as a player in California winemaking, it continued to be important.

My focus on the city and county of Los Angeles may seem an arbitrary limitation—why not write about all of Southern California? The fact is, nothing elsewhere compared in importance to Los Angeles. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the city and county of Los Angeles provided, overwhelmingly, the winemaking in Southern California. There were scattered growers and producers in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Diego Counties, but nothing to signify. San Bernardino County, now imagined by most people to have been the major source of Southern California wine, did not in fact develop until the vineyards were beginning to be crowded out of L.A. County, and then it did so as a colonial development of the big Los Angeles wineries. The substantial vineyards in and around Rancho Cucamonga persisted into the 1960s, which is why people now think of the region as primary.

These two facts are why I have written this book: the fact that it was important, and the fact that it has been forgotten. I have enjoyed the work of putting together the case for giving Los Angeles its due. There is no doubt much more that might be known, but I have at least made a beginning.

That the missions made wine is generally known, but our information about how it was made, and how much of it was made, and what was done with it when it was made, is terribly thin. No one, so far as I know, has studied the question with any thoroughness. I have not been able to add anything to the subject; a patient study of the Spanish records would be required, and I am not competent to do that. There is a fair amount of information about the brief Mexican period, and after the American takeover in 1846–47 the record becomes reasonably full. I have, accordingly, given most of my attention to the hundred years following the American conquest down to the end of the story in the 1950s.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My two major sources are, first, the Huntington Library and, next, the Shields Library of the University of California, Davis. The Huntington houses a rich collection of material from Southern California in the nineteenth century: the papers of Benjamin D. Wilson, of J. DeBarth Shorb, of L. J. Rose, and others provide a detailed view of the scene at the time. At Davis, the great library—developed to support the university’s work in viticulture and enology, and now presided over by my former student Axel Borg—was an essential source of information, as were the records of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), the federal agency concerned with winemaking, now held in Special Collections at the Shields Library. The history of Los Angeles wine under Prohibition and in the years following Repeal would be impossible to write without the BATF papers.

Of the published work about Southern California winemaking, by far the most substantial and useful is Ernest Peninou’s posthumously published History of the Los Angeles Viticultural District (2004). Charles Sullivan’s series of articles about early California winemaking, published in the Wayward Tendrils Quarterly from April 2010 to October 2015, is another invaluable source of information, notable for its fullness and accuracy. Two exemplary works of reference were constantly useful: James D. Hart’s Companion to California (1987) and Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt’s Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (1997); both volumes were published by the University of California Press.

A special word should be said about the collection devoted to the history of winegrowing in Southern California, held at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and developed under the direction of Danette Cook Adamson. It takes a broad view of history and is now a rich and growing collection not only of documents but of labels, posters, brochures, photographs, bottles, winemaking equipment, and other things associated with wines and vines as they flourished in Southern California.

Two friends, Gail Unzelman and Charles Sullivan, have, as always, provided indispensable help.

1

MISSION WINE

In May of 1769 the men and animals of the so-called Sacred Expedition were gathered near Loreto, on the Baja peninsula of Mexico, poised to begin their march into what is now California. Some four hundred cattle had already been driven northward by a group in advance of the main expedition, which was under the command of Captain Gaspar de Portolá. Another group had been sent around by sea and were to rendezvous with the overland marchers at San Diego Bay. The object of the expedition was to establish a Spanish presence in what, except for its coastline, was an almost wholly unexplored region stretching for hundreds of miles to the north along the Pacific. The expedition was called Sacred because the soldiers who provided the muscle were accompanied by Franciscan priests, whose charge was to set up missions, convert the Indians, and so prepare the land for productive settlement. The political meaning of the expedition was to forestall any occupation of the land by foreign powers—notably the Russians, who had made tentative moves in that direction, but also the English, who had a base in Canada from which they could move southward.1 When the expedition began its march north, the modern history of California began, and with it the history of winemaking in California—although not all at once.

It was a precarious beginning. Only 126 of the original company of about 219, depleted by death or desertion, reached the expedition’s first destination: the splendid bay where San Diego now stands. There, Portolá, whose orders were to march to Monterey Bay to establish a colony there, dutifully collected half of the survivors, leaving a sickly remnant behind, and set out for his next destination, four hundred miles distant. There were further misadventures—Portolá marched right by Monterey Bay and instead discovered San Francisco Bay—and there were various hair-breadth escapes for both the marching group and the San Diego group. But the survivors hung on and managed to make a start on the three-pronged system of Spanish colonial enterprise: presidio, pueblo, and mission. This was a combination of army post (presidio), civilian settlement (pueblo), and church mission (the engine for converting or civilizing—the words were interchangeable—the Indians). The first presidios were at San Diego (1769) and Monterey (1770). To call them forts would be an overstatement; they were merely garrisons, without heavy fortification. The first pueblos were San José (1777) and Los Angeles (1781). The first missions were those at San Diego (1769) and Monterey (1770; relocated to Carmel in 1771).

