GRAPE EXPECTATIONS : Part-Time Growers in West San Fernando Valley Find Climate Allows : Backyard Vineyards to Yield Much Satisfaction--and Drinkable Wine

From the loamy soil of Woodland Hills, Tony Tasca’s vineyard is blooming its way into early fruit. The vines, taut on their supporting wires, are shoulder height. Among the spreading canes and unfolding leaves are tiny grapes the size of broccoli buds, but much greener. There are 100 vines on less than an eighth of an acre, and Tasca knows them all by name.

“I pulled out some rows of good stuff--orange muscat and muscat canalli. Very aromatic and sweet grapes. But the birds and the bees always got them,” said Tasca. “So I got tired of fighting and replaced them.”

Remaining are rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and French Colombard, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, plus a few experimental and rare varieties unusual anywhere in California.

Tasca is a sturdy man of 72, with a full, dark head of hair and the coloring of someone who likes to spend his free time outside. He’s been an aircraft engineer, a San Joaquin Valley farmer and a designer of solar energy systems.

Small Vineyard

Now he devotes much of his time to growing grapes and making them into wine on a fragment of the half-acre lot surrounding his home near Warner Ranch. The grapes share the land with an assortment of fruit-laden trees and a coop of plump Rhode Island Red hens.

It takes an odd, increasingly rare combination of attitudes, personality and commitment to grow your own wine, even on a small scale.

According to Tasca, who is completing his bachelor’s degree in early medieval studies at California State University, Northridge, it also requires a feeling for history, a sense of place, a love of growing. Maybe that’s why grape growing isn’t a thriving, expanding hobby in Los Angeles, where many homes change hands in less than the three years it takes a vine to produce its first fruit.

And in fact, although grapes flourish, it is nearly impossible to grow great wine grapes in most of Los Angeles County.

“It gets too hot--up to 108 degrees or more,” said Tasca on an early spring day when his vineyard was already sweltering in the upper 90s.

Called ‘Undistinguished’

This heat eventually evaporates the fruit’s acidity, even as it ripens the grape early and concentrates its sugar. The result is a heavily alcoholic vintage of scant character, the kind of wine the critics term “flabby” or “undistinguished.”

Tasca says that “a little craftsmanship,” meaning addition of fruit acid after harvest, can mitigate the flabbiness.

As few as a dozen people are seriously growing their own wine grapes in Los Angeles County, said Tasca. All of them, so far as he knows, have their plantings in or near the San Fernando Valley. They are the only people on Earth who can bottle wine with the appellation “Grown and Produced in Los Angeles County.”

Jess Stevenson, a Teledyne engineer, heads the Cellarmasters Club, which is loosely based in the West Valley-Tarzana-Woodland Hills area. About 120 of the group’s 160 members make their own wine, but only a small fraction of them grow their own grapes for even part of their output, Stevenson notes. Most of these people have started their vineyards from cuttings provided by Tasca.

“He’s the only real viticulturist in our part of Southern California,” said John Daume, who owns the Home Wine Shop on Ventura Boulevard near Fallbrook Avenue.

Tasca briefly owned and operated a small La Crescenta vineyard during World War II. In the 1950s, he gave up a flourishing career as a contract aviation engineer and moved his family to a grape vineyard near Fresno. The venture didn’t work out, but he had the grape bug. In the early 1970s, he started again, on a much smaller scale, in his West Valley backyard.

The mulching, cultivation, sulfuring for mildew, spraying for pests and fertilizing and pruning are facets of Tasca’s intense involvement. As he shows his visitor through the vineyard, he notes the red pigment in the unfurling green leaf of a “color” variety intended to make red wines darker, the abundance of buds on a rootstock vine that will never bear fruit, the relative sparsity of grapes on a Cabernet vine compared to the heavy bearing of a massive Colombard.

Tasca, after two larger winegrowing ventures, has retrenched in his small, intensely-cultivated vineyard. But according to Daume, it’s more usual for Valley vintners to move upscale, even to apply the skills learned in the home winery and back-lot vineyard to professional production.

Has Camarillo Winery

Jim Ahern, for instance, is one of about two dozen former cellar masters who went professional. His San Fernando winery produces some widely acclaimed Chardonnays from Edna Valley grapes. Daume himself has established a Camarillo winery to press grapes from San Luis Obispo County.

Although going professional is a major step in a market that seems literally saturated with quality wine, those who chose to do so are likely to head for the prime Central Coast and Northern California wine country, said Daume.

Even locally, the wide availability of quality wine grapes from Temecula and areas of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties also dampens the amateur wine maker’s enthusiasm for growing his own, said Daume.

