California’s most unlikely vineyard
Power lines. Soaring towers. Sand. Antioch. Evangelho’s old vines defy logic.
Forty-five miles east of San Francisco, in the shadow of Mount Diablo, two bays removed from the tourist-tread valleys of Napa and Sonoma, sits Frank Evangelho’s vineyard. It’s a sandy beach of a vineyard, on East 18th Street in Antioch, just a few hundred yards from the intersection of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Its 130-year-old, head-trained grapevines might look like erratic coastal dune grass to the casual glance. PG&E owns the property. Transmission towers crown it, electrical lines canopy it, railroad tracks form its northern border. It faces a motel, across 18th Street, with rooms for rent by the hour.
The visual is incongruous, logic-defying.
Aren’t we in factory country, not wine country? Isn’t Antioch too hot for grape growing? If Contra Costa County produced any good wine, wouldn’t we have heard of it by now?
Yet the Evangelho Vineyard is one of California’s most precious viticultural treasures, both a preserved expression of this area’s history and a source of some of the state’s most soulful, distinctive wines. And just as astounding as the fact that it produces wines of such excellence is that it still exists — after a century of near-constant threats by man and nature.
“I’ve got one of the last vineyards left in Antioch,” says Frank Evangelho, its second-generation caretaker.
Evangelho grew up in these vines, and looks it: Like a pet owner who comes to resemble his dog, he’s sturdy, unshowy and vaguely beachy, sporting Hawaiian shirts and a Guy Fieri-esque goatee. At 70, Evangelho doesn’t have the energy he always did — a pacemaker, a defibrillator and some stents have kept him moving since a 1995 heart attack — but as he walks through his 36-acre vineyard, he interacts with his vines with a deep, quiet passion.
“These vines are connected to me,” he says.
The historic vineyards of Antioch and Oakley are an endangered species, and their most powerful conservationists are winemakers from Napa, Sonoma and elsewhere who buy their fruit. “When the Portuguese came in the 1880s, they had to plant on the sand,” explains Matt Cline, of Sonoma-based Three Wine Co., who makes more than 10 Contra Costa wines, including from Evangelho Vineyard. “You can’t grow too many leafy vegetables there, but it’s perfect for grapes.” These vineyards are “mixed black” plantings: Zinfandel interspersed with Carignan, Mourvedre, Alicante Bouschet and white grapes like Muscat and Palomino. Though the area had a thriving wine industry before Prohibition, today no wineries exist here — and many of the vineyards have survived merely by historical accident.
“It’s the land that time forgot,” says Nathan Kandler of Precedent Wine in San Mateo County, who makes Evangelho Zinfandel.
“The real key to why these vineyards still exist is the sand,” says Randle Johnson, winemaker for Napa’s Hess Collection and Artezin and another of Evangelho’s clients. He’s referring to phylloxera, the lethal grapevine louse that wiped out nearly all of California’s vineyards in the late 1800s and struck again in the 1980s. Phylloxera can’t survive in sand.
Yet it’s unusual for grapevines to be planted in pure sand, largely because of the soil’s poor waterholding capacity. (The vast majority of California’s grapevines today are grafted onto phylloxera-resistant rootstock.) What’s incredible about Evangelho Vineyard, whose vines are on their own roots, is how much water it has. “We dug a well in the middle of the vineyard, and we were still hitting roots in sand at 40 feet deep,” Evangelho says. “Whatever water source it has, it’s good water — not salty water from the rivers.” One well, dug in the 1970s, could produce 500 gallons of water a minute, he claims. The vines have never been irrigated.
The site is deceptively perfect for viticulture. “It’s a warm climate that acts like a cool climate,” says Cline. Just on the other side of Mount Diablo, Walnut Creek gets an average 25 inches of rain a year, but the weather stops at the mountain; Evangelho Vineyard got just 12 inches last year. The sand reflects heat, but the afternoon winds coming off the nearby rivers create a cooling effect. Fruit ripens early and retains beautiful acidity.
“I’m always surprised at how elegant the wines are, even sometimes at not necessarily low alcohols,” Kandler says.
“The Carignan from Evangelho is probably the best in the state,” says Doug Timewell of Arroyo Grande’s Toucan Wines. “It’s ultra-ripe but incredibly well balanced.” Evangelho agrees that Carignan is his best output.
