Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

The members of the Farmers’ Club were the type of people who sought out the new and unusual. So they must have been salivating as they picked up glasses of wine from the vintages of 1858 and 1860. There was white wine and Champagne from the El Aliso vineyard in Los Angeles, now owned by the Sainsevain brothers (which the note taker mistakenly called Alizo) and Port and Angelica from Kohler and Frohling.

  The men tipped back the glasses one by one. They let the wine linger on their tongues and then swallowed. While not every man liked every wine, overall they were favorably impressed.

  “These Alizo wines, particularly one of the vintage of 1858, is fully equal to the best Rhine wine or Sauterne,” said James J. Mapes, a professor of chemistry and natural philosophy with an experimental farm in New Jersey. “These are very sound, possessing just spirit enough to preserve them, and have a fine, fruity flavor with a little of that pleasant bitter taste, that when once acquired is highly approved by those who use this class of wines.”

  Solon Robinson, a fifty-eight-year-old farmer and noted writer, said, “I think the samples shown today prove that America is capable of producing its own wine, and that we are really independent of the wine countries of Europe.”91

  These may have been the first tasting notes about California wine ever recorded in New York,92 and they suggested a promising future for the beverage. Certainly the Sainsevains and Kohler and Frohling, who had invested heavily in the trade, hoped so.

  But the enthusiastic reception of the men of the Farmers’ Club would prove to be an anomaly. For the next thirty years, California vintners would fight their way into the eastern market, fending off slurs and competition from New York and Ohio winemakers and a strong bias in favor of French wine.

  There were many obstacles to selling California wine on the East Coast: transportation costs, an unfamiliarity with the product, and America’s penchant for beer, hard cider, coffee, and whiskey—anything other than wine. But most of all, California was its own worst enemy. Much of the wine sent to New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and other places was awful.

  The grape boom after the Gold Rush had attracted fortune seekers and speculators who didn’t care about making fine wine. They were in the business for the money. They wanted to make wine, lots of it, and sell it off.

  These winemakers often used shortcuts that degraded a wine’s flavor. They relied on dirty, musty barrels. They would press plump, juicy grapes with grapes that were moldy, green, or sunburned, and they would neglect to remove the leaves and stems that could turn a wine bitter. One observer noted that some winemakers permitted the “cap” that forms on fermenting wine “to get white with mold and swarming with vinegar flies.” He “then cheerfully stirs it under so as to thoroughly infect the wine with the germs of destruction.” Winemakers also adulterated wine to make it darker or sweeter. Some added fuchsine, a magenta dye derived from coal tar, or natural vegetable dyes made from logwood and elderberry juice, or from the cochineal insect.93 Sometimes the wine soured from heat while being shipped.

  Part of the problem was the continued reliance on Mission grapes, which produced a bland wine. While enterprising farmers had started to plant other varietals in the late 1850s, it wouldn’t be until the late 1870s that grape growers experimented widely, and tried grapes like Zinfandel or red or white Frontignan. In 1880, as much as 80 percent of the vineyards in California were still planted with Mission grapes. It wasn’t until 1890 that the reverse was true.94

  All of this contributed to California’s bad reputation on the East Coast. “It is a notorious fact, that there is, and has been, a vast amount of adulterated and spurious Wines palmed off against the public,” a California newspaper commented.95

  Easterners also had a preference for French wine, which they equated with gentility and civilization. Most restaurants didn’t even list California wine on their wine lists. This prompted unscrupulous merchants to take good California wine and slap on a French label when it was bottled. Only the cheapest and worst wine was sold as Californian, giving all of the state’s products a bad reputation.

  “Unfortunately for us, Americans are not a wine-drinking people,” one newspaper lamented in 1875. “Their prejudices are so fixed in favor of Imported European Wines that our native wines remain unsold, unless placed before them with a foreign label attached during the transit from California to the American consumer via France and Germany.”96

  * * *

  John Rains’s family no longer owned Cucamonga Vineyard. Dõna Merced had been forced to give up the 13,000-acre Rancho Cucamonga when she couldn’t pay the mortgage. The woman who had once been one of the largest landowners in southern California saw the San Bernardino County sheriff auction her land off on the courthouse steps to pay her debts. Isaias Hellman, my ancestor and a Jewish immigrant who had arrived in Los Angeles from Bavaria eleven years earlier, bought the land.

