Town Has Grapeness Thrust Upon It : Inglewood Wine Makers Ply Trade in the Shadow of LAX

Burgundy. It is a region, a passion and the suggestion of soft summers in patient search of gentle wines. So it is with Champagne and Bordeaux. Moselle and Lombardy. Napa and Sonoma. It’s all in the names, then our minds.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, “Wine is proof that God loves us and likes to see us happy.”

And now, mes amis du vin , Inglewood.

Where the kerosene mist rolls in from Los Angeles International Airport, there are three commercial wineries. For the nippy cellars and chateaux of upper La Chapelle, read windowless, cinder-block warehouses on lower La Cienega. The gentle slopes of this wine country lead not to San Adrian but the San Diego Freeway.

‘Napa Valley South’

“We call ourselves Napa Valley South,” Cecil and Marcy McLester say. They are husband and wife, cellarmaster and mistress of McLester Winery at 10670 La Cienega Blvd. They hold no pretenses about its location. In commemoration of vinification 323 feet beneath jetliners on constant and shrieking final approaches to LAX, they market curiosity wines labeled Runway Red and Runway White.

“Every time a 747 goes over it shakes the barrels enough that we get a year of aging,” said Hank Donatoni, founder-owner-president-crusher-racker-bottler-head-taster of nearby Donatoni Winery at 10604 La Cienega. He’s kidding, of course. “Obviously, I’m not going out to join the noise abatement people.”

Obviously. Donatoni’s other job is as a 727 captain for United Airlines.

Then there’s Herb Harris. He heads Palos Verdes Winery (“I didn’t think Harris Winery had much of a ring to it”) at 10620 La Cienega. It’s next door to an auto parts store that sells only well-battered bits for Chevrolet Corvairs.

Harris is similarly ambitious. To fool the grape juice known as must that still manages to ferment amid Inglewood’s industrial clatter and asphalt, he has built an adjustable cold box to duplicate the environment of Northern France.

A Stranger to France

Incidentally, Harris has never visited France. There just isn’t time for vacations in faraway places; not with the winery and marriage and children and a primary job as marketing manager for BHP Trading, a busy subsidiary of a massive Australian steel company.

Harris has indeed heard the one about the wine critic who attributed a good Inglewood Zinfandel to “berry flavors, open top fermentation, light fining and on-time arrivals of TWA’s Flight 761 from London-Heathrow.”

But flippancy aside, there’s much serious wine making in Inglewood. Donatoni, the McLesters and Harris have collected a goodly share of medals and ribbons from the better festivals; the Los Angeles and Orange County fairs, Cal Expo and the San Francisco International Wine Fair.

Their wines retail from McLester’s $2.75 Runway Red (that its vintner describes as “not exactly a loss leader, but close”) to a Chardonnay (“from McGregor grapes, and I think it will go a long way,” enthuses Harris) from Palos Verdes at $10.95.

Each winery is precisely that, an establishment where wine is made. Grapes are trucked from elsewhere, primarily from the Central Coast, from Santa Barbara, Amador and San Luis Obispo counties. But the wine certainly is made, fermented, aged and bottled in Inglewood. Such divided production, the producers agreed, means a winery would be well situated downtown at 7th and Figueroa.

Location Is ‘Academic’

“Location is really quite academic,” Donatoni explained. “It is (important) where the grapes are grown. You can’t make wine any better than the grapes. You can easily screw it up but it’s very difficult to make it any better.

“Of course, it would be very nice to have a chateau alongside your own vineyards . . . but it’s what is in the bottle that counts,” he continued. “It’s like labels. A pretty label is nice and it helps. But it’s not everything.”

Donatoni sells about 1,400 cases or 16,800 bottles a year through liquor stores, smaller markets, restaurants and clubs. McLester sells 3,000 cases and his wine is available through Trader Joe’s and Liquor Barn. Palos Verdes markets 1,000 cases to restaurants and smaller wine shops.