Evangelho’s father, Manuel, who came here from Portugal’s Azores Islands, began farming the vineyard in the 1930s. When its owners and original planters, the Viera family, sold the property to PG&E in 1952, Manuel eked out an agreement to purchase 11 acres and lease another 29. Frank took over the farming from his father in 1963. The business then was grape shipping — mostly to home winemakers in Canada.
Those were wild, lawless days. The Evangelhos’ shipping competition was the Italian mafia; Frank Evangelho says he was a murder target. (“Did you get the flowers yet?” read one auspicious note sent to him. Lucky for him, his Mafioso rival eventually went to prison for driving the getaway car for a murder in San Jose.)
Evangelho’s shift from comm
modity farming to fine-wine viticulture began in 1972, when Brother Timothy of Napa’s pioneering Christian Brothers winery first bought grapes. Recognizing their quality, Timothy paid Napa prices — “and in those days, we got a sugar bonus for riper grapes,” Frank explains, bringing prices up to $450 a ton. Fred and Matt Cline — of the Jacuzzi clan, hot tub and wine moguls, now based in Sonoma but with considerable land holdings in Contra Costa — began buying fruit in the 1980s, first as brokers to other winemakers, then as winemakers themselves. By the 1990s, the roster of California winemakers bottling Evangelho fruit was prestigious: Ridge, Jade Mountain, Chalone, Bonny Doon. But Antioch never got the Monte Bello treatment; it never became a name brand.
In 2006, claiming eminent domain, the city of Antioch tore out 4 acres of Evangelho’s vines. They wanted to put a sewer pipe through. “I broke down,” says Frank, who farms the property with his foreman Manuel Carranza. “They had no idea what these vines mean.” As compensation, they offered him $1.50 per vine.
The destruction was in vain: The project was never even realized. The city didn’t check before digging, and hadn’t known that a PG&E pipeline stood in its path. Frank speaks about the removal with bitterness that still feels fresh. A few months ago, after he spoke at an Antioch Historical Society meeting, a local political candidate approached him and apologized on the city’s behalf. “I had no idea how historic your vineyard is,” she told him.
And that’s precisely the problem in Antioch and Oakley: Absent a local wine industry, these 19th century survivor vineyards are not understood as the treasures they are. Vandalism targets, the vineyards get dumped with discarded fridges, trash, used as racetracks for joy-riding teenagers. With BART extending here next year, the push for residential development is powerful. Sandy fields of head-trained Zinfandel, adjacent to strip malls and trailer parks, are getting commercially zoned, auctioned off to real estate developers at prices higher than any agricultural land could command.
Frank Evangelho is a religious man. Before his heart attack, he worked for a time as a marriage and family counselor at a nonprofit Christian counseling center. When he speaks about his vines, he’s speaking from the perspective of a businessman — they are now his sole source of income — but also from an impulse that is obviously spiritual. “We live by the season, and that is a value. You’re connected to nature. It gives you a different feel. If we lose our connection to the values, things go chaotic.”
Talk about value: It may be those PG&E power lines that have kept Evangelho’s property a vineyard. No chance of building condominiums under them. “It’s like postmodern preservation,” laughs Morgan Twain-Peterson, owner of Bedrock Wine Co., who buys about one-third of the Evangelho fruit every year.
But the vines also owe their salvation to high-profile winemakers like Twain-Peterson, who are designating Evangelho Vineyard on their wine labels, promoting the idea of old vines to their customers and paying generous prices for the fruit. Along with stalwarts like Hess’ Johnson and Matt Cline, Evangelho’s roster of clients includes boutique operations like Neyers, Turley, Dirty & Rowdy, T-Vine, Timewell’s Toucan and Kandler’s Precedent. There is a waiting list for Frank’s fruit.
“The market is finally recognizing the value of old vines,” Evangelho says.
He’s being modest. “Frank is smart. He’s done a great job of marketing his grapes,” Cline says. “He’s getting the grapes into new hands, which is bringing new life to the vineyard.”
“The vines have a nobleness,” says Kandler. “It’s important to our history that they get recognition. How unique they are — that’s part of what makes California what it is.”
And just as unique as any of the Carignan shrubs is Frank Evangelho himself: firmly anchored in the sandy soil, his roots deep, protecting his charges with the instincts of a parent. He shall not be moved.