257 Years is a nine-part series on the history of wine in Southern California, from the Mission grape’s arrival in San Diego in 1769 to the region’s revival today. This is Part Five. Earlier posts are linked at the bottom.

If your email truncates, the full post is on the website and in the app.

Most of us learned about Prohibition the same way. On TV. Someone bootlegged in a story we were watching, and the adults in the room explained. It had something to do with a law that outlawed alcohol, once, a long time ago. Our parents said it didn’t work. It didn’t last. Then the story moved on.

Prohibition lasted thirteen years. From January 17, 1920, to December 5, 1933. And what it did to California wine wasn’t what most people think.

The industry didn’t shut down. It got louder. During Prohibition, Americans made an estimated 111 million gallons of wine at home every year between 1922 and 1929. In 1919, the last year before the ban, commercial wine production in the entire United States was 55 million gallons. So under Prohibition, Americans made twice as much wine as had been made commercially the year before it started. The industry didn’t disappear. It went underground and doubled.

But for Southern California, the story was different. And it didn’t end when Prohibition did.

The Engineered Loophole

The 200-gallon home winemaking exemption wasn’t an oversight. Paul Garrett, the wealthy North Carolina winemaker behind Virginia Dare, helped write it into the Volstead Act. The language was deliberately vague. Each household could produce up to 200 gallons of non-intoxicating fruit juice per year. A term Congress never defined. Everyone understood what it meant.

The Act carried two other loopholes: sacramental wine, which churches could purchase for religious use, and medicinal wine, which pharmacies could dispense by prescription. Together, these three provisions kept the American wine trade alive through the driest years in the country’s history.

Wineries scrambled to fit through one of the three doors. Those that couldn’t, closed.

The Grape Shipping Economy

The visible expansion was staggering. In 1920, California had 300,000 acres of grape vines. By 1927, seven years into Prohibition, that number had grown to 577,000 acres. The crop grew from 1.25 million tons to 2.5 million tons. And the shipping doubled and doubled again: 26,000 railcars of fresh grapes rolled out of California in 1920. By 1927, it was 72,000.

Most of those grapes were headed east. To Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. The railroads set up grape distribution sites in each city. Italian, Greek, Portuguese, and other immigrant families bought them every fall, hauled them home, and made wine in their basements and garages. It was legal under the 200-gallon rule. And it was much of what Americans drank for thirteen years.

The grapes that traveled well weren’t the noble ones. Cabernet, Riesling, and Pinot Noir were pulled out and replaced with thick-skinned reds that could survive a transcontinental journey: Alicante Bouschet, Zinfandel, Carignan. Deep color, high sugar, sturdy fruit. Not fine wine grapes. Wine-brick grapes.

Meanwhile, Paul Garrett was selling grape concentrate directly to home winemakers under the Vine-Glo label. The concentrate was delivered by your neighborhood druggist in five- and ten-gallon kegs. It came with instructions warning purchasers how not to ferment it, a warning everyone read in reverse.

According to Thomas Pinney's history of California wine, a wit at the time said: “America might have become a wine-drinking country, if only Prohibition had lasted long enough.” It didn’t. Overproduction eventually inflated prices, and the Depression shrunk the market. But for seven years, the boom was real.

Pinney also notes something more specific. The planting boom was “faintly heard in Los Angeles County.” Most of the action was in California’s Central Valley, where Gallo and Franzia, and the future bulk-wine giants, were taking root. Southern California was already fading.

The Sacramental Boom

The second loophole made careers.

Georges de Latour, the French-born founder of Beaulieu Vineyard in Napa, had a relationship with the Archbishop of San Francisco going back to 1906. His wife Fernande had made the introduction. When Prohibition took effect in 1920, Beaulieu was better positioned than almost any winery in the state. The winery declared itself The House of Altar Wines and applied for sacramental permits.

Over the next thirteen years, Beaulieu quadrupled in size. De Latour bought up neighboring vineyards being sold for pennies on the dollar. He shipped sacramental wine in barrels marked FLOUR to prevent theft in transit. When repeal came, Beaulieu was one of the largest wine producers in California.

Beringer received permits. So did Wente in the Livermore Valley. Concannon received official permits and made sherry; a surviving 1929 bottle bears the markings “Bonded Winery 616, Permit Calif.” A 854. The Christian Brothers, who ran Mont La Salle in Martinez, produced sacramental wine during the dry years and relocated to Napa in 1932 in preparation for repeal.

In Los Angeles, the Riboli family’s San Antonio Winery, founded in 1917, just three years before Prohibition, survived the same way. Before 1919, they had made about 5,000 cases of wine a year. By 1933, they were making 20,000. Today, San Antonio remains the largest supplier of sacramental wine in the United States. They are also, as noted in Part Three, the only Los Angeles winery to have made it through Prohibition continuously.

There was a math problem underneath all this. Sacramental wine production in California increased 700 percent during Prohibition. But Catholic Mass practice hadn’t changed. Communion under both species, wine and bread, wasn’t opened to congregations until Vatican II in the 1960s. The wine was consumed only by the clergy. So who was drinking the other 700 percent? The answer is that some clergy became de facto distributors. Some parishes ordered more sacramental wine than they could possibly consume. Some sold what they didn’t need. The archdiocese looked the other way. The California wine industry survived on a religious loophole that everyone quietly knew was being stretched.

The Southern California Collapse

The grape shipping economy that made Central Valley growers rich barely touched the south. The Vai brothers in Cucamonga chose the third loophole. They created Padres Wine Elixir, a medicinal tonic sold by prescription in pharmacies. The story of that operation is told in Part Four. The Vai brothers survived. Most of their neighbors did not.

Pinney provides the numbers. In 1922, two years into Prohibition, California had 694 bonded wineries holding legal permits to make wine. By 1927, only 28 of those were in Southern California. By 1929, 25. By 1930, 19. By 1933, statewide, only 177 wineries still held permits, and only a fraction of those were in the south.

The Southern California decline was already well underway before Prohibition even ended.

Three large Southern California operations survived intact. The Italian Vineyard Company in Guasti, the largest single vineyard in the world at its 1917 peak, pivoted to grape syrup during Prohibition, producing 454,150 gallons of dry and 1,497,585 gallons of sweet product. The ratio of red to white was seven to one. Secondo Guasti himself died in 1927, six years before repeal, but he had positioned the IVC for the eastern Italian immigrant market whenever the day came. His planning outlived him.