The leader of the mission priests was, as every California schoolchild knows, Father Junípero Serra, a native of the island of Majorca, who had, among other things, been active in missionary work in Mexico for many years. He presided over the founding and the development of the California missions for fifteen years, and by the end of his tenure, which came only with his death in 1784, there were nine of these, scattered along the coast from the original foundation in San Diego in the south to San Francisco Bay in the north.

It is widely believed that vines were planted by Serra at San Diego in 1769, just as soon as the mission had been established.2 There are some plausible reasons for the belief, the most important of which is, of course, the need for wine in the celebration of the mass. Besides, the Franciscans were Spaniards, accustomed to wine as an essential part of their diet, so what more natural than that they should at once have planted vines? There would have been no problem acquiring planting stock, since the missions of Baja California, where the Sacred Expedition had been assembled, already had productive vineyards.

But against the popular belief a number of stubborn facts must be set. As Roy Brady has shown in an important article closely reviewing the evidence, Serra did not set out from Baja until May 15.3 If he had any cuttings with him, he would have needed to keep them dormant in cool and damp conditions, impossible to provide on the long, difficult march up the Baja peninsula. But suppose that Serra did have vine cuttings with him; in that unlikely case, and if he managed to keep them moist, they would have begun to leaf out almost at once in the warm climate of Baja, and that premature growth would have reduced the chances of a successful planting almost to zero. Serra’s party did not reach the San Diego site until July 16, an impossibly late date for planting vines in any place, not to speak of such a dry place as San Diego. And no sooner were the sickly few soldiers and priests left alone at San Diego than the local Indians attacked, an attack that the enfeebled Spanish barely managed to repel. In these conditions, is it reasonable to expect that Serra planted vines—a crop, as Brady writes, that would yield nothing for at least three years?

Illustration

Vitis californica, the native California grape, but not a wine grape. From Pierre Viala and Victor Vermorel, Ampelographie (Paris: 1901–10). Courtesy of Special Collections, Shields Library, University of California, Davis.

Furthermore, there is evidence that the missionaries had no intention of supplying their own wants in this matter; instead, they brought wine with them, and had every expectation of receiving more by ship from Mexico, mostly from the old Jesuit missions in Baja. And so they did, for the next decade and more. It was expected that the first settlers would not achieve self-sufficiency for a long time, and so the port of San Blas, on the west coast of Mexico, had been set up specifically to supply the California venture. Mission records show that through much of the 1770s the harvests of such essentials as wheat, barley, and maize were small and uncertain, so that, in the words of one writer, it is highly improbable that grapes would be planted before the cultivation of the necessary crops had been somewhat established.4 Food came first; wine a distant second.

Finally, in making the case against a very early start to winegrowing in Spanish California, one may note that, although there are native grapes in California, they are unsuited for wine. The two native vine species—Vitis californica in the north and Vitis girdiana in the south—flourished along the banks of streams and rivers, and attracted attention at once as evidence that viticulture would succeed in the region. Serra himself, on only the second day after his arrival at San Diego, wrote that he had found wild grapes in abundance there.5 Alexander von Humboldt, in his book about Mexico, which was based on his residence there in 1803, wrote, The first colonists [in California] found, on their arrival there, in 1769, shoots of wild vines…which yielded very large grapes of a very sour quality.6 The great botanist has it wrong—the native grape is sweet, the berries small—but he does testify to a general sense that the grapes were unfit for wine.7 There were, no doubt, early winemaking trials of these grapes.8 The results were such that the experiments were not continued.

All in all, then, it seems overwhelmingly improbable that 1769 marked the beginning of winegrowing in California. When the state officially celebrated the bicentennial of the industry in 1969, no one, so far as I know, rose up to protest against the historical error. Still, it was an error. But if the received notion is wrong, what is the correct version? When did winegrowing begin, and where, and with whom?

