Charles Mingus gave free concerts on the Red Car. Reyner Banham missed it. For the past eight or nine years, I’ve been running around town, planting vineyards in South L.A. in places with names like Watts, West Athens and Willowbrook. While visiting the neighborhoods where those vines are located, I’ve gotten to know some of the people. And I’ve heard some stories. One of the stories I heard recently was about Charlie Mingus, the Watts native who would take out his standing bass while riding...

We've all heard the adage, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." But what if those lemons are grapes? That was the situation that the Willowbrook community gardeners faced with their most recent vintage of Willlowbrook Community Garden wine. Because of scheduling complications among the members of the garden, the grapes were picked before they were fully ripe. In addition, there was too much fruit on the vines, which resulted in unevenly-developed grapes with under-developed flavors....

A few years ago, I'd been researching a public-history project about L.A.'s first truly dominant industry, that of winemaking, when I realized that I’d been running across quite a lot of open and obvious bias against Los Angeles terroir . This bias results from what I'll call a Northern California wine imaginary that views L.A., its past as well as its present, through the smoggy lens of its post-war, car-first history. According to this imaginary, the wine industry left Los Angeles, where...