Since Silver Harvest is set in historic San Luis Obispo wine country, it might be of interest to know a little bit about the real-life events that inspired the story.
More than 100 years before San Luis Obispo County became internationally acclaimed for its fine wines, a local newspaper columnist predicted the area’s imminent emergence as an important wine-producing area.
In the Oct. 3, 1889, edition of San Luis Obispo’s Daily Republic, the writer declared that “soil and climate are of the greatest importance in winemaking, and the western slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains are peculiarly adapted to the production of wine. The wine of this region will become famous in no distant day. We believe this because the wine made here is much superior to that of Napa, Sonoma or Los Angeles, the chief wine-growing regions of the state.”
In 1889, no one knew how prophetic the columnist’s prediction truly was.
San Luis Obispo County’s winemaking history begins in the late 1700s, with the Franciscan padres sent by the king of Spain to colonize rugged Alta California. Spanish explorers in the 1500s had found several indigenous species of grapes on the Central Coast, but the native fruit was small, seedy, and sour, and unsuited for wine production. Padres at the newly founded missions in San Luis Obispo and San Miguel became the area’s first growers of wine grapes when they planted Vitis vinifera vines, which were propagated from cuttings brought from Europe to California in the mid-1770s.
The modern-day development of the county’s two world-renowned grape-growing regions—San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles—can be traced to these mission vineyards that produced wine for religious services.
San Luis Obispo-Area Vineyards and Wineries
After Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772, the mission padres enlisted the help of local Chumash Indians to plant a vineyard that would eventually encompass much of the city’s present-day downtown district.
The region’s ample sunshine, warm climate, and cool Pacific breezes provided favorable conditions for the cultivation of the mission’s grapevines that climbed on heavy stakes driven into the ground. The varietal became known as the “Mission grape”—early vintners described the fruit as “blue-black” and “round as a musket ball,” and the vines as “abundant yielding” and “taller than a man.”
The Mission grape yielded a sweet, harsh-tasting red wine that mellowed a bit when allowed to mature. Unfortunately, the grape’s low level of tannic acid usually caused the wine to turn to vinegar before it could age sufficiently. Proper aging was also hindered by the absence of the white-oak barrels that the padres had used in Europe. Like European winemakers who produced brandy from poor-quality wine, the padres built stills and converted much of their wine into aguardiente, a 150-proof brandy. Mission San Luis Obispo soon acquired a reputation for the “ferocity” of its aguardiente.
It became customary to seal all local business transactions with a wine toast, a pleasant practice that lasted until the California missions became secularized in the 1830s and San Luis Obispo’s vineyards fell into a state of neglect. Wine was no longer made in what would one day become one of the world’s premier wine regions. It wasn’t until after the great drought of the early 1860s that area winemaking had a second birth. A Frenchman, Pierre Hypolite Dallidet, pioneered the secular commercial wine industry in San Luis Obispo. Oddly enough, the new, prosperous flowering of wine production was engendered by a European agricultural disaster.
To be continued in the next blog post….