The missionaries were not indifferent to the prospect of growing their own wine. Strictly speaking, wine was a monopoly of the Spanish crown, as was the olive, and the planting of both vines and olive trees had been forbidden in Mexico, one reason among others why that country never developed a Mediterranean cuisine. But the rule was relaxed out of practical necessity in remote regions of the empire, such as Alta California and New Mexico. The Franciscans in California were free to plant grapes and make wine.9 Serra repeatedly complained in his letters of the difficulties in getting a regular supply, and in 1777, in a letter to the viceroy in Mexico, he raised the idea of bringing in vines from Baja. Whether any were then imported, we don’t know; but since Serra, eight years after the Sacred Expedition, writes about it as a thing to be done rather than a thing already done, it confirms the notion that the missions were slow to take up winemaking.

Two years after Serra’s letter, however, the European vine had certainly arrived. Writing in March 1779, Father Pablo de Mugártegui of Mission San Juan Capistrano informed Serra that snow is plentiful, wherefore, until the severe cold moderates and the floods subside, the vine cuttings which at your request were sent to us from the lower country have been buried.10 Supposing that the cuttings in question were set out that spring, a small crop might be expected by the third leaf, in 1781, or a more substantial one by 1782.11 Roy Brady, after considering all the possibilities, concludes that 1782 was the year of California’s first vintage, that the place was the mission of San Juan Capistrano, and that the winemaker was Father Mugártegui. None of this is certain, but it is a good guess, much to be preferred to the received version of 1769, San Diego, and Serra.12

The vines that produced that first wine—and, in effect, all of California’s wine for the next fifty years and more—were of what we call the Mission grape, a variety known through much of Spanish America under a number of synonyms, including Pais, Criolla, and Negra Peruana.13 In California it was commonly called the Mission, since the missions were seen as its source. At other times it was called the Los Angeles grape after the most prominent region of California winemaking; or it was called, quite wrongly, the native grape to distinguish it from grape varieties known to have been imported from Europe—these were called foreign or European grapes, although they were no more foreign or European than the Mission itself. Or it might simply be called the California grape.

Illustration

The Mission grape, the first variety—and for many years thereafter the dominant variety—in California vineyards. From a watercolor by Hannah Millard in Grapes and Grape Vines of California (1872). Courtesy of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Until quite recently the origin of the Mission variety was a mystery, at least to students of American viticulture. It is unquestionably a member of the species Vitis vinifera, the European grape, the source of most of the world’s wine and all of the vine’s noble varieties. But where did it come from? And was it known in the Old World? No one could say, although there were many unsupported guesses. Now, through sophisticated genetic analysis, researchers in Spain and Chile have determined that the California Mission grape is an old Spanish variety called Listán Prieto, no longer cultivated in Spain but still surviving on the Canary Islands.14 The Baja vineyards would have been planted to this variety, and so the cuttings sent up to Capistrano were of Listán Prieto vines. They would have traveled by sea rather than over the arduous land route; only a very few ships visited California in those remote days, and among those very few the probable choice as the bringer of the vine is the San Antonio, in 1778, commanded by Don José Camacho. His name is unknown to the historians of wine, but he is, perhaps, the true Bacchus of California.15

The Franciscans could not know this, but when they planted those Mission cuttings at Capistrano they were about to succeed in doing what other settlers in North America, far on the other side of the mountains on the remote Atlantic coast, had been struggling vainly to achieve for almost two hundred years: that is, to grow wine. It is true that wine from vinifera grapes—the variety was the Mission—was already being produced on either side of the Rio Grande in the region of El Paso, on the Mexican border, now partly in Texas but then a part of Spanish New Mexico. Winegrowing there went back into the seventeenth century, and by the mid-eighteenth century El Paso had developed a substantial trade in wine and brandy south into the province of Chihuahua and north to Santa Fe.16 El Paso winegrowing persisted into the nineteenth century but, after the American takeover, only in a much-diminished way; then it gradually faded out. A continuous supply of wine from vinifera in North America had a different source: California—specifically, Los Angeles.