The other two large survivors were the California Mission Vintage Company and the Pacific Wine Company. Pacific dated back to 1889, closed during Prohibition, reopened after repeal as Piuma Winery, and later changed its name back to Pacific Wine Company. It went out of business in 1952.

Smaller operations scrambled. Giuseppe Guerrieri, one of Guasti’s winemakers at the Italian Vineyard Company, left to start his own Santa Fe Winery. The Demateis brothers began ramping up production of Claret, Riesling, Port, Sherry, Muscat, and Angelica in 1932, after Franklin Roosevelt put a repeal plank into the Democratic Party platform. All manner of small Italian winemakers, Pinney writes, tried their hand at “orange wine, vinegar wine”. Surviving without quality.

And a certain kind of desperation showed in the labeling. California wine that did make it to market often went under borrowed names. Bottles were labeled Haut Sauterne, Chianti, Moselle, St. Julien, Pontet Canet, Chateau Yquem. The wine inside was Californian. The names on the bottles pretended to be somewhere else. The industry had lost its identity along with its market.

The Long Erasure — 1933 to 1952

Repeal came on December 5, 1933. That day, 177 California wineries held permits. By year’s end, in the rush of applications, the number had climbed to 380. Total wine production that year reached 20 million gallons.

But repeal was not recovery. And for Southern California, it was not even the beginning of one.

The consolidations began. Antonio Moramarco bought Santa Fe Vintage Company and joined his father in running it. Then he bought Morello Winery in Kerman near Fresno. Then Santa Fe was itself swallowed by the Di Giorgio Wine Company in Kern County and converted into a bonded wine cellar — a bulk storage facility, no longer a producer in its own right. Burbank Winery, opened in 1896 by an Irishman named John McClure and later renamed Sunnyside Winery, then renamed Burbank Winery again, was sold and resold. Buyers came in from the East, from New York, from the Midwest. Often just for inventory. The wineries themselves were sold off in pieces.

Then came the population.

Before the war, California had been underpopulated. In 1940, the state had 6,907,000 people spread across 158,693 square miles. By 1950, that number was 10,586,223. By 1960, it was 15,717,000. More than half of that growth happened in Southern California.

Eight million new residents in twenty years. Every one of them needed a house. Every house sat on land. Much of that land had once been vineyards.

Thomas Pinney’s verdict is direct. “A crucial difference between the southern and northern sections of the trade was that the north had a few big wineries such as the Italian Swiss Colony, making decent table wine, plus a few smaller wineries devoted to making table wines of high quality—among them Inglenook, Beaulieu, Larkmead, and Louis Martini—but the south did not, and could not have, given the irresistible transformation of Los Angeles, city and county.”

Did not, and could not have. The historian’s judgment is not that Southern California failed. It is that Southern California, under those population and real estate pressures, was never going to survive as a wine region on the old terms. What the freeway era finished in Cucamonga (Part Four) had long been set in motion by Prohibition, the Depression, the war, and the postwar boom.

By 1952, the original Southern California wine industry was effectively gone.

What the Silence Meant

What was lost wasn’t only measured in acres and businesses. It was measured in knowledge, taste, and reputation. And those took much longer to rebuild.

Chardonnay in California in 1940, seven years after repeal, covered an estimated 50 to 100 acres. Total, in the entire state. Thompson Seedless, a table and raisin grape, covered 200,000 acres. Alicante Bouschet, the workhorse shipping variety of the Prohibition years, was planted everywhere. The noble varieties that had once made California wine interesting had largely been ripped out.

The tradition of winemaking, Pinney writes, was broken. No research in viticulture or enology had continued through the dry years. Buildings sat derelict. Barrels had dried out and split. The men who had known how to make wine had aged out or moved on. When the industry resumed, it was led by people who mostly did not know what they were doing.

Worse, the American public didn’t know what they had lost. Pinney puts it this way: “few of the American public knew anything about wine apart from a few debased ideas acquired during Prohibition.” Fortified wines and jug wines dominated. Sweet, high-alcohol, cheap. That was what America thought wine was. And that was what California made, in enormous volume, for the next four decades.

There was also a suspicion attached to the trade. For thirteen years, winemakers had been legally indistinguishable from bootleggers. That association didn’t lift with repeal. Pinney notes that in the public mind, in bureaucratic offices, and in legislative chambers, winemakers were still viewed as figures of dubious respectability. It took a generation for that suspicion to fade.

Andre Tchelistcheff arrived at Beaulieu in 1938, sent from France to help modernize the winery. He introduced cold fermentation and malolactic fermentation to Napa. His work over the following decades trained the winemakers who would eventually rebuild California’s reputation. In 1966, Robert Mondavi founded his own winery in Oakville, the first new large-scale Napa winery since before Prohibition. On May 24, 1976, at a blind tasting in Paris, a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay and a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon beat their French competitors. It was called the Judgment of Paris. It changed everything.

Forty-three years from repeal to that moment. That was Northern California’s recovery. Southern California’s took longer, and looked different. But the record of what had been was still visible, if you knew where to look.

What the Seal Remembers

The Los Angeles city seal still shows grapes.

Along its border, among the other emblems of the city’s identity, oranges and grapes sit as small ornaments. Pinney puts it plainly:

“As the original seal of the city made plain, Los Angeles was a place to grow grapes and make wine.”

That’s what the city was, once. It was on the record. It was on the seal. And it was true for over a century, from the pueblo’s founding in 1781 through the collapse of the industry in the middle of the twentieth century. Los Angeles was a wine city.

The vineyards are gone. Cucamonga’s empire is gone. The Italian Vineyard Company, the Padre Vineyard Company, the Pacific Wine Company, the California Mission Vintage Company — all gone. What remained after 1952 was a handful of survivors and a memory.

When Southern California wine began again in the 1970s and 1980s, it did so somewhere else. In Temecula. In Coachella. In Baja. In the Santa Monica Mountains. On land the old industry had never touched. It began as something new, on land that had no history to recover.

That is the story of the posts still to come.

The grapes remain on the seal. The city remembers what it was, even when the ground has forgotten.

