Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  The building was repaired, but hardly any of the original adobe material remained. In 1980, a developer acquired the land and built a small strip mall he named the Thomas Winery Plaza. There are modern restaurants and shops, and thousands of cars whiz by daily. While there are no vineyards nearby, reminders that this was once the center of an important wine-growing region dot the mall. Huge pockmarked redwood barrels that came around Cape Horn in the middle of the nineteenth century (or so a sign claims) decorate the plaza. Smaller barrels sit on top of a wagon. An old rusting tower remains, as well as a large round brass vessel once used to distill brandy. There is a retail wine shop where visitors can taste wine made elsewhere. Customers can even blend their own vintages to order.

  Most interesting is a sign painted on the side of a barrel, not far from Vineyard Road. It reads “California’s oldest commercial winery.” Since winemaking began in southern California and all the vineyards of Los Angeles have long been paved over, history buffs and boosters claim that the rectangular building covered in vines in the Thomas Winery Plaza may be the closest we now have to the one of the birthplaces of California’s $24.6 billion wine industry.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WINE FEVER

  The travelers couldn’t believe the sight before them.

  For three months they had been trekking across deserts and mountains, exhausted and half starved. They had killed off their horses and mules one by one for food, and stuck their heads in tiny pockets in the ground to drink up drops of moisture. The plan, to take the southern route to the California gold fields, had seemed like a good idea when they left Provo, Utah, three months earlier.

  Now it was Christmas Day in 1849 and the twenty-five would-be gold miners were nearly spent, their clothes in rags, their boots worn down, their spirits low. They had come out of the mountains hours earlier and had made their way to Rancho Cucamonga, a welcoming spot of green after days in the desert. They thought the place was called the Pokamongo Ranch.

  The men were still about five hundred miles from the gold mines, but the sight that greeted them, the first sign of civilization they had seen in months, promised riches of another kind. Two naked Indians stood on a platform made from a cowhide stretched between four poles. In the center sat a pile of fermenting grapes. The Indians trod up and down, squishing the grapes into a bright red liquid that flowed out of a hole in the bottom of the hide.

  The travelers grabbed their tin cups and filled them with the young wine, as the superintendent of the rancho, a dark-skinned man, looked on with amusement. “We went at the wine, caught it in our tin cups, as we all had one apiece,” one traveler recorded in his diary. “We drank it as fast as the Indians could tramp it for awhile. The old negro after awhile said ‘Gentlemen, you have had a hard time of it, I know, but de first ting you know you will know nothing. You are welcome to it.’”

  The travelers drank draught after draught of the young wine until they collapsed on the ground in a stupor. They fell asleep right where they lay. “Now this spree was on Christmas day. In the morning when we all got up we felt pretty good but awfully hungry.”30

  The travelers hadn’t hit the gold fields yet, but they had stumbled upon what would one day be another of the state’s riches: purple gold. Rancho Cucamonga was the first settled place many gold seekers taking a southern route into the mines would find as they came out of the mountains. It became a regular stop. And word spread that the wine from the vineyard was worth seeking out.

  * * *

  When Tapia died in 1845, he passed his property on to his daughter and her French husband, a grape grower who had vineyards near the coast. Their main abode was in Los Angeles, and although they traveled back and forth for a time, it appears they neglected the rancho. A member of a U.S. surveying expedition who visited in 1854 described abject working conditions for the Indians. The vineyard belongs to “a Californian, living at a great distance off, who had placed these people here to look after it. They were evidently very poor, and lived in rude log huts … and who, in their scanty ragged clothing appeared the picture of misery. They stand much in the position of serfs.”

  In 1858, Tapia’s daughter and son-in-law sold Rancho Cucamonga’s 13,000 acres to an American Confederate supporter. California had become a territory of the United States in 1848 and a state in 1850. As the country geared up for Civil War, southern California was dominated by people who supported the Southern cause.

  The buyer, John Rains, considered himself a modern man, someone with a vision. The old Californio way of life, with its vast ranchos, giant herds of cattle, and focus on family life rather than commerce, was rapidly disappearing now that California was part of the United States. Americans and Europeans had flocked to San Francisco and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush. Some found their way south, to escape the arduousness of the mines, or to set up small businesses, or to escape a criminal past.

  Rains straddled the American and old Spanish-Mexican lifestyles. He had come to California from Alabama in 1847 after a stint with the Texas Rangers. From the time he had arrived, he had lived by his wits and his willingness to try his hand at almost any type of business. He had herded thousands of head of sheep and cattle across the unforgiving Mojave Desert, fought off Indians, and even run unsuccessfully for sheriff.