  Hellman’s purchase was emblematic of the changes sweeping California, where immigrants and Yankees bought old ranchos for pennies on the dollar. The end of the Civil War prompted a migration west and the new settlers flooding into the state were eager to own their own farms, prompting the wide-scale division of large tracts into smaller parcels. Hellman, a short man with brown hair and a bushy Vandyke beard, was just twenty-eight years old and the owner of a small bank in downtown Los Angeles, but he was already a wealthy man. He had been eyeing Rancho Cucamonga ever since he lent $5,352 to John Rains just two days before his murder in 1862.

  On a cool Thursday in mid-November 1870, Hellman paid $49,200 to Sheriff Newton Noble for the rancho. When the title cleared on May 9, 1871, Hellman immediately flipped the property, selling 4,840 acres to a syndicate of San Francisco businessmen for $28,20097 and the 580-acre vineyard to Joseph Garcia, a Portuguese sea captain, for $25,000, making a small profit.98 He retained the other 7,600 acres to develop himself. In 1873, Hellman bought back the vineyard.

  The vineyard had been the center of the rancho ever since Tiburcio Tapia oversaw the planting of the first grapes. By the early 1870s, however, it had a neglected air. The winery and cellar had not seen major repairs for close to a decade. In July 1870, a cloud of grasshoppers descended on the vineyard. Two hundred acres of green vines were decimated, the leaves chewed to nubs, the stems broken and bent. Half the vineyard was destroyed.99 The vintage that year from the vineyard’s 130,000 vines was a paltry 12,000 gallons, a small portion of its usual production of 60,000 gallons.100 The grasshoppers came through again in 1871.

  Jean Louis Sainsevain was the winemaker at Rancho Cucamonga at that point. He had started managing the property in 1867 when Doña Merced still controlled the vineyard. He and his brother had even owned it briefly. Hellman kept him on. Sainsevain had once been one of the most acclaimed wine merchants in the west, overseeing hundreds of acres of grapes and managing retail and wholesale stores in San Francisco and New York. Now he was a hired hand.

  Sainsevain’s downfall had been Champagne. After expanding their uncle’s wine operation into a large commercial enterprise with retail and wholesale operations around the globe, including San Francisco, New York, and Mazatlan, Mexico, Jean Louis and his younger brother, Pierre, decided to produce Champagne, a risky proposition since sparkling wine had never been made commercially before in California. But it reflected the risk winemakers thought was necessary to solidify and grow the small wine industry. In 1856, Pierre Sainsevain returned to France and brought back Monsieur Debanne, a former Champagne maker for the widow Cliquot in Reims.101

  The brothers leaped into the Champagne business. They made about 50,000 bottles of Champagne in 1857 relying on “a new process” in which they aged the Champagne for a year rather than the customary five to six years.102 They called it “Sparkling California Champagne” and shipped bottles as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

  At first, the project seemed to be a success. By 1859, the Sainsevains were selling three hundred cases of Champagne a month, worth about $3,600.103 They sent some to President James Buchanan, who
thanked them profusely in a note. The brothers turned around and used excerpts from the president’s letter in newspaper advertisements. “Was the most agreeable wine I have ever drunk,”104 the ads quoted Buchanan as stating. When the French government threw a party in 1860 to celebrate the opening of its consulate in Los Angeles, the Sainsevains’ Champagne was served. It must have been a triumphal evening, one that showcased how French ingenuity had transformed the California wine industry.

  But something was off about the Sainsevains’ Champagne. About 20 percent of the bottles from the first vintage exploded while still in the Sainsevain cellars in San Francisco. Workers took to wearing masks to protect their faces from flying corks and shards of glass. Other bottles, once opened, had the unfortunate effect of making people gag. There was an unpleasant earthiness to the taste.105 The brothers reportedly lost $50,000 in the Champagne business in 1857—money they could not spare. More losses would follow.