If you grew up in California in the second half of the twentieth century, you probably drove past an old winery building without knowing it. A Kleen Blast warehouse. A distribution center. A strip mall. A subdivision named after a vineyard nobody remembers. If you know of one, I’d like to hear about it. What stayed, even after everything else went.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

— Jennifer

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

• Part Two → Before Napa, There Was a Boat Leaving Spain

• Part Three → Before Napa, Los Angeles Was the Wine Capital

• Part Four → What the Freeway Buried: The Pride of Cucamonga

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a wine region that remembers.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Spinach salad with strawberries and bacon is a traditional dish. The Midwest knew what it was doing, chasing summer produce before the frost arrived, pairing what grew together because the season said so. In California, we have the luxury of year-round bounty, but the trick is that the produce tastes better at different times. A nectarine in July is at its peak sweetness. A tomato in August tastes like summer itself. California sunshine does the ripening and the rest follows.

I have always been the salad maker. The baker, the sweet sauce maker, and the salad maker. That's me. This recipe is inspired by my little sister Jackie and my dad. We were out to dinner years ago at a steakhouse. She was maybe fourteen, perfectly capable of ordering for herself. My dad loved a salad bar — the kind where you can go back as many times as you want — and he kept talking over her, steering her toward it. Spinach salad. Spinach salad. We all started laughing. She knew what she wanted. She got it. Happy memory. I bring it up from time to time. So I made her one. A better one. It's 90 degrees outside, and by dinner it will be hotter. The oven stays off. Make the salad. Keep it simple.

This is that spinach salad, made in her honor, made considerably better. It is 90 degrees outside, and by dinner it will be hotter. The oven stays off. The vinaigrette goes in the mason jar and is shaken until it’s ready. Everything else is summer doing what it does best.

Notes

To make this vegetarian, omit the bacon and add a handful of candied or spiced walnuts for crunch and protein. The salad holds up beautifully either way.

This salad delivers protein from the bacon, goat cheese, and almonds, and fiber from the spinach, berries, and nectarine. For more protein, add a sliced grilled chicken breast.

The nectarine adds a crisp balance to the softer berries and tomatoes. Peach works equally well, but peel it first to remove the fuzzy skin.

Trader Joe's carries all three specialty ingredients: uncured applewood smoked bacon with no sugar, dry toasted sliced almonds, and Chèvre with honey.

The vinaigrette can be made a day ahead. Keep refrigerated in the mason jar and shake again before serving.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a dinner table joke that turned into a family dish.

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257 Years is a nine-part series on the history of wine in Southern California, from the Mission grape’s arrival in San Diego in 1769 to the region’s revival today. This is Part Four. Earlier posts are linked at the bottom.

A long one this week, with family photographs. If your email truncates, the full post is available on the website and in the app.

In 1942, my great-grandfather Thomas Tatton was a carpenter at the Padre Vineyard Company in Cucamonga.

He earned $1,140 that year. He worked forty hours a week, forty-four weeks. He had an eighth-grade education. He owned a modest home in San Bernardino County valued at $2,000. The U.S. Census recorded him as a carpenter at a winery, which is to say he was the man with the hammer. He built and maintained the structures where other men made wine.

The winery he worked at had been there since 1870. It held California Bonded Winery License No. 1. By the year my great-grandfather walked through its gates, it had survived Pierce’s disease, the early collapse of the Anaheim Colony, the rise of Cucamonga as the largest single wine-producing valley in California, and the thirteen dry years of Prohibition.

This story is about that valley. It is also about the family that founded the winery, the family that bought it back generations later, and one of the men in between who kept the buildings standing.

It is also about what disappeared. Most of the original vineyards are gone, paved over by the 10 freeway and the warehouses, distribution centers, and subdivisions that followed it. The Cucamonga wine country was buried, but not entirely. Some of it survived, some of it is coming back. And a thread of it runs through my own family.

Let me show you what I found.

The Valley That Looked Like Italy

The Cucamonga Valley sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in what is now San Bernardino County. The land had cool foothill terraces, natural springs, and warm sandy soil with perfect drainage. To Italian immigrants arriving in the late nineteenth century, the views resembled those of the Piedmont region of their homeland. The hills rolling into the Alps, grapes ripening slowly, in the soft, warm light.

Word traveled back to the old country. Italian families began to arrive. Towns with Italian names emerged across the valley: Etiwanda, Fontana, Grapeland, Mira Loma, Wineville. One village would eventually be named after a single Italian immigrant: Guasti.

But the valley’s wine story didn’t start with the Italians. It started with a Californio adventurer who planted the first large vineyard in 1838, four years after the Mexican government secularized the missions and twenty-two years before any of the Italian families arrived.

The First Vineyards (1838)

In 1838, Tiburcio Tapia planted the first large vineyard in present-day Rancho Cucamonga. Tapia was a soldier, privateer, smuggler, and politician. The kind of figure the Mexican period produced often, and the American period rarely.

The following year, on March 3, 1839, Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado granted Tapia 13,000 acres in the Cucamonga area. Tapia built his adobe on Red Hill and planted his vineyard to the east. The work was done by indigenous laborers, as was the case across Spanish and Mexican California. The same labor system that built San Gabriel, the Avila Adobe, and the missions.

Portions of that original 1838 operation, later known as Thomas Brothers Winery, still stand at the corner of Carnelian Avenue and Foothill Boulevard in Rancho Cucamonga. The sign reads California’s Oldest.

In 1859, John Rains planted a second large vineyard. By the late 1860s, he had 125,000 vines.

And in the late 1860s, the Sainsevain brothers arrived from Los Angeles. Pierre and Jean Louis, Vignes’s nephews, had taken over El Aliso in downtown LA and were now leaving the city as Pierce’s disease spread, urbanization claimed vineyards, and the industry was pushed east. Jean Louis became the winery superintendent at the Tapia property. Pierre imported French cuttings and planted new varieties in Etiwanda.

The Sainsevains literally connect Part Three and Part Four. They are the same family that founded the LA wine industry, now planting in Cucamonga.

In 1869, the San Francisco Times wrote of Cucamonga wine: “It is known as Cocomungo, or California Madeira wine, and is pronounced by competent judges to be as fine an article as manufactured in the world.”

Cucamonga had arrived.

