Wine Industry Trying to Take Root in Antelope Valley

The little Lancaster vineyard looks like a place where a thousand starvelings have been crucified.

In the late-November dusk, as storm clouds form a phantom mountain range above the adjacent hills, the young cabernet sauvignon vines seem dead. Their withered brown arms are flung out along trellises and tied down with thin strips of green plastic. They vibrate in the hard wind.

But they’re not dead, just sleeping--exhausted, as might be expected of 3-year-olds who have had to work all summer. The first frost packed them straight off to dreamland early this month.

Next year they’ll awaken to harder work and higher expectation. They’ll be disciplined by the pruner. They’ll be kept thirsty. They’ll bake beneath the desert sun and shiver at night, so that the sugars and acids in their ripening fruit may emerge in balance. Stressed vines, winegrowers like to say, make the best grapes.

Maybe next year the vines will bear enough fruit for the first time to warrant crushing at Antelope Valley Winery. Maybe the juice will be good enough to become a wine of its own--an estate-grown cabernet sauvignon. That would be a signal achievement, a step toward realization of a vision a small band of believers nurtures: the dusty, exurban Antelope Valley as a legitimate wine-growing region.

This year, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms formally established a new geographical designation--known as an appellation--that includes the Antelope Valley. The appellation “South Coast” may now appear on the labels of wines from California grapes grown south of the Tehachapi Mountains.

The Antelope Valley Winery is in an industrial strip in Lancaster. In its cool, humidified warehouse, sparkling stainless steel storage tanks rise ceilingward. Barrels of French and American oak are neatly stacked in the center; Dante Donato, the 4 1/2-year-old son of winery co-owner Cyndee Donato, loves climbing them.

The tanks and barrels are filled with the product of grapes that Donato and her husband, Frank, bought from growers outside the valley. In the six years of their winery’s existence, as its production doubled to nearly 3,000 cases a year, the Donatos have had to rely on such grapes, in some cases producing wines of admirable quality.

Only two of the 13 wines they currently offer are made exclusively of Antelope Valley grapes grown on their two acres. One is a red called Fusion, especially popular with the Antelope Valley residents who make up the bulk of the winery’s customers.

Fusion reflects the valley’s wine-growing nascence. The Donatos grew the merlot for the blend themselves (from vines that water problems have since caused to be torn out), and acquired cabernet and zinfandel from two other valley growers.

“Other growers up here were in the same situation we were,” Cyndee Donato said. “They didn’t have enough grapes on their own yet either, so if we put three harvests together we could come up with the necessary five tons.”

This year yielded “nice, big clusters of grapes from the vines, but you just need more of them,” Donato said. “The kids and I went out and picked them, and the kids stomped them and we made home wine out of them, just for the fun. But it wasn’t enough grapes to put through our crusher at the winery, because we crush five tons at a time.”

It is early in the game, however. The shortage of wine-ready valley grapes should begin to ease. Cecil McLester, the winemaker at Antelope Valley Winery, estimates that the number of valley acres planted in wine grapes has grown to 150, with new vineyards being planted every year. Valley growers buzz about established wineries scouting possible planting sites.

Even with the new “South Coast” appellation, Antelope Valley winegrowers eventually could pursue a narrower appellation all their own.

Geographical particularity matters. The more specific its appellation, the more cachet a wine has as the product of unique soil and weather conditions.

Antelope Valley vintners would have to prove the valley has a special microclimate. A lot will depend, too, on the character of the wines from vines like the young cabernet sauvignon planted at the Donatos’ place.

Which, maybe next year, will yield enough grapes for a crush.

And maybe, after the juice has been fermented with the proper yeast at the proper temperature, and spent a year and a half in those French and American oak barrels clarifying and picking up just the right wood tannins, it will be bottled. And maybe after six months’ rest, it will be released--just in time for the millennium, a thing of local pride that will make the wine magazines rave and connoisseurs swoon.

Or maybe not.

Regardless, winegrowing writes its own rule book.

It’s about youthful things undergoing controlled rigor to achieve productive maturity. It’s about the wisdom of delayed gratification, of resources invested now in hopes of a kind of grandeur in the unseeable future.

More than anything, it’s about optimism. Confidence that things will turn out well--that insects and molds will not attack the vines, that the weather won’t rebel, that wild things in the air won’t subvert the wine as it develops, that what a new wine promises in the glass won’t prove chimerical.

And if things do go wrong, as they might, it’s all about something else: Getting another chance next year when the vines rouse themselves from sleep and start the cycle again.