The Mission Grape: Spain’s Gift to California
photo by Eric Stoner
It took the Franciscans 65 years to build California’s 21 missions and only a few decades for many of their buildings and possessions to fade away. However, the Franciscans left behind one thing that survives today — their import of the Spanish wine grape known in California as the “Mission grape.” A hearty, bountiful producer, the Mission grape continued to prosper on thousands of acres, although it has recently fallen out of favor. Despite its historical importance, it’s become a rare white in American viticulture.
The first vines grown in California were the Mission variety, which were cultivated at San Juan Capistrano. These grapes contributed to the first extensive vineyards at San Gabriel Mission. After the mission period ended, the Mission grape remained popular and thousands of acres of vines were planted.
The Mission grape produced sweet, fruity dessert wines albeit of mediocre quality, but their hardy, long-lived vines and their abundant fruit more than made up for their lack of subtle flavor. The Mission variety was also well suited to the sunny, Southern California climate.
“The Mission variety is suitable for fairly warm, even hot climates,” says Don Galleano, head of Cantu-Galleano Ranch in Mira Loma, “[it’s] very versatile. It’s a heavy producer of grapes, and the bunches are very big. When picked young, the grapes have a good sugar balance, perfect for dessert wine.”
This taste made Mission grapes very popular until the 1960s, when 80 percent of the wine consumed in America was dessert wine. “It was most often used as a blender calledlow sweet white, low in alcohol and high in sugar, up to 14 percent,” he explains. “I sold Mission grapes to Gallo until 1985, which added it to white varietals, such as Chenin Blanc and French Colombard, to make them sweeter. They would ferment those varietals dry to create a stable product, then add a low sweet white to increase the sugar.” Mission vintners, such as Galleano, add brandy to the wine or extremely high proof neutral grape spirits, which is essentially ethanol from grapes.
A Grape by Any Other Name
Grape varietals are essentially clones. All are genetically the same, or should be. Recent advances in genetics have allowed modern vineyards to guarantee for the first time that all of their grapes are not only of the same variety but also of the same line, grown from cuttings grown from a mother vine.
Recently, a team of scientists working at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología in Madrid was able to trace the Mission grape to a varietal once common in Spain called Listan Prieto. The two are genetically identical.
All but wiped out in its homeland by the phylloxera epidemic of the 19th century, Listan Prieto remains popular in the Canary Islands, where it is known as the Palomino Negro, and in South America, where it has many names — Pais in Chile, Criolla Chicain Argentina, and Rosa del Peru in Peru. Until recently, Mission/Pais was the most common variety grown in Chile.
Decline and Rebirth
In California, the Mission grape survived the phylloxera epidemic. Nevertheless, two things happened that all but destroyed it commercially within the past generation.
As consumer tastes matured and dessert wine sales declined, vintners no longer demanded supplies of low sweet white to sweeten dry wines. At the same time, urban sprawl vastly reduced the amount of open space in the climate region suitable for growing Mission grapes. “Real estate prices in Southern California forced farmers to plant varieties that were more in demand,” says vintner Galleano. “If Mission grapes weren’t dug up and replaced, the land was taken out of production and sold for other uses.” By some accounts, Mission plantings dwindled to less than 200 acres.
Galleano’s own vines in Mira Loma are safe because they’re part of a National Historic Landmark and will probably be producing Angelica for many years to come. However, in this history-hungry state, anything tied to a romantic past is likely to have a market, and savvy vintners are planting new Mission vines or returning old ones to production.
Among the former, those restoring a romanticized past, is Mike Sinor, director of winemaking at Ancient Peaks Winery, where an old Mission-era way station orestanciahas been preserved for more than a century. Sinor has planted a small special vineyard designed to produce blended wine. Among the varieties planted is the original Mission grape.
Among the latter group who seeks to bring those old vines back to new production is Deborah Hall of Gypsy Canyon Winery in the Santa Rita Hills near Buelton. She discovered a long-abandoned, three-acre patch of 100-year-old vines on a hillside, which she determined were Mission grapes. When buyers refused to touch her Mission grapes, she decided to turn them into Angelica, made according to an original Franciscan recipe that she adapted. Hall allows the juice of these ancient Mission vines to ferment just halfway. Based on a Franciscan recipe, Angelica must contain only the juice of Mission grapes — fermented into wine, half-fermented or even raw. Hall then stops fermentation by adding neutral grape spirits and then stores the result in oak barrels for two years. The result is 50 cases of 18-proof Angelica a year, grown organically, which she places in hand-blown 375 ml bottles, sealing the cork with bees’ wax.