The Vaché Family

In 1832, a French family arrived in Monterey. Theophile Vaché had come with his three nephews, Adolphe, Émile, and Theophile II, seeking relief from the Napoleonic wars rolling across Europe. They planted vineyards in the Monterey area. Within a few decades, they had decided their fortunes lay in Southern California, in the valleys at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Vachés brought their vines to the banks of small rivers in the San Gabriel and Cucamonga Valleys. In 1870, they founded the Padre Vineyard Company on 8th Street in what is now Rancho Cucamonga, positioned across from the railroad tracks for easy shipping. The site featured grand stone buildings and expansive underground cellars built to produce and age sparkling wines, ports, and brandies.

The operation grew. It eventually held California Bonded Winery License No. 1, the first commercial winery formally registered under the modern federal framework. That license number was not symbolic. It was structural. Padre Vineyard Company was the first.

In 1892, a young Frenchman named Marius Biane arrived in Cucamonga and was hired by the Vachés. He met Marceline Vaché, daughter of Adolphe, and married her. Marius and Marceline together extended the Brookside vineyards across the valley, raising two sons, Philo and François, who would themselves become part of one of the longest continuous winemaking lineages in California.

Secondo Guasti and the Italian Vineyard Company

The man whose name became the town’s was born in Piedmont, Italy, in 1859.

Secondo Guasti emigrated to California as a young man and made his way to Cucamonga. He stood at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and watched floodwater coming out of the canyons. “Surely, I thought, this is heaven’s doorstep,” he later said.

In 1883, he founded the Italian Vineyard Company. By 1917, the IVC advertised five thousand acres of contiguous vineyard, which the company claimed was the largest single vineyard in the world. It was probably true. At this point, Cucamonga had no rival.

By 1916, more than twenty thousand acres of vineyards were under cultivation in the Cucamonga Valley, well beyond the acreage of Sonoma and Napa counties combined.

Guasti died in 1927, four years before the dry years would have ended. The town he founded in 1904 still exists. You can drive there. The IVC office still stands, alongside the San Secondo d’Asti Catholic Church that he built for his workers.

He was not the only figure of the era. The Hofer family established the Cucamonga Pioneer Vineyard Winery in 1882, running an association of eleven other growers that covered four thousand acres. George F. Johnston in Etiwanda helped establish the commercial viability of Thompson Seedless grapes. The Gallo brothers also operated in the valley. And the Vaché-Biane family was building Brookside.

By the early twentieth century, Cucamonga was not just a wine region. It was an industrial wine economy operating on an international scale.

Then came January 17, 1920.

Prohibition and the Padres Elixir

On January 17, 1920, the Volstead Act took effect. The manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors became illegal in the United States. Most of the country’s commercial wineries closed.

The Vai brothers did not close.

James and Giovanni Vai, Italian immigrants who had acquired the Padre Vineyard Company in 1909, were not the kind of operators who accepted closure as an outcome. They studied the loopholes. The Volstead Act permitted home production of up to 200 gallons of wine per family per year. It permitted sacramental wine. It permitted cooking wine. And, most importantly for the Vai brothers, it permitted medicinal alcohol to be sold by prescription through pharmacies.

The brothers created Padres Wine Elixir.

A May 29, 1929, advertisement in the Los Angeles Evening Express showed a stern-looking man in a suit and stethoscope. The copy read:

“Your Doctor Recommends PADRES WINE ELIXIR for general run-down condition, convalescence, impaired digestion, and spring fever. Medical authorities everywhere recognize the body-building, health-giving qualities of the phosphates and proteins contained in exact proportions in Padres Wine Elixir.”

It was, of course, wine. Sold as a tonic. The Vai brothers were running one of the most successful Prohibition workarounds in the country.

A separate advertisement in the Santa Ana Register recounted the product’s laboratory certification. A chemist named R.H. Pinker had secured a sample at the company’s warehouse at 845 North Alameda Street in Los Angeles, the same Alameda Street where Jean-Louis Vignes had planted his vineyard a hundred years earlier. The chemist’s letter read: “We have examined a sample... and find it to be free from Strychnine.”

That was the standard the Vai brothers’ product had to meet to be marketable. Not rat poison.

But they also threw parties.

In July 1941, with Prohibition eight years gone and the Pride of Cucamonga label they had created now shipping to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Atlantic City, the Vai brothers staged a publicity gala at the Cucamonga winery. The event was tied to United Artists’ film New Wine. The brothers buried a nitrogen-filled metal time capsule, said to contain Hollywood memorabilia. A sarong from Dorothy Lamour, a lock of Mary Pickford’s hair, a fake mustache from Charlie Chaplin, Lana Turner’s banned sweater. Starlets in white dresses took champagne showers under a vat of sparkling wine. Life magazine sent a photographer.

A reporter from the United Press peeked into the capsule during the party. He noted that it appeared empty.

The Vai brothers were not in the business of preserving the era. They were in the business of selling wine. The capsule was theater. The headlines were the point.

This was the Padre Vineyard Company in the summer of 1941.

The following year, my great-grandfather went to work there.

The Family Thread

In 1942, my great-grandfather Thomas Tatton was a carpenter at the Padre Vineyard Company in Cucamonga.

He was not a vintner. He moved barrels, repaired cellar doors, and kept the buildings standing through the Vai brothers’ decade of national distribution and Hollywood publicity stunts. He was the kind of worker whose name does not appear in the histories of California wine. There were thousands of Thomas Tattons in the story of this industry. They are absent from the published accounts, and they were the backbone of every operation.

Thomas worked at the winery through his fifties and beyond. Like most men of his generation, he kept working until he was about seventy, then retired. At some point after that, he left Ontario and moved up to Lake Hughes in the Angeles National Forest, where he shared a house with his sister Marguerite. He died there in 1966. Marguerite outlived him by eleven years and died in Los Angeles.

In the chaparral, not far from where Thomas spent his last years, vines planted in 1899 by an immigrant named Eli Munz were still alive. They had survived the vineyard's abandonment in the 1950s, as well as decades of fires, neglect, and erosion. About three hundred vines remained, hidden. Thomas couldn’t have known they were there. He had spent thirty years building structures at the winery that the Vachés founded and the Vai brothers ran, and now he lived a few miles from vines that had been planted before he was born. Vines that would outlive him by another sixty years, until Patrick Kelley of Cavaletti Vineyards rediscovered them in 2020.