  The brothers shut down their Champagne operation in 1862 but by then they were on a downward financial spiral from which they never recovered. Vignes’s children sued the brothers and accused them of underpaying for their father’s vineyard. In January 1869, after losing their case in court, the Sainsevains were forced to sell the historic El Aliso vineyard with its towering sycamore tree and grapevine-draped arbor. They had other debts, which were satisfied when the sheriff of Los Angeles sold their possessions and stock of wine at public auction.

  So Jean Louis Sainsevain became an itinerant winemaker. After Hellman took control of the vineyard, he brought in partners to finance improvements. Sainsevain oversaw the addition of fifty acres of new grapes. The partners also planted 5,000 orange, lemon, and walnut trees and erected new cellars and distilleries.106 The vineyard, with a row of stately chestnut trees on one edge, the mountains rising to the north, and the sound of the gurgling Cucamonga Creek nearby, was a spectacular sight and garnered renewed attention.

  “I have nowhere seen a vineyard which presented a finer appearance than Cucamonga,” the noted travel writer Benjamin Truman wrote in 1874. “The foliage of the vines was just sufficiently advanced in growth to present an even surface of delicate green over the whole extensive area. Not a weed disfigured the ground, which careful cultivation had rendered almost as smooth and level as a ballroom floor.”107

  * * *

  The vintage of 1875 was a difficult one. The last two weeks of October were hot in southern California, with afternoon temperatures reaching 100 degrees. The grapes dangling from the vines at Cucamonga Vineyard soaked up the sun. The purple, marble-sized orbs began to shrivel, almost like raisins, a sign that their sugars were intensifying. It was an encouraging development, as the season had started out with a deluge that dropped more than fourteen inches of rain in four days in mid-January, flooding parts of Los Angeles and drenching the vineyards of the region. In April, a frost killed about one third of the grapevines in the area. Winemakers were leaving the fruit on the vines as long as possible before harvest to make up for the early, miserable weather.

  When the time came to harvest the grapes, groups of Chinese men went out into the fields with sharp knives and scissors. Chinese workers had been replacing Native American workers in southern California since 1869, when James De Barth Shorb, the owner of the nearby San Gabriel Winery, had hired them. Winemakers found the Chinese were more reliable than the Indians, for they didn’t drink to excess and paid for their own room and board.

  As Sainsevain stood in the middle of the vineyard to supervise the harvest, he could see the men in blue denim jackets and triangular grass hats squat down to pick the grapes off the low, umbrella-shaped vines. It was grueling, backbreaking work. Vines in those days were pruned to stay about a foot and a half off the ground. The pickers had to rest on their haunches, kneel, or bend over to pick the grapes. Then they carted baskets of grapes into the winery, where they were crushed with the new press and left to ferment.

  The harvest was a success. Sainsevain still had his magic touch. A bottle of his 1875 sweet white wine won a first-place ribbon in the 1877 Southern California Horticultural Fair.108

  Something strange happened with the wine made in 1875, though. The harvest came during a financial depression that had started in New York in 1873 with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company and had spread across the world, arriving in California in 1875. The downturn ripped apart the once-flourishing market for wine for the next five years, a cycle that would plague the California wine industry over and over again. Prices plummeted. Grapes soon sold for less than it cost to pick them. Some grape growers could not even find a market for their grapes, so they let hogs loose in their vineyards to gorge on the ripe fruit. Other desperate farmers ripped out their vines to plant oranges and peaches and walnuts—anything they thought would be more profitable than wine grapes. The number of wineries in California dropped from 139 in 1870 to 45 wineries in 1880.109

  The depression may explain why at least two large barrels of the 1875 vintage from the Cucamonga Vineyard were never sold but sat in the wine cellar, untouched, for more than four decades. Maybe Hellman was too busy to deal with them. The downturn had presented a huge crisis for the Farmers and Merchants Bank, the bank Hellman founded in 1871. When a run on the bank at its downtown Los Angeles headquarters forced it to close its doors, Hellman had to cut short a vacation in Europe—the first time he had been back home since his emigration. Hellman rushed across half the world, traveling from Venice, Italy, to Los Angeles, a trip of 6,000 miles, in twenty-three days.110 He stopped in New York and Los Angeles to borrow money to reopen his bank. Hellman had left his wife and young son behind in Europe, so perhaps there were more pressing matters on his mind than the two barrels of wine.