  In October 1854, Rains made his smartest move yet: he signed on to look after 1,000 head of cattle belonging to Isaac Williams, a Pennsylvania native and cattle baron who had made a fortune selling tallow and hides to the ships that arrived at the port at San Pedro. Taking that job at Rancho Santa Ana del Chino in modern San Bernardino County put Rains in close proximity to Williams’s young daughter, Maria Merced. With his dark hair, full beard, and heavy eyebrows, Rains was a handsome man. He wasn’t well educated, but resourcefulness counted more than school learning on the western frontier. Before long, Merced was smitten. She may have been seeking a protector as well because her father was ill in bed with heart disease. The fifty-seven-year-old Williams never recovered. He died on September 13, 1856. Three days later, the twenty-seven-year old Rains and the sixteen-year-old Merced were married by Reverend Padre Raho at the Catholic church on Los Angeles’s main plaza.31

  The union thrust Rains into the upper echelons of society, for Doña Merced was Californio royalty. Merced was a descendant of some of the first Spanish settlers in California and her maternal grandfather had been one of the few granted land by Spain. Her father acquired even more. When he died, Merced inherited half of one of the most beautiful ranchos in the region, the 35,000-acre Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, near present-day Chino, among other land holdings, and huge herds of stock. Her total dowry was worth around $70,000.32 Rains only brought about $1,850 to the union, all of it in cattle and sheep.

  Rains immediately started to invest his wife’s money. Perhaps he was thinking of his father-in-law, whom one observer thought combined the best of American ingenuity with the best attributes of the Californios. Rains bought land in San Bernardino. He invested in the Bella Union Hotel on Main Street in Los Angeles. And two years after the wedding, after selling his wife’s stake in the Chino rancho, he used the proceeds to purchase Rancho Cucamonga for $8,500. Rains had to pay another $8,000 to convince a longtime tenant to relinquish claim on the land.

  Rains had big plans for the property. Although Tapia’s home still stood on top of Red Hill, Rains dreamed of a modern house, one that would announce to the world that the Rains family was important. Impermanent adobe was the predominant building material of the time, but Rains aspired to build a home of fired red brick. He found five Ohio brick makers living in Los Angeles and hired them to move to Rancho Cucamonga and construct close to 300,000 bricks by hand.

  The finished house was a marvel. It was U-shaped, with a round brick fountain in the patio. Flumes from a canyon stream filled the fountain and funneled water beneath the house, cooling it during the hot days of summer. The rooms had twelve-foot-high ceilings, wide plank floors, fireplaces, and large
windows to let in the light. Elegant wood furnishings brought around the horn from Boston probably decorated the home. The home was large enough to accommodate the Rains’s growing family, and Merced’s three younger siblings.

  Rains’s attention then turned to Tapia’s vineyard, which spread out over 100 acres right near the new house. The Cucamonga region had proved well suited to grape growing: its sandy, loamy soil was loose and porous; and the climate was ideal. While temperatures could reach over one hundred degrees in the summer, it never dipped to freezing in the winter. Moreover, the area sat over a water table, which encouraged the vines to send out roots deep into the ground.

  In October 1858, Rains laid out another 100,000 new vines on 160 acres. He set the vines in a grid pattern and planted rows of sycamore trees around the vineyard’s perimeter to break the wind that often whipped through the area. Rains interspersed orange hedges between the trees, forming a natural fence to keep out animals. The scent of the blossoms mixed with the earthy smell of grapes.

  Rains planted mostly Mission grapes, the most widely planted strain of grapes in the state. But he also used some “foreign” varieties of vitis vinifera, too. Winemakers had begun to realize that the wine made from Mission grapes was inferior and some were experimenting with varieties imported from Europe. Grapes offered for sale in local nurseries included Black Hamburgh grapes, which one newspaper ad described as “luscious,” and “an immense bearer,” and Large Rose of Peru, touted as “a large and very superior white grape, very prolific very large.”33 It would take decades, and much trial and error, to discover which grapes worked best in California.

  Rains, like most southern California winemakers, made red and white wine. He distilled brandy in large copper vats. He also produced two types of fortified wine, Port and a sweet white wine called Angelica, which was made by mixing one part grape brandy to three parts wine.34 Bottled Angelica created a small sparkle—which delighted the tongue but could produce a terrific hangover. When Paul Revere’s nephew Joseph Warren Revere came to Los Angeles in 1847 and tasted Angelica, he was transfixed. “A most delicious cordial is likewise made, called Angelica, and if the Olympian gods could get a drop of it, they would soon vote nectar a bore, and old Jupiter would instantly order Master Ganymede to change his goblet and change it with the new tipple to the brim,” wrote Revere.35

  Because summer temperatures got so high in Rancho Cucamonga, the wines had a high alcohol content—as high as 14 to 18 percent. They were also sweet, which imbibers at the time preferred. “The wine made here is the most celebrated in the country, on account of its peculiar, rich flavor, being some twenty percent above Los Angeles wine in saccharine matter,” one visitor wrote about Rains’s wine in 1861.36

  Rains sold most of his product in Los Angeles or San Bernardino or to whomever came to the rancho. He sent some to San Francisco as well. By 1862, the value of his wine operations topped $50,000. For a man who came to California with practically nothing, that must have felt like a great accomplishment.

  * * *

  One reason Rains expanded his vineyard was that California was caught up in a wine fever.