His daughter Margaret Ann Tatton was born in 1916. She married John Thomas Blair, and she is the bridge between the two families: the Tattons in Cucamonga and Lake Hughes, and the Blairs in Downey.

My grandmother, Margaret, was beautiful, sweet, and kind. She smiled and laughed and giggled. But she also carried a quiet sadness that stayed with her after my grandfather, John Thomas Blair, died in 1965, then her father, Thomas, in 1966. The year after I was born. The sadness showed up in silence and in still moments. I knew it as a child without knowing why. She died in 1975.

The Blairs lived in Downey. Their house is still standing. It looks the same now as it did then. But there was a second place that mattered to them: a Forest Service cabin in the redwoods, deep in northern California, near a lake, accessible by a one-lane mountain road with pullouts at the cliffs where you waited for oncoming cars to pass.

The cabin had come down through the family from my great-grandparents’ generation. They had a permit through the U.S. Forest Service program established by Congress in 1915 to allow more American families access to the outdoors. About six thousand of these cabins were built in California, most before 1950. You owned the cabin itself but leased the land beneath it from the government. There was no electricity, no insulation, no real plumbing. Just the structure, the trees, the lake, and whatever you brought up with you. You took care of it yourself and did your own upgrades.

My father loved that cabin. He used to drive up as a young man to help. Fix roofs, repair the porch, and do the small, constant work that mountain cabins require. He married my mother soon after, and we went up as a family.

After my grandfather died, the cabin became harder to maintain. By then, Margaret’s two children had children of their own, and there wasn’t time for the forest anymore. My dad and my grandmother decided together to let it go. The Forest Service doesn’t sell empty lots, and once a permit is terminated, there is no path back. The cabin is gone, and there is no possibility of returning. The land it stood on is back to forest by now.

So my family is connected to two corners of this story, in two different forests. The Tattons in Cucamonga, where Thomas was building structures at the winery that became the Pride of Cucamonga, and at Lake Hughes, where he spent his last years a few miles from vines he didn’t know were there. The Blairs in Downey, with a beloved Forest Service cabin in the redwoods that Margaret and my dad surrendered together as the family grew. Two forests. One bridge between them.

My father carried a wish, all the way to the end of his life, that the family had managed to keep the cabin. But not far from where his grandfather Thomas spent his last years, vines that were planted in 1899 are still producing fruit. Against all odds, they are coming back.

The Peak and the Pivot

By the 1950s, the Cucamonga Valley was riding the last wave of its second great boom. After Prohibition, the Pride of Cucamonga label and dozens of others had rebuilt the industry. By 1939, the valley contained 41 bonded wineries and 13 brandy distilleries, with storage and fermentation capacity over 13 million gallons. By 1945, 55 wineries operated, producing wine from 35,000 acres of vineyards.

The valley supplied the rest of the country with the inexpensive, sweet, fortified, port-style wines and hearty reds that American consumers wanted. Gallon jugs. Sparkling wines. The market was massive.

In 1968, the Cucamonga Valley accounted for 98% of the 9.5 million gallons of wine produced in Southern California.

That was the peak.

The Freeway Era

In 1954, the freeway came.

On November 16 of that year, a 13.2-mile stretch of new highway opened to traffic between San Dimas and Archibald Avenue. It was called the Ramona Freeway. It would later become Interstate 10. It ran near Cucamonga Creek, cutting through the heart of the vineyard country.

Before the freeway, Route 66 had run along Foothill Boulevard, just north of the new highway. Route 66 was the vital vein of transcontinental travel. The road that carried Americans west during the Depression, the road that carried them on vacation in the 1940s and 50s. Travelers driving Route 66 passed directly through Cucamonga, stopping at the wineries, buying Pride of Cucamonga and other local bottles to take home. Sweet wine became a popular souvenir for drivers heading east. Cucamonga’s national distribution wasn’t only by rail. It was carried out in the cars and station wagons of travelers who had stopped along the way.

The new Interstate 10 didn’t replace Route 66. It bypassed it. The traffic that had once threaded through Foothill Boulevard now flew past on the freeway, on its way to and from Los Angeles. The walk-up trade evaporated. The wineries that had counted on Route 66 commerce lost a market they didn’t fully recover.

The freeway sat there through the 1950s and 1960s, slowly making the surrounding land more valuable, more accessible to developers, more attractive for warehouses and distribution centers. The Inland Empire was rising. The infrastructure was in place. The real estate pressure was building.

Then, in the 1970s, two more forces arrived.

First, American wine consumers’ tastes matured. The sweet wines that had built Cucamonga’s market fell out of favor. Drier wines, more elegant European-style productions, took their place. Northern California, Napa, and Sonoma, were experiencing a renaissance. The 1976 Judgment of Paris, where California Cabernets and Chardonnays beat their French counterparts in a blind tasting, transformed the global perception of American wine. The fine wines were now coming from the north. The mass-market sweet wines of Cucamonga were no longer what the public wanted.

Second, land values exploded. Subdivisions, warehouses, distribution centers, and strip malls were spreading east from Los Angeles. The land that had been worth $200 an acre as a vineyard was now worth $50,000 an acre as a building lot. The Pomona Freeway, the 60, followed the Ramona. The 210 came later. The valley that had been Italian villages and family wineries and the largest single vineyard in the world became a commuter corridor and a warehouse district.

Vineyards sold to developers. Wineries closed. Many of the families who had spent generations in the valley took the money and walked away. Land that could not be replaced was paved with asphalt and concrete.

The town of Guasti, which had been a complete company town with homes, a school, a post office, a general store, a firehouse, and the San Secondo d’Asti Catholic Church, was largely absorbed by the city of Ontario. Most of the original bungalows and surrounding vineyards were removed or redeveloped in the 2000s. A few historical structures remain. The church still stands, as do portions of the original Italian Vineyard Company winery. The town’s footprint now includes the 150-acre Cucamonga-Guasti Regional Park, with fishing lakes, a swim complex, water slides, and picnic areas.

The largest single vineyard in the world became a place where kids ride water slides.

The 1941 time capsule that the Vai brothers buried for a thousand years is presumably still in the ground at 9879 8th Street. Whatever is on top of it now is what the freeway era left in place.