  The Port and Angelica were finally bottled in 1921 and made their way into the cellars and basements of some of my family members. It was this wine—175 bottles of it—that was destroyed in the Wines Central warehouse fire 130 years after it was made.

  * * *

  The wine business recovered from the depression by the early 1880s and by the middle of the decade had reached new heights in southern California. Vineyards were scattered throughout the region, from Cucamonga and Pomona in San Bernardino County, west through the San Gabriel Valley to places like Alhambra and San Marino, all the way through Los Angeles and Orange counties. Large-scale producers like James De Barth Shorb of the San Gabriel Winery could ferment 1 million gallons at a time and store another 1.5 million gallons.111 The Los Angeles Vineyard Company, which began as an agricultural cooperative in 1857, had lured dozens of German settlers from San Francisco to what eventually would be known as Anaheim. The industrious Germans had transformed 1,165 dry and sandy acres into lush vineyards and fifty distinct winemaking operations.112 Benjamin Dreyfus, a partner in the Cucamonga Vineyard (and its manager after 1878113) had gotten his start in Anaheim in 1857 and had become the most important winemaker and merchant of the region. His B. Dreyfus & Co. sold the wine made by the Anaheim colonists, along with the state’s first kosher wine. Before long the company was the largest wine wholesaler in the state. Dreyfus was so confident about the future of wine in southern California that he tore down the winery he constructed in the 1860s and in 1884 built a $40,000 cellar with a million-gallon capacity.114 A longtime grower in Los Angeles, Matthew Keller, planted 170,000 vines on his property in Los Angeles in 1880 and announced his intent to plant an additional million vines on his ranch in Malibu.

  Disaster struck in 1883. The winemakers in Anaheim noticed a strange, wavelike pattern appearing on grape leaves. The blight started on the outer edges of the leaves and moved inward until the afflicted leaves drooped and fell off. The grapes withered and did not ripen. Then the roots died.

  The next year the affected vines were late in sending out shoots. When the leaves started to unfurl, they grew slowly and eventually developed the wave-patterned scalding. They died, and the vines died too.

  A scourge had hit southern California that was quick and ruthless in
its destruction of grapevines, even those that were fifty years old and had previously survived drought and flood. The rapidity and destruction of the disease took everyone by surprise. Anaheim Disease, as it was first called, hit hard and quick and was almost 100 percent fatal.

  It killed off Dreyfus’s personal 240-acre vineyard, and most of the acreage in Orange and Los Angeles counties and parts of the San Gabriel Valley. Old proud Mission vines, the backbone of California’s wine economy, were reduced to leafless stalks poking out of the ground. A government report estimated the disease caused $10 million in losses to Los Angeles and Orange counties.

  For some reason, Anaheim Disease (which would later be known as Pierce’s Disease, after the scientist who first identified it) did not seriously affect the Mission grapes at the Cucamonga Vineyard. The soil there was sandy and porous, which apparently provided some protection. By 1890, the Cucamonga region was producing 279,000 gallons of wine a year, up from 48,000 gallons in 1870.115

  Anaheim Disease, with its destructive and rapid rush through the vineyards, signaled the end of southern California’s dominance in the wine industry. Winemakers shifted to oranges and other crops. Urbanization eventually took a toll, too, particularly after an influx of Midwesterners moved to the region during a boom in 1886. El Aliso, the vineyard planted by Jean-Louis Vignes in the 1830s and then taken over by his nephews, was subdivided into town plots.

  The decline of the vineyards in southern California set the stage for the rise of northern California, which was better suited to growing grapes anyway. The terrain was more varied, with flat land and hills in Napa and Sonoma and plains in Santa Clara County. The climate was better, too. Southern California was very hot, which didn’t allow the grapes to cool off at all, a process that contributes to their complexity. In the north, the cooling winds from the ocean and the summer fog modulated the temperature, creating temperate nights. By 1890, northern California produced almost eight times as many gallons as southern California.116