Donatoni is the gentleman vintner. His ancestors produced Muscat from vinelands near Verona, Italy, and he lives the industry’s oldest saw: It is easy to make a small fortune from wine making if you’re prepared to invest a large fortune. So Donatoni listens to soft, all-jazz radio as his Cabernet matures, hosts wine and food society dinners at the plant and makes sure there’s always time in his life to sniff the grape.

The McLesters are marketeers. They sell wine by the bottle, magnum and jeroboam. Also glasses, bar gadgets and jewelry. Runway Red isn’t their only novelty. There’s Suite 13 (a sweet 13% sugar and 13% alcohol) and Marci Beaucoup (after Marcy McLester and merci beaucoup ) and plans for Pizza Pink in the belief that there’s a palate and a dish for every wine and more occasions for sauterne than Thanksgiving.

A Climate Wizard

Harris is the scientist. He studied his craft through Extension courses at UC Berkeley and UCLA. Hence his wizardry in re-creating a climate that we’d call bracing but which he establishes scientifically by the numbers and duration of something called “heat summation zoning.”

To think it all began because Harris couldn’t afford to drink Montrachet.

And Donatoni bought a house in Topanga Canyon.

And Cecil McLester was handed a Father’s Day gift.

McLester well remembers the present. It was a home wine-making kit. “I was kinda ticked off at the kids,” he recalled. “Not only didn’t they buy me something to drink on Father’s Day, but if I wanted something to drink I’d have to make it first.”

But he did make five gallons. Then 10 gallons. Then 100. “Until there was nothing in the garage but wine. No cars, no washing machine, no lawn mower, just 11 barrels of wine at 500 gallons apiece.”

Then, in 1980, McLester’s 5-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon earned him the Master of Enology trophy at the International Amateur Wine Competition in Bloomington, Minn.

That was the start of McLester Winery. “I was interested in premium quality, vintage, varietal wines that would compete with Robert Mondavi,” he said. “It took us about 18 months to realize that wasn’t the direction we wanted to go.”

Marcy McLester picked up the story: “So we went to the blends and away from the varietals to create table wines for the low-rent trade.”

‘Runway One of the Best’

And why not? Table wines are majority wines in France, Germany and Italy. Bread and cheese wines. Sausage wines. Spaghetti wines. Good, twice-a-day wines. “There are a few of them (good table wines) out there but not a lot,” she said. “And I happen to think that our Runway wine is one of the best table reds I’ve found.”

But Runway Red? “Frankly we got tired of defending our location and people who said you just can’t make good wine in Inglewood,” she explained. “So to celebrate our location we came up with the Runway wines and the airplane label because you just can’t put a picture of a 747 on a $9 bottle of wine.”

Cecil McLester’s production isn’t dominated by inexpensive wines. He’s proudest of an ’84 Merlot that has yet to reach retail bins; an ’82 Cabernet that won awards from the Riverside Farmer’s Fair and the Central Coast Wine Growers; and an ’83 Zinfandel that received bronze medals at the Amador and Los Angeles county fairs.

Yet he still prefers to serve those who simply know what they like. Chardonnay and Cabernet, he believes, have become useless buzzwords.

“Just what is all this pretentiousness?” Marcy McLester asked. “All that is really important is: ‘Do you like it or not?’

“If you want to chill your red wine, I say chill it,” she said. “And why room temperature? What else do you eat or drink at room temperature?

“I don’t want our customers to feel embarrassed about how they serve our wine. If they want to take a $9 Cabernet and make a spritzer out of it, fine. If they like it, that’s all we’re interested in.”

Cecil McLester sees wine making as a shortcut to new friendships, admission to a gentle fraternity, his creative outlet. He believes there’s a small piece of him in every bottle that goes out of the door. And maybe one of these days . . .

“My dream is to be living somewhere in the Central Coast area, not more than three miles from the ocean with a small winery.

“Come to think of it, that’s what we’ve got now.”