What Remains

In the late 1970s, Pierre Biane, grandson of Marius and Marceline, descendant of the Vachés who had founded the Padre Vineyard Company a hundred years earlier, bought the old Vai Brothers winery. The same site. The grand stone buildings. The cellars. He purchased it from Dr. Pepper Beverage Company, which had owned it through the corporate consolidation period of the 1960s.

The Biane family operated the site as the Pierre Biane Winery through the late 1970s and 1980s.

By 1988, with the Cucamonga wine industry largely collapsed and the surrounding land worth far more as commercial real estate, the family transformed most of the property into a business park. Wine production ended.

But Paul Biane and Jean-Pierre Biane, Pierre’s sons, didn’t let the family’s winemaking go entirely. In the 1990s, they planted grapes on every extra inch of available ground and began making wine again. Today, the Biane Winery operates on the property of the former Pierre Biane Winery. On the grounds that the Vachés founded in 1870, that the Vai brothers built into an empire, and that my great-grandfather worked there in 1942.

Paul Biane is opening the doors to the public again.

The Galleano Winery, founded in 1927 by the Galleano family in what is now Mira Loma, is still operating and remains in the founding family’s hands. They survived Prohibition by selling grape juice with tags cautioning customers on how not to ferment it. Today, they remain one of only two Cucamonga wineries still actively making wine on family ground continuously since their founding.

The Hofer Ranch, established in 1882, is a National Historic Register property in Ontario. The Hofer family still stewards the ranch and protects some of the oldest living Grenache vines in the country. Vines that survived Pierce’s disease, Prohibition, the freeway, and a century of urban development. They no longer operate a commercial winery themselves. They lease their historic fruit to boutique winemakers, who make wines from vines that have been in the ground for more than a hundred years.

The Joseph Filippi Winery, run by the Filippi family for decades and one of the traditional families that held on through the worst of the freeway era, recently changed hands. Joey Filippi retired. The historic site was leased to a nonprofit developer and reopened as Ellena Cellars / Regina Winery Property. The buildings are preserved. The Filippi family is no longer operating a winery.

There is also a survivor from Part Three’s story. The San Antonio Winery, founded in 1917 in Lincoln Heights by the Riboli family, is the only Los Angeles winery to make it continuously through Prohibition. They survived by producing sacramental wine. Four generations later, they still operate in Lincoln Heights, with a second location in Ontario. They are the through-line from the City of Vines to today.

Patrick Kelley at Cavaletti Vineyards is working with the rediscovered Munz vines. Rajat Parr’s Scythian Wine Co. is making wine from the surviving century-old Cucamonga vineyards. The Los Angeles Vintners Association is sourcing fruit across Southern California, including from Cucamonga.

The empire is gone. The freeway buried most of it. But the Biane family still stands on the Vaché ground. The Galleanos are still working. The Hofer Grenache vines are still producing. The Filippi site is preserved under new operators. San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights has never stopped. The vines that survived the freeway era are being tended again. The Mission grape descendants are still in the soil at the foot of the San Gabriels, where they have been for over a hundred and fifty years.

What was buried wasn’t entirely lost. It was buried. There’s a difference.

If your family has a connection to a place that disappeared — a vineyard, a farm, an orchard, a town, a stretch of land that became something else — I’d love to hear about it. What we keep when something is buried isn’t always what we expected.

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

— Jennifer

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

• Part Two → Before Napa, There Was a Boat Leaving Spain

• Part Three → Before Napa, Los Angeles Was the Wine Capital

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a wine region that remains. For Dad, who would have loved to read this.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

I sat down at a table in a room full of strangers, picked up a pencil, and started writing about wine.

Two and a half hours. Two exams. WSET Diploma Units 1 and 2 (viticulture and winemaking), then business and wine marketing, back-to-back, which I have already established was either efficient or optimistic. The verdict on that is still pending.

What I didn’t expect was to enjoy it.

The room was full of people in the same condition. Some worked in the industry and still couldn’t remember. Some had studied for months and felt like they’d retained nothing. One person said what everyone was thinking: I just wanted to love wine. I didn’t know it would be this hard. We laughed. We commiserated. We picked up our pencils and did it anyway.

My wrist gave me more trouble than my shoulder. The handwriting was ugly. When I put the pencil down, I felt relief so complete it was almost physical. I couldn’t wait to get out of that room and into the valley.

Then the road opened.

The Day Before — When Napa Said Hello

The tastings came first, the day before the exams, which was either inspired planning or a very good excuse to drink wine before a test. I’ll call it research.

A rental car with low tire pressure, a quick fix, and then the drive up Route 29. Stags Leap had closed by the time I arrived. The Oxbow was fuller and busier than I remembered from 2010, stuffed with food and life and chatter, nothing like the quieter version I’d seen before. Walt Wines was tucked into what was once someone’s home, three small houses where people actually lived when I last came through. Now it’s a tasting room with the door wide open and no reservations required.

I spent over an hour at Walt talking with the staff about wine and Napa and history. I took home a 2025 Walt Rosé, a 2024 Baca Stargazing White, and a 2023 Walt Sierra Mar. The Rosé I can find at the Hall tasting in Palm Springs. The other two were harder to come by. In wine country, where everything requires a booking three weeks out, Walt leaves the light on. You walk in, sit down, and talk to people who actually want to talk.

Then Inglenook.

I’d been before, in 2010, when Rubicon Claret was the wine to take home and the estate was fully open. This visit was different. Tastings run Wednesday through Monday, advance reservations required. I wandered in without one.

What I found was somewhere between a winery and a museum. Velvet ropes cordoned off much of the space. But I kept walking and found what I was looking for.

A grand staircase draped in deep red carpet, dark wood banisters, and a stained glass window at the top, catching the afternoon light. Unchanged from when I last walked it in 2010. Some things deserve to stay exactly as they are. Nearby, a vaulted stone cave, a crystal chandelier hanging over a long wooden table, the ceiling arching overhead in the way that makes you feel small in the best sense. A private wine library room, dimly lit, bottles lining every wall, floor to ceiling, velvet chairs around a table set with glasses. The kind of room that makes you wish you’d made a reservation.

Francis Ford Coppola bought this estate with Godfather money in 1975 and spent fifty years buying it back piece by piece. The château. The vineyards. Even the name, which had been sold to a jug wine company. He paid as much for the name as he had for the original house. The Italia Cave, 23,000 square feet underground with 120 fermentation tanks, I didn’t get to see. You sign up for that separately. I’ll be back.

