'Wine Was a Tool of Conquest': California's Hidden Multiethnic History of Winemaking

The Sierra Pelona Valley in northern Los Angeles County is known for its rugged hills, gale-force winds and stunning rock formations shaped over thousands of years by the San Andreas Fault. For local wine lovers, though, the area is better known as wine country.

Paul Charles, a retired sales executive turned winemaker who lives in nearby Santa Clarita, began to plant grape vines in his backyard nearly 20 years ago. The hobby flourished into a small business, Charles Wine Co., which he runs with wife, Cherise.

"The general public always thinks of Sonoma and Napa when they think of wine," said Charles. "But when I look at the history of California and winemaking, I wonder why we don't talk more about places like the Sierra Pelona region. We make great wines here. Yet we never talk about our local winemakers," he said.

Indeed, before Napa and Sonoma counties became synonymous with California wine, the epicenter of wine production in the state was Los Angeles, which by the mid-1850s had earned the nickname of the "City of Vines."

The story of L.A. wine, and California wine history, is more diverse, multiethnic and working-class than most people realize, says professor Julia Ornelas-Higdon, who teaches 19th century American West history at the California State University, Channel Islands.

California Indians and Mexican Californios (usually defined as people of Spanish or Mexican descent living in the Mexican province of Alta California), as well as Chinese and European immigrants, laid the groundwork for the state's multibillion dollar wine industry, said Ornelas-Higdon, who has spent the past five years researching her upcoming book, "The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769-1920."

Wine production in the state dates to the Mission system established by Spanish Franciscan missionaries in 18th century California. Vineyards planted with imported cuttings of Vitis vinifera — better known as the Mission grape — were established at most of the missions in order to make sacramental wine and a type of brandy known as aguardiente. Stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, the mission system — and their vineyards — were built using the forced labor and enslavement of California native peoples.

"Wine was really a tool of conquest for the Spanish," said Ornelas-Higdon, noting that Indigenous Californians were prohibited from drinking wine outside of the confines of the Catholic mass. Even ownership of wine-making tools was criminalized.

"California natives are the ones who planted, pruned, harvested the grapes, and did all of that work," said Ornelas-Higdon. "Yet the irony is that they had very limited access to the literal fruits of their labors."

Mexican independence from Spanish rule eventually led to the secularization of California's missions. The lands were broken up, and the property sold or granted to private citizens, who in turned developed ranchos, many of which became centers of wine production. According to historian Thomas Pinney's "The City of Vines: A History of Wine in Los Angeles," major wine-producing ranchos during the first half of the 19th century included Rancho Paso de Bartolo Viejo (which covered present-day Montebello, Whittier and Pico Rivera) and Henry "Don Enrique" Dalton's Rancho Azusa (in present-day Azusa, Arcadia, Monrovia, Irwindale and Baldwin Park). Under Mexican rule, more European immigrants began to settle in California, including Frenchman Jean-Louis Vignes (downtown L.A.'s Vignes Street is named after him). His El Aliso vineyard, situated near the present-day location of downtown's Union Station, was one of the first large-scale wineries in mid-19th century California.

By the 1850s, California was under American rule, and the state was undergoing monumental cultural shifts, including the decline of Indigenous populations across the state due to disease, starvation and the targeted genocide of California natives by non-Indians. The discovery of gold in northern California in 1848 sparked a population boom in the state, leading to a higher demand for Los Angeles wine, which began to be shipped to northern California in larger quantities. During this period, German immigrants such as Charles Kohler and John Frohling — who would go on to build Kohler & Frohling, one of the largest and most successful wine companies of its days — were finding success in the industry (Frohling was also one of the founders of Anaheim, which was established as a German American wine colony in 1857).
In the 1860s and 1870s, more California winemakers began to employ working-class Mexicans and Yoemi (Yaqui) laborers from the Arizona-Sonora borderlands to work the vineyards. But the most sought-after workers during this period were Chinese immigrant laborers, who cleared land for farming; planted, pruned and harvested grapes; and dug wine caves by hand.

"They were stereotyped as being compliant and docile, which made them desirable," said Ornelas-Higdon. "Also, vineyard owners could get away with paying them less money and putting them up in substandard housing for much less than what they would pay white workers."

By the 1880s, Italian immigrants brought new energy to the booming California wine industry; the most famous Italian American winemaker of the period was Secondo Guasti, who came to Los Angeles from the Piedmont region of Italy and built a wine empire, the Italian Vineyard Company, in the Cucamonga Valley.

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Several factors contributed to the decline of the winemaking in Los Angeles, including rapid urbanization and development, a massive outbreak of Pierce's Disease in the 1880s (a notorious bacteria that effectively "chokes" grapevines to death), and the ascendance of the California citrus industry. Prohibition, which went into effect in 1920, didn't help.

Today, being a winemaker in Los Angeles can sometimes feel a little lonely, said Linda Yee of Mighty Yee Wines, which specializes in small-lot, artisanal wines that Yee produces herself during annual trips to Sonoma County. "My friends in Sonoma have formed a wine group and they've been tasting wine together for 30 years. I haven't been able to find a group like that in L.A.," said Yee. "And it can still be hard to find a tasting room here."

Still, L.A. is experiencing something of a wine-making renaissance. In 2019, a group of L.A. winemakers led by Mark Blatty of Byron Blatty Wines formed the Los Angeles Vintners Association. The group, which also includes Angeleno Wine Company, Cavaletti Vineyards and Acri Wine Co., aims to revive and promote the city's rich tradition of viticulture. (In 2020, the group was invited to take cuttings and harvest grapes from the San Gabriel Mission's original Ramona Vine; the grapes were used to recreate the sweet dessert wine known as Angelica, which historians often refer to as the first true California wine).

"Our thought process was that there are already so many great wines coming from Paso Robles and Santa Barbara. We wanted to focus on Southern California grapes," said Ben Sposato, who in 2018 opened Acri Wine Company with his wife, Katy. The pair work with growers across Southern California, from the High Desert all the way to Dulzura on the California-Mexico borderline, to produce low intervention wine, including harder-to-find Italian varietals such as Fiano,

Aglianico, and Nebbiolo Zinfandel, along with crowd-pleasers such as Merlot, Syrah and Cabernet Franc, among others.

"We have found that there are quite a few vineyards in Southern California. Many are farmed sustainably or organically — and the fruit is really good," said Sposato. Since opening in 2011, Robert Reyes, who owns Reyes Winery, a 14-acre vineyard in the Sierra Pelona Valley of northern Los Angeles County, has also seen renewed interest in locally-made wines. "We have a lot of wineries now in places where we previously did not," Reyes said. "I don't think we'll ever be what Los Angeles was many years ago — the land is so scarce. But there's certainly more trends toward vineyards in L.A. county."

Looking back to the early days of the California wine industry shows us that winemaking has not always been the province of historically elite groups, but that it belongs, in some way, to all Californians, said Ornelas-Higdon.

"If we peel back the layers of this history, we see this amazing, diverse industry that was really working class, that was immigrant, and that included a lot of populations of color," she said.