The winemaking grape from the Canary Islands has found a home in South L.A.
When we help communities plant their own vineyards of historic Mission grapes, we are agnostic when it comes to what the communities do with their grapes. Some have expressed an interest in making raisins; others just want to eat the grapes or show kids what real grape juice tastes like; still others want to use the leaves of the plants to make dolma.
And then there are those who want to make wine. The Willowbrook gardeners belong to this last category. This year, they made their third vintage. Here's a short summary of the three vintages so far:
Vintage 1 - Winemaker Adam Huss of #CentralasWines helped us with the first vintage. Lots of deep purple and black grapes. They made an excellent rosado. The harvest was compromised by an infestation of June bugs.
Vintage 2 - Some of the grapes did not go through veraison, meaning they didn't turn red. This might be because of the particularly wet winter we had that year. The Willowbrook gardeners made an Amber-colored wine that could be mistaken for an excellent Viognier. Felecia Hodges of #OrangeBootsWine let us use her press. Thank you, Felecia!
Vintage – 3 – Grapes were looking good, but some neighborhood kids used a ladder to climb over the chain-link fence and removed half of them. This from a watchful neighbor who lives near the Garden. As of this writing, Rose Pinkney, the organizer of the Willowbrook Community Garden, is getting set to bottle what wine she was able to make from the grapes that were left.
Before you ask, the wines are not for sale. But the very fact that this block of 121st St, which Rose herself has told me was once gang territory, is now wine territory speaks of a kind of progress that only Rose and the gardeners of Willowbrook could have imagined.
Коментарі