The new stars of Malibu: winemakers

One day, a few harvests from now, there may be a real Malibu Wine Trail. It will never be as grand or productive as the Silverado Trail in the Napa Valley or the Russian River in Sonoma. But it will be even more beautiful, and it will have an allure all its own.

In this ruggedly beautiful region long known for surfer dudes and celebrities-in-hiding, on the very cusp of Los Angeles, there are vintners who, without fanfare, are already producing quality grapes and sending them off to wineries to be processed. These folks are not dilettantes, and in at least one case, their wines have already begun getting favorable reviews and are showing up on serious wine lists, including those at Spago, Valentino, Melisse, Vincenti and La Cachette.

The stories behind the Malibu vineyards are as varied -- and as intriguing -- as the grapes they yield.

One is owned by an enormously wealthy developer more accustomed to playing host to rock stars than to selling wine. Another is run by a man who didn’t even drink wine until he and the former Playboy Playmate of the Month he married after they met on a blind date decided it would be more profitable to grow grapes than avocados. A third is essentially a one-man operation run by a Canadian-born money manager whose tiny vineyard is in his backyard.

I recently visited these three vineyards -- one is actually more Topanga than Malibu -- and then had dinner at Saddle Peak Lodge, in near-to-Malibu Calabasas, where chef Warren Schwartz prepared a seven-course meal designed around the wines.

The wines are too varied to have a discernible “Malibu style,” but they do have at least this much in common: While many California wines -- over-oaked Chardonnays, over-extracted Pinot Noirs, overpowering Cabernets and Zinfandels -- overwhelm the food they’re intended to accompany, the Malibu wines complemented the food instead of dominating it.

The Malibu wines are on the Saddle Peak wine list -- which is one reason the restaurant decided to host the dinner -- and at other restaurants in and around Malibu. They’re also available, at mostly reasonable prices, in other restaurants and wine shops in the greater Los Angeles area. Wines from Rosenthal: the Malibu Estate, for example, are sold at Wally’s, the Duke of Bourbon, Gelson’s and Topline as well as at many of the city’s best restaurants.

That’s not surprising since proprietor George Rosenthal is the most experienced and wine-savvy of the vintners who participated in the Saddle Peak dinner. But he’s not exactly Bob Mondavi, having planted his first grapes in 1987 and marketed his first vintage in 1991.

Before that, he was a hugely successful developer, building modest “starter” homes in Orange County and apartment units in West Hollywood, then stepping into the big time by putting up the Playboy Building, Raleigh Studios and the Westwood Marquis and Sunset Marquis hotels, where his frequent guests have included the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera.

Rosenthal, who turns 72 Thursday, met the owner of what is now the Malibu Estate in 1975. Two years later he started buying the land -- 25 acres at first -- just off Kanan Dume Road, amid the hilly, tree-lined splendor west of Malibu Canyon. He initially thought of the land as the perfect spot for a bucolic weekend home, away from the beach in Santa Monica where he’d lived for 30 years. He continued to buy the land, mostly in 20- and 25-acre chunks, and now has 240 acres on which he’s built a beautiful, Mexican-style hacienda.

“I got the wine idea serendipitously,” he says. “I was having lunch at Michael’s in Santa Monica one day, and Michael [McCarty] said he was thinking of putting in a vineyard in Malibu, where he lived. I had developed a great love for wine while traveling the world with a very close friend who has a great wine cellar, Emilio Azcarraga, [the late Mexican media baron].

“I thought having my own vineyard sounded like a great idea.”

But he’d never put his own name on any business venture.

“I got good reviews on my first Cab, though,” he says, “and I decided, well, why not. I thought it would be nice to have my grandchildren or great-grandchildren see it and know their name stands for quality.”

Wine Spectator gave that first Rosenthal Cab a 91, and most of his wines since have been in the mid-to-high 80s.

Rosenthal’s wines, like others from Malibu, are actually made elsewhere. He ships his grapes to the Baileyana Winery, just south of San Luis Obispo, “but I’m planning to have my own winery and my own caves here,” he says, “maybe by late next year.”