And then Mondavi.

The Sitting Area Faces To Kalon

I didn’t know what to expect. I’d read about the renovation, studied the details, and written about the history. None of it prepared me for being greeted at the entrance by staff with a glass of wine already poured.

They walked me to the pairing room. Floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. The sitting area arranged so that every sight line leads directly to To Kalon vineyard, one of the most storied pieces of agricultural land in California, stretching out beyond the glass, unhurried, indifferent to the renovation around it. Outside: rustic, historic, green, alive with trees and colorful plantings, and the particular quiet that old vines carry.

Four wines. A 2022 Sauvignon Blanc from Stags Leap District, a 2022 Fumé Blanc from Oakville, a 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon from Oakville, and a 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. Each one precise. Each one rooted.

The food arrived in courses. A citrus salad I will never forget: butter lettuce, Castelvetrano olives, mint, citrus vinaigrette, and blanched pistachios. The chef’s full hand is a mystery, and I didn’t try to solve it. I just ate it and was grateful. Then, handmade ricotta capelletti with Genovese pesto, English peas, and pecorino romano. Then hazelnut gelato with chocolate crumb.

Most wine pairings seat everyone at a communal table. Mondavi gave each party their own. I was alone and expected to feel it. I didn’t. The staff were present without hovering, warm without performing. They gave me time with the view. And at the end, a small mercy, a taste of a To Kalon red that was simply one of the best things I’ve put in my glass. I won’t pretend I remember every note. I remember the feeling.

That evening, back at the River Terrace Inn, a spicy basil Paloma, a mushroom and cheese empanada, a platter of hummus and olive oil, cucumbers, olives, and tomatoes. Dante set me up. Victor put me in a room on the third-floor patio overlooking the Napa River when I arrived. The water moves slowly there. Green and cool. The opposite of the desert in every way.

I slept well.

Wednesday

Two exams. Two and a half hours. A pencil. A wrist that had opinions.

Afterward, the group that had tested gathered at the Napa Valley Wine Academy. D1 through D4 candidates, plus teachers. The winemaker from Lodi and the Willamette tasting staff who had sat those same tests that morning brought their bottles to share. Generous of them. The kind of thing that happens when people who love wine are also good people.

It was a jolly good time. The fear of the morning dissolved into wine and conversation, and the relief of people who have done a hard thing and lived.

I found Los Agaves on OpenTable and sat outside. Ordered a skinny margarita with a Grand Marnier float, my reward, earned, non-negotiable. Chips, salsa, and a taco plate with Chile Morita built into the sauce, a dried, smoke-cured red jalapeño smaller than a chipotle, with a deep, fruity heat that arrives late and lingers. The owners and chef are from Mexico City. The menu reflects a city that knows how to eat.

I drove past the Napa River Inn, where my sisters and I had stayed in 2010, walked through, and discovered a shortbread chocolate candy that had been developed just days before my arrival. I bought enough to bring home to the family. Keeping chocolate from melting while traveling is its own test. I passed that one.

Then the Road Again

Carmel first. My sister, my nephew, his middle school graduation, and recognition from his teachers that made everyone proud. I missed the ceremony because the exam conflicted with it. I was there for the celebration. That’s what matters.

Then, Highway 1 south to San Luis Obispo. My niece graduated from Cal Poly with a gold cord for academic excellence. We stayed at Petit Soleil, a French inn that served pastries, thoughtful breakfasts, and afternoon happy hours as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The graduation was on Sunday. The tradition that preceded it was a 6am bar with the graduate, The Libertine Brewing Company, Olivia’s choice, the right choice. A band, pool tables, espresso martinis, Bloody Marys, and Screwdrivers, parents and kids dancing and trying to remember how to play pool. It was exactly what a graduation should feel like.

The Drive Home

Nine hours. My mom in the passenger seat, not feeling well. I drove, didn’t talk much, and let the miles pass.

An hour from home, the sky changed. Smoke. Orange light on the mountains. The Short Fire had started alongside the highway, and by the time we pulled into the desert, the air tasted like it. The smell stayed all night. The fear of it, too.

Archie was fine. The sitter was wonderful. He had clearly enjoyed his own vacation, complete with a new toy from the sitter. He was overjoyed to see me and has spent the last week sleeping in my bed. He is not subtle about his feelings.

What the Valley Taught Me

Napa is changing. Not just in hospitality, though the hospitality is extraordinary now. Something deeper.

The wineries I visited are leaning into regenerative agriculture. Planting heirloom trees. Sourcing locally. Building authentic connections with the land and with the people who come to experience it. The wines are backed by a belief system, a concern for the environment, and a respect for what the earth is actually doing when no one is managing it.

Napa outpaced Southern California’s wine regions because it never stopped believing in the vine. It didn’t build freeways over its vineyards or convert its agricultural land to housing developments. It kept its eyes on To Kalon and asked what the land wanted to become.

Standing in that pairing room, watching the vineyard through floor-to-ceiling glass, I understood something I’d been circling for years. The difference between Napa and the regions still trying to get there isn’t money or scale or prestige. It’s intention, sustained over time, against all the easier options.

Robert Mondavi opened his winery in 1966 because he believed California wine deserved a place at the world’s table. Francis Ford Coppola spent fifty years and a Godfather fortune restoring one estate to what it once was. Walt leaves the door open because wine should be welcoming, not exclusive.

That’s what I brought back to the table.

Next time

Back to the vines. The 257 Years series continues. Today is the summer solstice. Something summery is coming July 5th. More soon.

Come to the Table: The Reading Series

A reading series launching July 5th. MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster, a dedicated chat, a monthly discussion. Less newsletter, more gathering. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, a paid subscription is $60 a year.

Before You Go

What's the last place that taught you something you weren't expecting to learn?

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a spin through Napa.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

I’m on the road this week. Napa, Carmel, San Luis Obispo, and a long drive home to the Coachella Valley with my mom and a James Patterson audiobook.

Before I left, I published four new recipes. Three you may have seen tucked into recent essays. One is making its debut. While I’m away, consider this your invitation.

Back next week with field notes from Mondavi Winery and whatever else the road brought to the table.

Pull up a chair.

Jennifer

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a spin through Northern California.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

I fly into Napa on Monday for two WSET Diploma exams, Units 1 and 2, back-to-back, which seemed like a reasonable idea in January and feels considerably less reasonable now.

