The Italian Roots of Plant the Vine

How a vineyard in northern Italy led to the planting of interpretive vineyards in South L.A.

Thirteen years ago, as part of my job selling wine, I took a tour of the Maggiorina vineyard in northern Italy. It was early winter so the vines were dormant, with a few yellow and brown leaves still clinging to the vines.

As the winemaker, Christoph Kunzli, led me through the vineyard, he explained its unique trellis system. This involved planting three vines together, then training the trunks of the plants in four directions. He also talked about the history of the place, which went back to Roman times, and how the economy, both local and global, was tied to it.

At a certain point, Christoph excused himself to go talk with the vineyard manager. Not wanting to trip over the vines by wandering about, I stayed put and looked down.

Just as Christoph had described them, the vines spread out in four directions. I'd never seen anything quite like it. But the vines also reminded me of something else entirely.

They made me think of L.A.

However, beyond the obvious graphic match of intersecting vines and intersecting freeways, I couldn't tell you why. Was there something else?

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfus' mashed potatoes lead him to the site of the alien meetup at Devils Tower.

Could the vines be leading me somewhere too?

And then one day, I learned that L.A. had once been at the center of what some have called the original California wine industry. I was more than surprised. I was practically offended. After working for almost two decades in the wine industry, why didn't I know about this part of L.A. history? At one point in its hey-day, three out of four Angelenos worked in some aspect of the wine industry, and in the vineyards and wineries were mostly Indigenous, Asian and Latino workers. In other words, people who are reflected in the faces of the students who fill our classrooms today. Shouldn't this be worth teaching?

And so that's what we've been doing. In the absence of a photographic record or of any physical evidence to attest to this period of history, we plant vineyards of historic grapes. They grow in parts of the city where vineyards once grew, and where communities want to plant their own.

It has been eight years since the gardeners in the Willowbrook Community Garden in South L.A. invited us to help them plant the first vineyard. We've followed that with plantings in Chinatown in the Los Angeles State Historic Park and on Grape Street at MudTown Farms in Watts. And through it all, whenever I walk through one of the vineyards, or give a demonstration in pruning or propagating the vine, I think of Christoph, and about those intersecting vines in the Maggiorina vineyard.