The City of Vines

Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! The latest title from the author of <i>A History of Wine in America</i> recounts the beginnings of California&apos;s world renowned wine trade&mdash;a story set not in Napa but in the isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, <i>The City of Vines</i> chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim&apos;s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles&apos;s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.