Donatoni started it all. He bought a home in Topanga Canyon in 1968; it came with a vineyard and 120 vines, so he went out and bought a book on wine making. “The first bottle was drinkable and being the first bottle we thought it was marvelous,” he said. “In retrospect, it probably wasn’t very good.”

But it certainly was encouraging.

Eight years and several books later he was searching for a site. He wanted Los Angeles. City zoning laws, however, seem geared to the teetotal. Winery locations are lumped with steel mills and railroad yards.

Yet Los Angeles also is a much-mottled city.

The eastern outskirt of its airport, a patch of two square miles from Century Boulevard to Imperial Highway, from Prairie Avenue to La Cienega, actually belongs to the county. County laws allow wineries on land allocated to light manufacturing and parking lots--and so Donatoni Winery opened for business in the bottom left-hand corner of Inglewood.

Donatoni knew McLester from wine club meetings. So McLester moved in. Harris was a fellow former president of the same club, the Cellarmasters. Harris moved in. And there--but as a distinct elevation to the area and shuttle bus maintenance yard across the street--went the neighborhood.

Grapes Arrive at Dawn

Donatoni buys either must or grapes from Santa Maria and Paso Robles. Must is delivered by refrigerated truck. Grapes are picked in late afternoon and travel by cool of night to arrive at chilly dawn. It’s all designed to suspend the natural activity of juice and grapes until man can set its progress.

There is the crushing with family and friends--a party day--then the bottling, another little festival with tasting of the vintage. Ex-Navy pilot Donatoni spends more hours supervising his winery than he does flying for United, and it may even be more satisfying.

“You sit among the barrels, the oak smells, listen to a little jazz . . . and the fun thing of wine is knowing that every barrel will come out different. It’s rather like raising children.”

Herb Harris is a commercial oddity. He borrowed no money to open Palos Verdes Winery. His material purchases are in cash. Harris seeks no investors because he is more interested in building good wines than tax shelters for others.

“I’m not in this to get rich, but to learn the business, to set up a market base,” he said. Surprisingly, he’s also on the black side of breaking even. It might have to do with a stern, albeit novel motivation. “I set out to make the kind of wine I like to drink, figuring if I couldn’t sell it, then I’d have an awful lot of it to drink.”

He entered the business on sentiment--being saddened by seeing old vineyards plowed under to make way for more condominiums in Northern California. He applied himself scientifically--through extension courses.

Harris acquired his product after acquiring a taste--for the popular and less-expensive wines of France’s northeastern plateaus because he couldn’t afford Montrachet and Pouilly-Fuisse.

“It’s the style of those wines, the crispness, the barrel aging of white wines and particularly the Chardonnays, a red wine that just happens to be white,” he said.

How the French Do It

In the Alsace, Champagne and upper Burgundy regions of France, wines are fermented in oak barrels, not stainless steel tanks. Harris follows that procedure, using only barrels made from French oak.

He buys his grapes from vineyards in North Santa Barbara County where the climate is similar to that of Alsace, Champagne and upper Burgundy.

Wine makers in France open their barn doors at night to create deeper cooling that regulates fermenting must to a 1% drop in sugar content every 24 hours.

“It’s a little hard to open the doors at night and catch the coastal breezes when your winery is in Inglewood,” Harris said. “So I’ve built this cold room where I can pick the median, 45 degrees, 47, 48 degrees, whatever is needed to drop 1% sugar a day.”

And his bottled products, he said, all whites and blushes, do indeed come close to their French cousins germain s.

“So I’ve got my second half planned,” Harris said. “Long term we all look at other options. Mine is to be full time in the wine business.”

But first, he’d like to visit the France he so admires.

“I’d like to pick one place and spend several months there, talk to the people, learn what they do. I want to learn the intangibles that go through their whole lives, the way they cook, the way they live . . . see the differences between how they make their wine against how I make my wine.

“And then try and add their differences to mine. Maybe it will be something they do instinctively as part of the culture. Maybe they don’t even know what it is. But I’d like to know.”