He and the Californio statesman and land baron Andres Pico made a wine that one visitor found to be “of good quality.” The San Fernando Mission had its own laudable vineyards, and in 1846, Spanish native Eulogio de Celis bought much of the mission land, lock, stock and grapevines, from Mexican officials. In a thank-you letter from “Washington City,” Buchanan thanked the freres Sainsevain and predicted a great future for California wine. The locals also favored a white fortified wine called Angelica.Īround 1857, vintner Manuel Requeña and future citrus tycoon William Wolfskill sent gifts of vino to President James Buchanan, packing red and white wine, brandy and Angelica the winemaking Sainsevains brothers sent their own rudimentary sparkling wine to the White House. Actual wine was a pretty basic plonk at first, unornamented by comments about bouquet or terroir, so cheap and so plentiful that it was often poured free with restaurant meals. The principal grape drink was aguardiente, a portmanteau meaning “burning water,” a brandy of considerable ferocity. Let’s take a moment here to define what that early “wine” was.
It became what the orange-tree-in-every-yard would soon be for gentleman farmers: a few grapevines grown for the family table, or eventually tens of thousands for profit. Whatever happened, enough survived to beget L.A.’s secular wine grape trade. In the same account, locals hacked up some vines for firewood. The 1880 “History of Los Angeles County” declares, with a likely margin of error, that when the missions were secularized by the Mexican government in the 1830s, the padres told the missions’ Native American workers to destroy the grapevines, but they refused.
Like the “Mother Hass” avocado tree in La Habra Heights, the San Gabriel Mission’s vineyards provided the founding madre stock of much of L.A.’s emerging commercial wine industry. California had a native grape, but neither the Indigenous Californians nor the arriving padres found it palatable. Just about every culture has its own intoxicant, and native Californians had already long concocted pispibata, a wooze-inducing substance from native cherries.
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