At least one serious local grower has compromised. Hank Donatoni, a 54-year-old United Airlines pilot, has about an eighth of an acre of medium-old vines on a steep, high hillside near his Topanga home. The 20-year-old grenache and zinfandel planation is located in what might be the best wine country in the county--if only it weren’t for the varmints.

Coyotes, birds, yellow jackets and other creatures attack the ripening fruit, and gophers undermine the roots.

60-Degree Temperature Drop

“The nights are cold, and if the days get hot it doesn’t matter as long as things cool off,” he said. “Sometimes, we have a 60-degree temperature drop in the weeks that we pick.”

At just over 1,100 feet, he says, the Topanga climate at best produces zinfandel similar to that produced in parts of the Napa Valley.

Unlike the tethered vines of Tony Tasca less than seven miles away, Donatoni’s vines stand alone, like small sturdy trees. Coastal overcast shields them from the sun. Already, the vine buds are developing a hint of bloom, a touch of the citrus scent they spread as they open into flower.

But the little vineyard was only the beginning for Donatoni. In Inglewood, near Los Angeles International Airport, stands the winery that bears his name, which he started it in 1978.

The winery presses Paso Robles grapes to produce quality Cabernets, zinfandels and Chardonnays. For the past two years, the winery has distracted Donatoni from his own little grape plot, but this year, he said, he foresees an abundant yield and harvest of Topanga Zin and Topanga Grenache.

Spectacular Microclimates

At least three other small vineyards are secluded in the upper reaches of Topanga, said Donatoni, and several more may have been abandoned. The rugged land contains spectacular microclimates. You can see desert-dwelling tarantulas near Skyline Drive, he said, while in a nearby canyon, night-time temperatures sink into the teens.

These are the kinds of temperature gradients grape growers love, and vines are not new to the area. Donatoni describes a plantation of abandoned Mission grapes--the variety the Spanish friars introduced for sacramental wine--on an old Topanga ranch. Although they’ve now gone wild, the vines still produce fruit for the animals of the Santa Monica mountains.

Growing wine is relatively new to West Hills, where Robert Prokop, a senior Hughes engineer, likes to say “My first bottle cost me $5,000. After that, it was free.”

Started With a Gift

The free wine started flowing about a dozen years ago, after Prokop’s teen-age daughter Donna gave him a simple home wine-making kit. He visited Daume’s store to find out how to use it and bought more equipment. Then he terraced part of his sloping home lot with concrete rubble and planted 16 vines.

His planation now contains zinfandel and grenache, as well as some petit sirah vines of which he is extremely proud.

“It is an escape. When you do what I do all day, something that grows is important because you can see what you have done,” Prokop said, “It’s the ultimate form of gardening.”

Daume says there is something about wine making that attracts the engineering mind. He suggests engineers like to bring their sense of precision and calculation to a hobby that involves intimacy with nature.

That intimacy is most intense at pressing time. Once the grapes are picked at maximum ripeness, the wine maker’s clock starts to run.

White grapes are put through a mechanical crusher, then pressed in a traditional screw press, and the juices run off before fermentation. Reds are only crushed, and the fermenting takes place with the juice and skins mixed together. A yeast “starter” has already been prepared to kick off this crucial step.

Ferments in Garbage Can

Prokop ferments in a 25-gallon plastic garbage can. Donatoni has a well-equipped small winery under his carport, and Tasca has a winery shed. But Prokop does his work either outside on his home patio, or if it’s too hot, in the kitchen.

“If you have four of those containers, all churning away, the whole house smells of wine,” he said.

The juice boils with the fermentation, belching gas that forces red wine grape skins to the surface. So the wine maker has to keep punching this cap down into the juice to leach its rich color into the liquid.

When the fermenting stops in three to six days, the wine “becomes very vulnerable to bacteria, bugs, to anything,” said Prokop. The young wine must be run off into five-gallon bottles that are capped with water bungs to permit the exit of late fermented gas and to prevent the entry of air. Red wine must be pressed before this step to remove the skins.

After the wine has settled for a couple of days, sediments are removed and the wine is aged in those same five-gallon bottles for up to six months.

Prokop takes his time after that, adding a few months in an oak barrel before the final bottling. He says he doesn’t drink his wine before it is three years old.

Donatoni would eventually like to move to Paso Robles, which he considers one of the most exciting viticultural areas anywhere. Prokop and his wife, Arlene, traveled for the past two years after he pruned the vines back beyond the point of bearing. Now, he hopes, their 1987 vintage will reflect the years of rest with a plentiful harvest.

Tasca produces more wine than he can use and says he is laying it down for his children now. In fact, at his son’s wedding in San Diego, he provided the champagne--hand-made and grown in Woodland Hills.