The Winemaking Grape from the Canary Islands has Found a Home in South L.A.
When we help communities plant their own vineyards, 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 stuffed grape-leaves.
And then there are those who want to make wine. The Willowbrook gardeners belong to this last group. 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 them with their first vintage. Lots of deep purple and black grapes. They made an excellent rosado. The harvest was compromised by an infestation of June bugs, and so the yield was smaller than it could have been.
Vintage 2 - Netting was used successfully to reduce the June bugs, but 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 them use her press. Thank you, Felecia!
Vintage 3 - The grapes were looking good, but some neighborhood kids used a ladder to climb over the chain-link fence and removed half of them. This was reported by 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.
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