Mission revival
Booming interest in California’s first wine grape, cultivated circa 1760 by Catholic padres, has a handful of winemakers rediscovering its dry, big tannic taste
The last thing Steven Gerbac was expecting to hear was “Mission grape.”
Gerbac, the winemaker at Rusack Vineyards in Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, had come into some mysterious vine material. On nearby Santa Cruz Island, the Nature Conservancy had found a single rogue grapevine hiding within a big stand of eucalyptus trees near a creek. Could it be Zinfandel? Elsewhere on the island were withering, neglected Zin vines — remnants from the long-defunct Santa Cruz Island Wine company, which had farmed vines here for a few decades beginning in the 1880s.
But the vine in the eucalyptus grove did not look like Zinfandel. What was it, and how had it ended up here? “This one vine must have escaped up the creek,” Gerbac says, and a seed drifted onshore. He sent cuttings to UC Davis, which turned back a perfect match for the Mission grape — a variety once ubiquitous in coastal California, much rarer now.
“As far as marketability, Mission was not the first vine we wanted to try to plant,” says Gerbac. “But we wanted to keep the history going.” So he propagated the vine material, and in 2013 planted half an acre of Mission at the Rusack estate on the mainland. He plans to harvest the first fruit this year. Commercially speaking, it’s a risky move, Gerbac concedes, but “we’re trying our best to take it seriously.”
What makes Mission a risky planting decision? Simple. It doesn’t produce a very good wine. Though that, of course, is up for debate.
Mission was the first wine grape (vitis
vinifera) planted in the United States — in fact, in North America. Brought to Mexico from Spain, where it’s known as Listán Prieto, in 1540, it was planted in New Mexico in the 1620s. The grape was first cultivated in California at the Mission San Diego sometime after Junípero Serra founded it in 1769. Eventually, Mission vineyards grew at all of California’s missions, from 1 acre at Santa Clara to 170 acres at San Gabriel.
Sacramental wine was the original intent, but the Californians liked to drink the stuff, too, especially as angelica, a Port-like fortified wine. Their fermentation vessel was typically a cowhide hung from 4-foot-high posts with a deep sag. And Mission migrated beyond the missions: Homesteaders took the padres’ cuttings and planted their own vineyards, many profiting from the thirsty onslaught of the Gold Rush. The wine was exported. George Yount even planted some in the Napa Valley. Effectively, Mission was the only wine grape in California until about 1865.
But by the late 19th century, in post-secularization California, a movement had gained ground — led by people like Hungarian-born Agoston Haraszthy, founder of Buena Vista Winery — to move away from the cultivation of Mission in favor of so-called noble grape varieties, things like Cabernet Sauvignon and Riesling. John Muir was a pro--
ponent, and replaced the Mission grapes at his Martinez home with Muscat and Zinfandel. “The padres ought to have known better,” Muir was quoted in The Chronicle, “such good judges as they were in most things related to the stomach.”
Others advocated the preservation of Mission. Julius Dresel, whose brother Emil planted the Sonoma Valley property where Scribe Winery now stands, wrote to the editors of the Daily Alta California in 1872 that the Mission wine from his brother’s estate was “pure of taste, ripe and unctuous” and “of a marked Burgundy flavor,” praising its “sweetness and high percentage of genuine alcohol.”
California Gov. John Downey took a strong stand, too. “We may and do want other varieties of vines, but be slow in your changes,” Downey cautioned, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times in 1883. “Stick to your so-called Mission. We have not yet found its substitute, its equal, or peer. It is an old friend; cling to it with affection, and let our friends at the north follow that vagary of jumping from one thing to another.”
Suffice it to say, Downey’s team lost. And that “vagary” resulted in the California wine industry as we know it today, capable of producing long-lived Pinot Noirs, Chardonnays and Syrahs that rival the best in the world. Which is more than could be said for Mission, whose wines are light in color, low in acid and — it must be said — short on complexity.
Yet a number of wineries have started making Mission again in recent years, whether from ancient vineyards survived from the 19th century (sites like Deaver and Story in Amador County and Somers in Lodi) or — as at Rusack and Scribe — planting it anew.
