A Toast to Winemaking’s Renaissance in L.A. County

Late each day, as the western horizon gathers in the sun, some of George Rosenthal’s thoughts drift to the mass of cool air dammed behind Kanan Dume Road north of Malibu as it starts to spill over into Newton Canyon.

Around the same time, Thomas Jones can’t help but be aware that the air cooling in the San Fernando Valley is setting out on its nightly journey through Moraga Canyon in Bel-Air toward the sea.

Simultaneously, in the great bowl of the Sierra Pelona Valley near Agua Dulce, Donal MacAdam mentally marks the beginning of the high desert evening’s precipitous drop in temperature.

All three men have wrested wealth and success from lives in business. Their present preoccupation with air currents and other natural phenomena they can’t influence, much less exercise executive control over, is traceable to a low-grade fever they’ve contracted. It’s called winegrowing.

Nowadays, a part of them is harnessed to the daily cycle of their vines as the plants labor under the sun to produce sugar in their grapes and are lulled to rest at night by cool air that preserves their balancing acids. Frosts, birds, insects, molds, all these have purchase on their psyches, too. “Passion is an absolute requirement,” says Jones, a retired CEO of Northrop Corp. “And it has to be an intelligent passion. You have to get darned interested to put up with all the problems.”

Los Angeles County is experiencing a boomlet of winegrowing. The Board of Supervisors helped things along last year by lifting a 50-year-old ban on commercial winemaking in unincorporated areas. Most growers had to truck their grapes to wineries in other counties to be transformed into wine.

It’s difficult to know exactly how much land in the county is in wine grapes. Many vineyards are of hobby size or are just being planted. Far from all are the creations of wealthy people. My informal canvass of growers with ambitions of making high-quality wines indicates a minimum of 375 acres (Napa, in contrast, has more than 30,000). Vineyard consultant Todd Schaefer says he’s planted 15 new vineyards in the Malibu area alone in the past two years.

This new current of energy arcs between exclusive Malibu and the dusty high desert. At present, the county’s largest winegrower is 3-year-old Agua Dulce Vineyards, which is co-owned and overseen by MacAdam, a developer of horse-oriented communities. To take in the expansive vineyard from Sierra Highway is to feel transported to Napa or Sonoma. It encompasses 90 acres of flourishing Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Zinfandel, Sangiovese and Syrah vines. Agua Dulce has just opened an 8,500-square-foot winery and expects to be selling its first home-grown or “estate” wines, currently aging in French and American oak barrels, in a couple of years.

By year’s end, 6-year-old Saddlerock Vineyards on Mulholland Highway in Malibu will overtake Agua Dulce in cultivated acreage. The Semler family, owners of Saddlerock Ranch, has 65 acres in Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah vines, and expects to have a total of 100 by January. The Semlers, like their neighbor Rosenthal, who owns hotels and other businesses, intend to have their own on-site winery operating two or three years hence. That high-quality wines can be made here has been amply demonstrated by Jones and Rosenthal. The limited Bordeaux-style Cabernet from Jones’ eight-acre Moraga Vineyard in Bel-Air, visible from the Getty Center, commands $125 a bottle on the retail market. The founder’s reserve Cabernet from Rosenthal’s 22-acre The Malibu Estate fetches about $70 a bottle.

Because of the county’s many climatic zones and insufficient recent history, local growers are constantly experimenting with grape varieties. Schaefer, for example, has high hopes for five acres of Pinot Noir he planted on a steep hillside near Leo Carrillo State Beach. Lancaster hotelier Jens Neelsen, meanwhile, is enthusiastic about the prospects of Viognier, the noble white grape of France’s Rhone Valley, in his hilly seven-acre Carina Vineyards near Palmdale.

What’s occurring is really a sort of renaissance. One hundred and twenty years ago, Los Angeles County was the leading producer of wine in California, with more than 400 operating vineyards, and may have been the first place in California where noble French varietals were planted.

The industry was gradually killed off by insect-borne Pierce’s disease, and eradicated from memory by Prohibition and all-out land development.

It’s a historical irony that the current bud break of renewed interest is occurring while Pierce’s disease once again troubles the sleep of winegrowers throughout California. Carried by an aggressive insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter, it has severely damaged winegrowing in the Temecula Valley and is making its way north toward the state’s gold-standard wine regions.

The high desert’s elevation and cold winters seem to make it immune to the glassy-winged, however, and so far Malibu’s vineyards haven’t been affected, either. Knock on wood. Few people are unaffected by a sense of timeless, earthbound romance and cyclical renewal when they contemplate a vineyard. How nice to think of this region as a wine appellation instead of the asphalt capital of the world.