Farther east, in the early coastal settlements of the country and in all of the interior regions that were settled behind the westward movement of the frontier, winegrowing of the traditional European kind had been tried everywhere, over and over again, and had always and everywhere failed. The vines of Vitis vinifera, planted at any point between the tip of Maine and the tail of Florida, and westward to the Mississippi, soon sickened and died. No one could understand why, and the question was all the more baffling because the would-be winegrowers saw abundant native vines flourishing all around them. The answer is a paradox: it is just because North America boasted so many varieties of native grapes—more than in any other part of the world—that the European grape would not grow. Native diseases had grown up with the native grapes, and the two had long since reached a sort of accommodation. But the innocent European grape—Vitis vinifera, the wine-bearer—knew nothing of the diseases that awaited it in the New World and was wholly unable to resist their onslaught. The list of pests and diseases native to North America is long, but leading the way are phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae), a minute louse that feeds destructively on the roots of the vine; Pierce’s disease (Xylella fastidiosa), a bacterial infection that shuts down the plant’s water supply and so infallibly kills it; and three fungal diseases: black rot (Guignardia bidwellii ); downy mildew (Plasmopara viticola), found in humid places; and powdery mildew (Uncinula necator), at home in dry climates. None of these things was then known in Europe, although phylloxera and powdery mildew have since been exported, with catastrophic results.17

What about the species of native grapes? They include Vitis labrusca (wild grape), Vitis aestivalis (summer grape), Vitis riparia (riverbank grape), and Vitis rupestris (sand grape), to name only a few of the more common species found throughout North America east of the Rockies. Practically speaking, none of them in an unsophisticated native state is fit for making wine. The berries are too small, the skin too thick, the seeds too large, the flesh too meager, the sugar too low, the acids too high, the flavors too wild, and so on through a long litany of defects. Wine can be made from such grapes if great quantities of sugar are added, but it is drunk only under duress.

The upshot of this situation was that the English colonies, and, later, the new republic of the United States, were wineless territories. The prosperous coast-dwellers could, and did, import European wines—Madeira was a special liking—but day in and day out Americans drank cider, or whiskey, or fruit brandies; the general taste for beer came later, with the heavy German immigration of the nineteenth century. South and west, Texas and California were Spanish territories, closed to foreign traffic, and even had they been open, they were too remote to affect the situation in the settled regions north and east. El Paso wine and brandy became briefly familiar to a small segment of the population in the days of the Santa Fe Trail after 1824. California wine would have to wait even longer to make it to the East Coast, but that tiny, obscure beginning made at Capistrano would, in time, grow into a revolution.

In the history of American wine, California offered a fresh start. Shielded behind the mountains and deserts that made traffic from the east almost impossible, it was free of phylloxera, of Pierce’s disease, of black rot and downy mildew. And to these negative virtues one may add many of the positive sort. The climate of Southern California is Mediterranean—that is, one in which rain, in moderate measure, falls during the mild winters. Summers are hot and dry, essentially rainless. For general agriculture, although not always for the vine, irrigation is necessary. In compensation, the soil is fertile. The coast is often foggy, and that disturbs the ripening of such fruit as the grape, but only a few miles inland the effect of the fog is no longer felt. From that point on, grapes will grow anywhere in the valleys and on the hillsides of Southern California—not, of course, equally well in all places, but the vines will at least grow, as they could not be made to do in the distant East.

Illustration

WINE AT THE MISSIONS

In order to understand the place of winegrowing at the missions, it is useful to know something of their purpose, practices, and economy. The first thing to know is that the mission, in the Spanish system, was meant to be not a permanent but a temporary body. The idea was that once the natives had been baptized and set to work at peaceful pursuits, the purpose of the mission had been fulfilled and it would cease to exist.18 For that reason, the missions owned no land but merely had the use of the huge unoccupied territory that lay all around them; when the Indians had absorbed their religious instruction and had learned the European arts, these lands would be divided among them and the Franciscans would move on. This scheme had in fact worked to some extent in Mexico, but in California the point at which the Indians would take over was never reached. And the missions, which were supposed to be temporary, grew more and more anomalous as they grew older. The Franciscans, it has been said, wanted it that way; they enjoyed the possession of undisturbed control over their California empire and had no wish to see it come to an end.19 That is a hostile view. A more charitable view is that the Franciscans saw that their work was far from complete; they did not want to abandon an unfinished work.

There were never many Franciscans in early California—only two or three priests at each mission, and, at the system’s greatest extent, only twenty-one missions. Thus, the Franciscans who carried out the work of the missions were a tiny handful scattered along the hundreds of miles of California’s coastal valleys. As the missions developed, this handful succeeded in managing a large economic enterprise in which winemaking was a valued, although secondary, activity.