“In the past five years, the interest in our Mission vines has skyrocketed,” says Rob Campbell, whose Story Vineyard in Plymouth contains 1 acre of Mission planted in 1894. “Right around harvest I will get 10 to 20 calls from people saying, ‘hey, got any Mission to sell?’ ” Fifteen years ago, Campbell felt lucky if he could charge $500 per ton for his Mission fruit. Now the Amador County average is $2,300 — more than Zinfandel.
This sudden attention raises the same question that engaged Haraszthy, Muir, Downey and their contemporaries: Is Mission worth keeping in the ground?
As hardy as the settlers who brought it, the grape has obvious appeal for a less-advanced era of viticulture. “When you look at a vine, you see why the Spaniards brought it,” says Brian Maloney, winemaker for Buena Vista, which — despite its founder’s anti-Mission position — has just released its first angelica. High-yielding and impervious to mold and mildew, as Maloney puts it, these are “big vigorous vines, with thick skins, big tannins, which I assume would make it resistant to bugs. It was able to thrive.”
“They look like trees,” says Story Vineyard’s Campbell, “like something out of Snow White’s haunted forest.” They stretch over 6 feet in height, with five or six twisting arms and clusters that, when ripe, can weigh over a pound. Some grapes can be dark purple and others albino-white, even when fully ripe.
Bizarrely, Mission’s thick skins do not translate to a darkly colored wine, as you’d expect. It’s so light and translucent that you might mistake it for rosé. Yet the wine is intensely bitter, as if from tannins, with a pithy orange-peel flavor and an oily, viscous texture.
Some winemakers, like Bryan Harrington and Chris Brockway, like it for that light-bodied quaffability, and even emphasize that quality by fermenting it carbonically. Harrington, whose translucent, dry 2016 Somers Vineyard Mission tastes like raspberry candy and grapefruit, is drawn to Mission for the same reason he’s drawn to other earthy, light-bodied grapes like Trousseau, Corvina and Poulsard.
“It’s meant to be enjoyed young and with relish,” Harrington says.
Other contemporary Mission makers dismiss its virtues as a dry wine, however, opting instead to focus on fortified angelica. “As a table wine, it’s pretty simple, I think,” says Bill Wathen, who produces angelica at his Foxen Winery in Santa Maria (Santa Barbara County).
“I think there’s some nice examples, but it’s not very serious,” says Maloney of dry Mission wines. “It’s only when you do it as a fortified that the tannins get velvety, especially after two years of aging.”
Not that angelica isn’t a weird wine itself. Unlike Port, which is fermented about halfway and then fortified with neutral brandy, angelica is fermented barely or not at all. You pick the grapes ultra-ripe, crush them into grape juice, then add brandy to heighten the alcohol level and prevent further fermentation. The result, often, is a dessert wine that tastes more like molasses than fruit.
Perhaps California’s best modern example of angelica is from Gypsy Canyon Winery in the Sta. Rita Hills American Viticultural Area in Santa Barbara County. Owner Deborah Hall, who discovered her property’s 130-year-old, 3-acre Mission vineyard in the early 1990s and spent 10 years resuscitating it, had never tasted an angelica when she first made one. Lucky for her, the padres had left detailed instructions. “I found the padres’ winemaking notes at Santa Barbara Mission library,” Hall says. “And followed those as closely as possible,” even going so far as to make her own Mission grape brandy for the fortification. It all makes a good story, maybe too good of a story. The ur-vine, the parent of California viticulture — the history of the Mission grape calls irresistibly to our nostalgia. As a storyteller, I love imagining these bizarre, contorted frontier vines, stalwart counterparts to the California newcomers.
But as a wine drinker, I fear that Mission wine, whether dry or fortified, delivers more pleasure from novelty than from taste. I can enjoy the treacle of an angelica or the arrestingly pithy bite of a Mission table wine. But there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to pay for nostalgic value.
Or maybe I’m just a John Muir naysayer. I’ll wait to be proven wrong that — to twist Downey’s argument from 1883 — we aren’t engaging in the vagary of jumping from one thing to another.
“Stick to your so-called Mission. We have not yet found its substitute, its equal, or peer. It is an old friend; cling to it with affection.” California Gov. John Downey in 1883