  The state had seen a huge influx of people after gold was discovered in the American River in 1848. People from around the world had responded to the promise of easy money. They dropped their farm implements, left their villages in Germany, Austria, France, Chile, Argentina, and China, and got on clipper ships and steamers to make their way to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  San Francisco’s population soared from fewer than 450 people in 1847 to almost 56,000 by 1860. Thousands more lived in the foothills where the gold was concentrated. These people needed to be fed and clothed and in the early years of the Gold Rush the dons of southern California were in an excellent position to do that. The boom brought tremendous prosperity to the area. Cattle that had sold for three dollars in 1847 were selling for seventy-five dollars a few years later. Fresh fruit commanded record prices. For a few years the streets of Los Angeles were full of newly rich caballeros riding horses bedecked in silver.

  Ambitious businessmen looked for ways other than panning for gold to earn money. Increasingly they saw it in grapes. Fresh grapes commanded huge sums in San Francisco. The newspapers also touted grape growing as a surefire method to get rich, particularly for those exhausted by the arduousness of the gold fields. “The yield of grapes is immense, and the profits per acre much greater than the tillage of the soil for any other kind of fruit or produce,” claimed the California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences in 1856. Growers could make $200 per acre by growing grapes, according to the article.37

  The promise of easy money led to a rush to plant grapes. In 1855, there were about 324,234 grapevines in the state. By 1858, around the time Rains expanded his vineyard, there were 4 million vines. One year later, there were 6 million grapevines in California.38 The California Legislature exempted growers from paying any tax on vines until they were four years old, thus providing another incentive to plant.39

  “Nearly every land owner caught the wine fever, entertaining the idea that the planting of a few thousand vines would make him rich and vineyards sprang up, as if by magic all over California,” wrote Charles Kohler, one of the nineteenth-century businessmen who did grow rich by making and selling wine.40

  Miners turned farmers planted grapes all over California, including near the gold diggings in El Dorado and Sutter counties. Most of the grape growing in northern California was concentrated in Sonoma County, with Alameda, Contra Costa, and Napa counties not far behind. The bulk of the vineyards, however, were in southern California, as they had been during the Mission era. Los Angeles was the center of the wine trade, with at least seventy-five vineyards within the town’s borders—most along the west side of the river—and another twenty-five nearby. By 1859, there were twenty-three commercial wine producers. The road leading from the port of San Pedro to Los Angeles became known as “Vineyard Lane,” because it was lined so heavily with vineyards and fruit orchards. Los Angeles was soon referred to as the “City of Vines.”41 Wine was abundant and cheap and was served free at every meal.42 There were also vineyards in Anaheim, south of the city, and the San Gabriel Valley, about ten miles east.

  The increase in wine production created an acute labor shortage. Most white and Mexican men had left the pueblos to try their hand at gold mining, leaving Native Americans to do the bulk of the planting, pruning, and harvesting of the grapes. It was a situation ripe for exploitation and the vineyardists took full advantage of it.

  The Indians who had been recruited into the Mission system had never recovered from its secularization in 1833. They couldn’t return to their ancestral lifestyles, as they were several generations removed from that world and knew little of its rhythms. They gravitated instead to Los Angeles and other pueblos seeking homes and work. Freed from the strict restrictions of the Franciscan fathers and the security offered by the missions, they faltered. In Los Angeles, many became addicted to aguardiente, a type of brandy with 18 to 20 percent alcohol. (The Franciscans had not permitted them to drink alcohol.) Many Native Americans found irresistible the lure of a short street right off the plaza named Calle de los Negros. The one-story adobe buildings that lined the street were filled with saloons, houses of prostitution, and gambling parlors where disputes over monte and faro were resolved with guns and knives, not words. The temptations proved too much for many Indians (and others) who often could be found passed out drunk in the street or in doorways.

  When California became a state in 1850, it immediately legalized a practice of short-term indentured servitude for the Native Americans, a practice of which winemakers took advantage. One of the first acts passed by the California Legislature was a law nicknamed the Indian Indenture Act. It stripped Native Americans of most of their rights, including the right to vote or testify against whites in court. The law also made it easy for vineyardists and farmers to use the pretext of vagrancy to obtain cheap Indian labor. Any In
dian who appeared to be drunk or loitering, or was seen in a place where liquor was sold, could be arrested. Sometimes just the word of a white man could lead to an arrest. A justice of the peace could order that the Indian be hired out for up to four months to the highest bidder to pay off his fine.

  Los Angeles adopted its own, stricter, version of this law on August 16, 1850, one of the most vicious in the state. It allowed Indians to be arrested for not working. Around sundown on Sundays, the town marshal would roam Calle de los Negros and other nearby streets looking for inebriated Indians. The marshal would drag them to a corral to sleep off the liquor. On Monday morning, he would put the Indians up for sale for a week to whomever would pay the most. The price was generally from one to three dollars. At the end of the week, the vineyardists or farmers would pay two thirds of the fine to the city and the rest to the Indian worker—in high-alcohol aguardiente, therefore assuring the cycle would be repeated.43

  “Los Angeles had a slave mart as well as New Orleans and Constantinople—only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which generally did not exceed one, two, or three years under the new dispensation,” wrote one observer. “Those thousands of honest useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way.”44