Rosenthal’s vineyards now yield about 700 cases of Chardonnay (which retail for $22 a bottle), 1,400 cases of Merlot ($30), 1,500 cases of Cabernet ($36) and 100 cases of a Founder’s Reserve Cabernet ($65) that he added to the line in 1997.

The current, ’98 vintage of the Founder’s Reserve is a big, rich wine, with wild berry overtones that made it an ideal companion to the roasted caribou chop, crispy potato confit, onion marmalade and dried cherry reduction at the Saddle Peak Lodge dinner.

I also liked the combination of Rosenthal’s Burgundian-style 2001 Newton Canyon Chardonnay and chef Schwartz’s butter-braised lobster with an English pea risotto and morel mushrooms.

That wasn’t the original pairing.

“Warren had a menu in mind, based on the ingredients that are usually available in late June, from the time I first thought of this dinner back in January,” says Gerhard Tratter, managing partner at Saddle Peak and the man who conceived of the dinner. “He knew, for example, that Virgin Blush white peaches would be in the market then, so he was going to serve lobster in a peach nage with one of the Chardonnays.”

Then the wineries delivered their wines, and Schwartz made the dishes and he and Tratter ate the food and drank the wine.

Uh-oh.

“Several combinations just didn’t work,” Tratter says. None of the white wines, for example “had the backbone necessary to stand up to the sweetness of the peaches and the richness of the lobster.”

So Schwartz rethought the dish.

But as much as I liked Rosenthal’s wines, the single best wine at the dinner -- for all four members of my party anyway -- was the 2000 Semler Malibu Estate Vineyards Cabernet. It was surprisingly approachable for a young Cabernet, and the subtle notes of black currant and cassis drew out the underlying sweetness in Saddle Peak’s braised baby lamb shank with fava beans and oven-dried tomatoes.

I suspect that the Rosenthal Founder’s Reserve, with more structure and more tannin, will be the better wine in the long run, but the Semler wine is made with grapes grown farther inland, where the weather is warmer, so they ripen faster and produce wines that are drinkable younger; it was no surprise that -- on this night, with this food -- we liked it better.

Easing into the business

That $45 wine is the flagship for the Semler family, the one wine on the market -- so far -- made with grapes from their own vineyards. When I visited them, they’d just bottled their 2001 Semler Malibu Estate wines -- 2,700 cases of the second vintage of the Cabernet, 600 cases of their first Syrah and 300 cases of their first Merlot. Although pricing hasn’t been set yet, the Merlot is likely to sell for about $40 and the Syrah for about $36.

The Semlers also sell two lower-priced wines -- a Merlot ($19) and a Chardonnay ($15) -- under the Saddlerock Vineyards label. Both are made with grapes from the Edna Valley.

“We started with that in 1997 so we could learn the winemaking process and marketing before we tried to grow our own grapes,” says Ronnie Semler, 60, who still owns a variety of other businesses, foremost among them a company that manufactures military communications systems for the U.S. and various foreign governments.

But it’s clear that his heart is in the wine business -- as is his family, including his 87-year-old mother, his second wife and four of the nine children from his two marriages.

Mom -- Blessing Semler, a graphic artist -- creates the oil paintings for the wines’ labels. Lisa, the mother of Semler’s six youngest children, is a former Playboy Playmate of the Month (September 1980), and her photo (no, not that photo) graces the only non-mom label, the one on the 2001 Cabernet. Lisa helps with all aspects of the family wine business -- including the harvest, the crush and the winemaking itself, which is done at Courtside Cellars in San Miguel, north of Paso Robles.

Sons Devon and Shane and daughters Tami and Tabitha have various responsibilities in the business, and even 11-year-old Dakota recently had his own business cards printed up. (There are rumors that Ronit, who will turn 3 next week, will soon be put to work as well.)

Like Rosenthal, Semler hopes to build his own winery soon and, also like Rosenthal, he didn’t buy his Malibu ranch land on the rolling slopes north of Mulholland Highway with grapes in mind.

“We bought the ranch in 1978 after a big fire burned everything here,” Semler says. “We had 13,000 avocado trees, but avocados require a tremendous amount of water and up here in Malibu, we didn’t have low-cost water. When we lost a million pounds of avocados in ‘91, we decided we’d better find an alternative crop.”

