The wine makers were not particular about what went into the hopper . . .

In the courtyard of one of the San Fernando Valley’s oldest houses, under the canopy of an oak tree which was old when Columbus was a child, five men and 10 women revived a rite of autumn.

Bunch by bunch, they dropped grapes into the hopper of a simple machine. Men took turns turning its crank.

White plastic rollers squeezed and burst the grapes. Off the sluice pan dribbled a stream of juice, glistening with just a hint of pale green and washing along flat, ragged ovals of pulped grape skins.

Glenn Hiatt, director of the Leonis Adobe in Calabasas, was getting the first installment of a dream coming true.

Spanish missionaries, the first non-Indian inhabitants of the Valley, grew grapes and made wine long ago. In the late 1800s, when the Adobe was the home of Miguel Leonis, he drank wine made on the ranch from his own grapes, Hiatt said.

The two-story ranch house, parts of which may date back to 1844, is now owned by a historical foundation that keeps it open to the public as an example of what life was like when the Valley was the Pacific Rim of the Wild West.

Leonis was a tough, 6-foot-4, Basque sheepherder. He built a small empire in what is now the West Valley, by means of a clever marriage to an Indian land heiress, ruthless dealing, a swarm of lawsuits--which he won by wining and dining the judges and juries--and out-and-out warfare, employing hired guns to chase off other settlers.

What is today the plush suburb of Hidden Hills once rang with gunfire in a weeklong war in which Leonis and his mercenaries fought pitched battles with a band of settlers, finally killing their leader and driving them away.

By the time Leonis perished under an overturned wagon in Cahuenga Pass, returning home from winning another lawsuit, he was worth more than $300,000, a sizable fortune in 1889.

Left behind in the wooden house he built around the core of an older adobe structure was a wine cellar, entered by a trapdoor.

For years Hiatt has wanted to get the adobe back into the wine business. On this sunny morning, the Cellarmasters, a Woodland Hills-based club of amateur wine makers, granted his wish.

Club members Bob Suver, a Pacific Bell executive from Agoura, and Tony Tasca, a retired Rocketdyne engineer from Woodland Hills, were overseeing the grape crushing.

Traffic poured past on the nearby Ventura Freeway. The ranch’s longhorn cattle, horses and sheep milled in the corral. Blue smoke from ribs on the outdoor grill at the Sagebrush Cantina next door drifted through the yard. The Adobe foundation is supported mostly by $12,000 a month in rents from the restaurant and the Leonis Plaza shopping mall across the road, both built on Leonis estate land.

Hiatt and two groundskeepers had picked about 350 pounds of grapes from the estate’s vineyard.

The wine makers were not particular about what went into the hopper, Suver said. Some of the grapes were the mission variety, “which the padres used in the 1790s,” he said.

“They make a light reddish wine that you almost never see anymore, except there’s one winery out near Ontario Airport that still makes it for the Yugoslav fishermen down in San Pedro.

“There’s also some black Hamburgs, and we even threw in some table grapes. We’re not entirely sure now what all’s in there.”

But when the wine is completed (Chateau Calabasas? Fume Freeway?) it will be some kind of “big rose,” he predicted, and quite drinkable.

Tasca tested the grape juice as it ran into three plastic garbage cans (“Please,” said Suver. “We prefer to call them ‘primary fermenters.”’)

“Sugar weight by volume comes out 23 degrees Brix,” Tasca said, obviously pleased. “That’s perfect. The acidity is 0.75--very good, showing that this is a good place to grow wine grapes and that Hiatt must have taken pretty good care of them.”

For half an hour, they cranked grapes through the modern steel “de-stemmer” they had brought with them, crushing grapes and removing stems. Then they sprinkled each can of the messy-looking mixture of juice and skins with a small packet of store-bought wine yeast, about the size of a restaurant sugar packet.

Suver wandered into the 76-year-old barn and reconstructed blacksmith shop, prowling through buckboards, buggies and 19th Century odds and ends.

“Hey, Tony, look here,” he called out.

Tasca found Suver inspecting what remained of a wine press.

“I’ll be darned,” Tasca said.

“How old, you figure?”

“Before the turn of the century, anyway. Probably made by the Amish, back in Pennsylvania, in those days.”

“Well,” said Suver, giving it an affectionate pat. “Now we know.”

The half-full garbage cans were lowered into the wine cellar, restoring it to its original use for perhaps the first time in the 20th Century.

Since the wine is to be a rose, it will sit for five to 10 days to absorb color from the skins. The mixture then will be run through a wooden wine press--little different from the devices the ancient Greeks used in the foundation days of wine worship--to remove the skins.

“Then it ages for about six months, to clarify it naturally, and we can bottle it,” Suver said. “It ought to be drinkable about a year after that, maybe a year and a half.”

Who gets to drink it?

“The foundation’s board of directors,” Hiatt replied.

The bystanders, most of them board members, smiled.