The Indians, once brought under mission control, were completely dependent upon the missions to which they belonged. They were called neophytes, that is to say, novices, and novices they remained so long as the missions operated in California. The neophytes were gathered in villages—rancherias they were called—around the mission, where they could be instructed and disciplined (frequently by the lash) and where they were available to do all the work: tending the vast herds of cattle; digging the irrigation ditches; planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crops; and constructing and ornamenting the buildings, both sacred and secular. Work in the fields was carried out with primitive tools: digging sticks, machetes, hand rakes, and plows made of tree branches.20 The work was mostly carried out under the supervision of mayordomos, who could either be Spaniards or mestizos. We regard the condition of the neophytes as slavery; to the Franciscans, it was a means of saving souls.21 There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of that conviction, just as there is no reason to doubt that the neophytes bore a heavy burden. Several times the neophytes revolted, from as early as 1775 (San Diego) to as late as 1824 (Santa Barbara). As the French sea captain Auguste Duhaut-Cilly put it after his visit to California in 1827–28, nearly sixty years after the first mission had been founded, If they [the neophytes] could all join together, they would certainly destroy the missions and take up again their former life.22 But the system continued.

Those Indians who remained unconverted were called gentiles. Although unbaptized, they might still work for the missions in one capacity or another, and as the settlement of Southern California developed, they might find work at one of the ranchos or in the pueblo of Los Angeles. In the census of Los Angeles for 1830, for example, gentiles outnumbered neophytes 127 to 71.23

The beginnings of the Spanish settlement of California were supported almost wholly by supplies from Mexico. Such support had to be continued for many years, but each mission and each pueblo aimed at self-sufficiency—food, drink, shelter, clothing, and all possible amenities would be provided by the labor of the people living in California. The pueblos, beginning with San José (1777) and Los Angeles (1781), were founded as agricultural communities so that they could help with the problem of supply, but the missions had to support the pueblos at the beginning, and the products of the missions continued to be the support of their Indian neophytes, gathered in rancherias around each mission. The Franciscans thus had to train their neophytes in worldly pursuits simply as a condition of survival. The methods of mission agriculture—the work that employed most of the neophytes—remained primitive. But even primitive agriculture was a big technological advance over the stone-age arts of the Indians, as were the many other sorts of work that were laid on them. At each mission, the church remained at the center, but it was surrounded by a whole range of secular activities, winemaking among them. Herbert Bolton listed the many tasks that the Indians performed:

Each fully developed mission was a great industrial school, of which the largest, as in California, sometimes managed more than two thousand Indians. There were weaving rooms, blacksmith shop, tannery, wine-press, and warehouses; there were irrigating ditches, vegetable gardens, and grain fields; and on the ranges roamed thousands of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats.…The women were taught to cook, sew, spin, and weave; the men to fell the forest, build, run the forge, tan leather, make ditches, tend cattle, and shear sheep.24

Most of the missions that were founded by Serra and his successor, Fermín Lasuén, were in what are now recognized as winegrowing regions in contemporary California, and most of them made wine back then.25 Before his death in August of 1784 Serra was able to write that the missions were now well looked after with respect to wine.26 An irregular spread of vineyards and of winemaking from mission to mission is recorded in the following years, so that, by the turn of the century, vines had been planted at all of the then-extant missions.27 By 1810 wine was being made at fourteen of the missions; only those where the maritime climate discouraged grape growing (among them San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Carmel) had to depend on their fellow missions for a supply of wine.28 There are no statistics for mission wine, only incidental remarks and uninstructed guesses, so we don’t know much about the scale of things. There is evidence, however, that many mission vineyards were small, only an acre or two, but even from so small a space the prolific Mission grape might yield enough to produce some hundreds of gallons of wine each season.29

Illustration

Mission San Gabriel, the leading wine producer among the California missions. Painting by Ferdinand Deppe, 1832. Courtesy of the California Historical Society.

Some idea about mission wines and winemaking can be gathered from the scattered information that survives. There is no point in reviewing the records of every mission, but a survey of winegrowing at the southern missions alone will make clear what tradition was inherited by those people who began making wine for themselves in and around Los Angeles toward the end of the eighteenth century.

To start with San Diego, the oldest and most southern of the missions, there are references to grapes at that place as early as 1781, and the Franciscans there were certainly making wine by 1784 and for the next five decades. When Richard Henry Dana called there in 1835, after the mission had been secularized, the meal he was given was accompanied by a decanter of wine—this, he said, was the most sumptuous meal we had eaten since we left Boston.30 At Mission San Luis Rey, next up the coast from San Diego, Duhaut-Cilly, who called there in 1828, found what he called the best wine in all California, and since he had visited a number of the missions, from the northernmost at Sonoma to the southernmost at San Diego, his opinion carries some