Unlike Rosenthal, the Semlers were not wine-lovers.

“About all we drank was an occasional mai tai in Hawaii,” Semler says. “But wine vines use about one-seventh the amount of water as avocados, and when we talked to people, they said we had the perfect physical location -- the right geography, soil and climate -- to grow high-quality wine grapes.

“We started to drink good wine to see if we liked it.” He smiles. “We did. So we figured if we grew grapes, we’d have a lot of options: sell them, sell their juice, retail it, wholesale it or, if worst came to worst ... “ -- now he laughs, a full, rich belly laugh -- “we could always drink it.”

So the Semler wines began as a business decision, not a personal passion.

But the Semlers are a passionate bunch, and Tami in particular shows her enthusiasm when she tells me the latest restaurant to carry the family wines (“the Water Grill, just yesterday”), and she rattles off the vineyard statistics (“53,000 vines, 57 acres planted, 75% Cab, 15% Merlot, 10% Syrah”) with the intensity of a mother bragging about her college-bound child’s SAT scores.

Tami, who functions as vineyard manager (among many other things), also seems to be the custodian of the family ranch history -- and a rich history it is.

The Chumash Indians were the original inhabitants of the ranch, and their rock drawings are still visible -- and visitable -- in caves and on ledges scattered across the 982-acre property. Saddlerock Ranch, nestled deep in the Santa Monica Mountains, dates to one of the original Spanish land grants more than 300 years ago, and it remains one of the largest working ranches in the county.

As Tami drove me around the ranch, I was struck repeatedly by its great natural beauty, by the easy co-existence of modern machinery and animals one would not expect to see outside a zoo or wild animal preserve -- llamas, emus, macaws, peacocks, camels and zebras -- and by the vistas that seemed to go on forever.

It’s easy to see why the rustic, rolling hills of Saddlerock Ranch have been the location for many movies, datingto the 1930s. “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer” with Gary Cooper was filmed here, as were “Hard to Kill,” “Hollywood Wives” and “The “Fear Inside.” Celebrity weddings have been even more common. Don Henley, Charlie Sheen, Lisa Kudrow and Kelsey Grammer all said their vows not far from the vines of Saddlerock.

But it’s with wine that the Semlers hope to leave their own mark on the history of the land they feel they hold in trust, and I’m eager to taste their Syrah and Merlot -- especially the Syrah -- when they come to market late this year.

It will be interesting to compare their Syrah with the big, jammy 2001 Syrah made by the third winery involved in the Saddle Peak Lodge dinner, Jussila Vineyard -- the Topanga Estate.

Malibu-adjacent

Jussila is located near Topanga State Park, south of Mulholland and east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It’s the smallest of the three vineyards, the only one that doesn’t make Cabernet or Chardonnay, the only one whose proprietor is also the winemaker and the only one that really isn’t in Malibu.

It was included in the dinner because Kevin Jussila is enthusiastic, because the folks at Saddle Peak like his wine and because Malibu and Topanga are so close, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Jussila, 43, a Canadian-born father of three, made only 75 cases of his $22 wine -- now in its third vintage -- using grapes grown on an acre and a half in his backyard. He makes the wine at Kahn Winery in Buellton when he’s not working as a money manager at Merrill Lynch.

He and his wife, Paula, built their home in 1989 with the help of a UCLA architecture student who was “really into wine,” Jussila says. “I liked wine too, and we started talking about how cool it would be to make wine.”

“I went to the Rhone three times when I started to get the wine bug and I fell in love with Syrah there,” he says.

He’s also planted Grenache and Sangiovese and hopes to be marketing those wines in 2005 or 2006, by which time he expects to be producing 300 cases of Syrah.

Who knows? By 2006, maybe there really will be a Malibu Wine Trail, complete with caves, tours and tasting rooms. The vineyards and the surrounding countryside are certainly stunning enough to lure visitors -- and where else could you drink good wine, see a zebra and talk with a man who can say, “Mick Jagger slept at my place”?

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.