15
Introduction to The Story
of Wine in California

Published in 1962, The Story of Wine in California was M.F.K. Fisher’s attempt to catalog the history of a growing wine industry. The book detailed not only the pioneers that began making wine in California, but described the journey from grape to glass. What follows is the Introduction to the book.

WINE, THE FERMENTED JUICE OF THE grape, has been a part of man’s religious celebration for too long to count—ten thousand or six thousand years, and everywhere on the globe.

Its exaltation, widely exploited by God’s priests, has given many a believer an insight into true mystery. Its use as a healer, a tonic, has helped men agelessly from mortality to greater things, and its abuse has been as justly punished as its respectful enjoyment has been blessed.

Thus it was right that when emissaries from the great colonizing Roman Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Spain came first to Lower California with the Jesuit fathers and then later to the little harbor of San Diego with the Franciscans, grape cuttings were brought along as naturally as were the vessels of the Holy Sacrament and the swords, spades, and axes of the invaders.

Probably the first grape vines were planted in “The Californias,” as they were then called, in 1769 by the Spanish father Junipero Serra. He was a colonizer and a zealot, and with gentle skill he kicked the little cuttings from Spain into the San Diego soil in the name of his two rulers, God and his king.

His first crops flourished in the new land, as did his faith, although it was an arduous battle and fraught with the turmoils of our common lot.

For years the hardy vines called “Mission” flourished around the increasing chain of schools, trading posts, and inns that circled the Franciscan chapels, cared for by the quiescent Indians and often pressed out by hand and foot, as in Spain, to make sacramental wines for the religious rituals and health-giving tonic for the mission people at their meals.

As since time immemorial, the best bottles were kept for the feasts, to exalt men’s spirits and reveal to them some of God’s mysteries. Leather flagons of the wines were carried from one mission and one rolling rancho to the next, and California wines became one of the finest flowers of the pre-Yankee culture, in the land that stretched from the tip of Lower California to the last stronghold of Father Serra’s helpers, the Mission San Francisco Solano, which was founded in 1823 at Sonoma.

In the next forty years many wild, brave adventurers from more troubled lands came to the dry beauty of the Californias, and according to their native tastes they continued the viticulture begun by the Spanish fathers.

One of the first of these, in the early boom days of the settlement called Our Lady of the Angels, now Los Angeles, was an American who in 1823 planted some four thousand vines inside what is now the downtown city. His name was Joseph Chapman, and although he hailed from Missouri it was said that he had passed through various stages of being a real pirate on the high seas.

Like any other respected citizen, he was called Don José by the Angelenos, and although his wine is now forgotten he is still known as the first Yankee who ever sold it, instead of merely trading it or using it for his own hospitality.

Soon after Don José Chapman started selling the product of his large vineyard, a refugee from France stepped quietly into his field in Los Angeles.

Less a buccaneer than a business man, Jean Louis Vignes (1779–1862)—the most aptly named vintner in modern history—was a trained cooper when he came to California from Bordeaux. He cannily bought land around the thriving settlement, and succeeded at the same time in supplanting the rough clay flasks and leather bottles of the Spanish-trained Indians with his fine oak casks.

He brought Frenchmen to join him in the new paradise, and each of them came burdened with cuttings from their finest vines, to enrich and gradually to supplant the hardy but nondescript Mission grape the Spanish priests had brought fifty years earlier.

Don Luis Vignes developed El Aliso, a legendary homestead of great shadowy pergolas, gracious patios, and glowing hospitality, where the Union Station of Los Angeles now stands. There are still Californians who remember from their grandfathers the fine bouquet of the Aliso wines, and there are countless wine makers descended from Don Luis’s first helpers who still practice his wise teaching in the art of brandy distilling.

The costs of his first commercial shipment of California wines and spirits from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1840 cannot now be met, for Don Luis Vignes de Aliso charged the most outrageous prices of those golden days: two dollars a gallon for his best dry white table wine, and four dollars for his noted firewater, aguardiente.

San Francisco, it is reported, welcomed the arrival of this first wine ship from the south with a fiesta which called for many more. Already the northerners were severe critics of the wines that flowed from their own rolling hills and their steep, wooded mountain meadows. They knew wine and they drank it, thriving with their thirst.

Many other hardy and daring men helped to build the great new industry of making wine in California, but the mightiest of them all was a Hungarian nobleman, Agoston Haraszthy, who came here in 1849 and who is now called the father of modern wine growing.

His history is well known and indeed almost legendary, and his once-majestic vineyards in Sonoma County have been rescued from their Prohibition desuetude. The 100,000 cuttings from Europe’s great vineyards which he gathered for California in 1861 served a noble purpose in enriching to an incalculable degree the state’s wine heritage.

Count Haraszthy, who fled Hungary to find political asylum in America, was discounted in his last years in our country as something of a political renegade, as well as a bankrupt and idealistic swindler, and poetic justice killed him off, perhaps by the teeth of a crocodile in a swamp in Nicaragua, in 1869.

It was believed that he had foolishly squandered the money he spent on his fabulous search for Europe’s great wine cuttings. Today what he paid $12,000 of his own money for is counted in millions, not pennies. From what is known of his bold spirit, it can be felt that he thoroughly enjoyed even his recurrent political setbacks.

Surely Haraszthy would be pleased to see how the mysterious batch of cuttings labeled Zinfandel, which he planted casually in 1852, would father a wine unique to California, untraceable and unidentified in any other country and now one of our great prides.

The history of California wines has always been full of drama, for it has needed great daring, monied or not. Mighty landowners like Senator Stanford and modest newspapermen like Charles Wetmore have kept it a living thing. It suffered, perhaps more than most other industries, during the years of national Prohibition. Adventurers almost as bold as Chapman, Vignes, and Haraszthy came in, during the 1930’s, rebuilt the old wineries, cleaned out the spider-haunted casks, and replanted the bedraggled vineyards. Now wine growing and wine making flourish as never before in this land of many faces, and the flat, hot plains of Cucamonga and the high mountain meadows of Napa and Sonoma send their gold-and-ruby flood to every part of the world, proudly labeled CALIFORNIA.