Los Angeles was once known as the City of Vines. Vineyards stretched for thousands of acres over a rolling landscape at the foot of the towering mountains. The river wound a shady, tree-lined course through verdant alluvial plains, watered by frequent floods. French and Spanish were spoken as commonly as English, if not more so. And wine was the biggest business and export of this colonial burg, enough wine to quench the thirst of an entire nation.

My guest for this episode is Stuart Byles. Stuart is the author of Los Angeles Wine: A History from the Mission Era to the Present so of course that’s what we talk about. As a Los Angeleno myself, I take a little bit of pride in knowing that Los Angeles was the center of wine in America for pretty much the entire 19th century. There are some amazing characters and stories from this time, and we just scratch the surface.

In addition to his book, we talk about some of the ecology of Los Angeles, and one of my heros – Biddy Mason – even though she wasn’t really connected to the wine business. And we also talk about the potential now for infill vineyard establishment in urban spaces under power lines.

I actually met Stuart at a wine tasting under some powerlines in South Central LA at the Willowbrook Community Garden. Thanks to Ned Teitelbaum and Rose Pinkney and the other members of the Willowbrook Community Garden, I got to be part of a fun afternoon of education and wine tasting there. They have planted a small vineyard of head-trained mission grapes in a section of the Willowbrook Garden and are helping to revive Los Angeles’s wine history. So a big thanks to them for what they are doing and for the introduction to Stuart.

Now, a huge caveat has to be made in that we are talking about the arrival and growth of the European wine culture that we’ve inherited centered around vinifera. We mention this in our conversation, but it bears repeating that there were of course indigenous grapes and people here long before the Spanish missionaries arrived, and the fermentation of local fruits into a diverse array of wines is as old as these pre-colonial cultures. In fact it was the thriving native grapevines along the Los Angeles river that probably gave the first Europeans hope that their vinifera would do well here. Our focus on this recent history of Los Angeles wine is in no way meant to downplay the importance of our pre-colonial history, just as the fact that we focus on wine is in no way meant to downplay the importance of oil, for example, to the ecology and economy of Los Angeles. This is just the narrow focus for this episode.

In fact I hope that our narrow focus on this slice of history opens your eyes to the many, many fascinating histories there are to explore.

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/