Here’s what I know: I studied. I also forgot most of what I studied. There is a real argument that I should have taken Unit 1 in March when it was offered, let it settle, then come back for Unit 2. I didn’t do that. I’m doing both at once, which is either efficient or optimistic, or a combination of the two that the exam results will clarify. My shoulder is giving me trouble, and my writing arm may or may not cooperate on the day. What was I thinking.

I’m going to give it everything I have, and then I’m going to close the study cards.

They’re on Wednesday. Wish me luck.

After the Exams

Robert Mondavi Winery just reopened after a three-year transformation, timed to its 60th anniversary. The parking lot is now a meadow planted with sweet peas, deer grass, and salvias. Visitors pass through the famous arch into a courtyard garden before entering a living room-like reception area. The iconic tower has been restored and now houses the wine library. Light-filled, open spaces blur the boundaries between indoors and outdoors. The vineyard is always visible, always present.

The renovation touches everything. A new cellar with state-of-the-art fermentation vessels allows small vineyard lots to be fermented separately, capturing optimal ripeness from each. The winery is Napa Green certified. The estate vineyard has been CCOF organic certified since 2023. They were among the first in Napa to transition to electric tractors. Rainwater capture, water recycling, smart soil sensors. Robert Mondavi believed in stewardship of the land.

I’ll be tasting at The Mondavi Table, their Wine and Food Pairing experience. Field notes to follow.

Napa and the Hospitality Wave

Napa’s hospitality story runs deeper than the renovation. Before the 1976 Judgment of Paris, Napa was an agricultural community focused entirely on production. No tourism, no tasting rooms, no epicurean events. Robert Mondavi changed that. He was among the first to open the winery estate to the public, pairing wine with food, art, and culture at a time when that simply wasn’t done. By the 1980s, luxury retreats and destination restaurants followed. Then a second wave around 2016 shifted things again, away from transactional drop-in tastings toward appointment-only, bespoke, experiential visits. What’s reopening now is the culmination of fifty years of that evolution.

Robert Mondavi

Robert Mondavi was born in 1913 to Italian immigrant parents who eventually landed in Napa Valley. In 1966, he opened the first major winery in Napa since Prohibition, determined to prove that California could produce wines to rival the best in Europe. What’s less often told is what it cost him to get there. He left the family winery after a bitter dispute with his brother Peter, started over with $200,000, and built something the wine world hadn’t seen before.

In 1970, Baron Philippe de Rothschild approached Mondavi in Hawaii with an unlikely proposal. Make a Cabernet Sauvignon together in Napa Valley. While every other winemaker in the valley was trying to beat Bordeaux, Mondavi said yes. When they formalized the partnership in France eight years later, the Baron conducted the meeting from his bed, in his 70s, with a servant standing by. In 1979, they officially agreed to a 50/50 joint venture. Opus One became America’s first ultra-premium Bordeaux-style blend, made in Oakville by two men who understood that the best way to prove you belong at the table is to set a place for someone else.

Rothschild believed that wine, art, and the table were inseparable. Mondavi believed the same.

Mondavi had a reverence for craft, a sense of cultural expression, and the understanding that great wine is never created in isolation. It lives at the table.

He traveled the world promoting Napa Valley, founded a cultural center and an art school, helped restore an opera house, and died in 2008. He and his brother Peter reconciled three years before the end.

The winery he built from a family argument and a dream is now 60 years old and just reopened. It’s now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Constellation Brands. Robert would probably have had opinions about that. The wines are still worth drinking.

Then the Road

From Napa south to Carmel, my sister and my nephew, who just graduated from middle school. I missed the ceremony but not the party. That’s what matters. A quick turn, then back on Highway 1 down to San Luis Obispo for my niece’s college graduation. More family, more celebrating, the kind of week that reminds you what all the table-setting is actually for.

Archie stays home with a sitter. He'll survive.

What I’m Listening To

Going up: Vine Pair Wine 101 with Keith Beavers. Keith is VinePair’s tasting director, a former Italian restaurant and wine bar operator, and one of the most genuinely enjoyable people to learn wine from. Funny, transparent, knows everyone in the business, and tastes more wine than should be legal. I wish I had his job. He recently joined Substack, though he hasn’t posted yet. Worth subscribing now just to be there when he does.

He also did a five-part podcast series on Robert Mondavi and his family. If you’re heading to Napa or just want to understand why the man mattered, start there.

Coming home: My mom is riding back with me, so we're switching to Audible. Something with history, intrigue, and enough plot to keep us both awake through the Grapevine. James Patterson is not beneath us.

What I’m Reading

Kelsey Erin Shipman writes Cheese Toast with White People on Substack. I’ve been reading her work and find it refreshing, sharp, and worth your time. Go see for yourself.

And this week on the road is when I finally give the writers I subscribe to the attention they deserve. There’s a stack of posts waiting, and I intend to read every one. If you’re a writer I subscribe to, thank you for putting the work out. I’ll be reading.

Also in my bag: MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. Research for July, and the right book for wine country.

Next Time

Four recipes you may have missed. Then I'll be back from the road.

Come to the Table: The Reading Series

A reading series launching in July 2026. MFK Fisher's Consider the Oyster, a dedicated chat, and a monthly discussion. Less newsletter, more gathering. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, a paid subscription is $60 a year.

Before You Go

Have you ever walked into something you were wildly underprepared for and done it anyway?

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, the joy of coming home.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Clara Weidman Baker’s recipe box held a lot of wisdom in a small space. Her oatmeal cookies held the cloves. Warm and a little unexpected, like most good inheritances. Her recipe listed no baking time. She instinctively knew how long to cook things, the kind of knowledge that lived in her hands, not on the card.

Her version called for butter and lard mixed together, and sweet milk. Details that tell you exactly when and where a recipe was made.

These heritage cookies are chewy, satisfying, and last for weeks in the fridge. Ideal for a very good breakfast or a Tuesday afternoon.

Notes

This can all be done in today’s mixer, quicker, and slightly easier, though I chose to make it the way Clara would have with spoons, whisks, and bowls.

Sweet milk is an old-fashioned term for whole milk, used to distinguish it from buttermilk or sour milk. Clara would have written it exactly that way. Use whole milk.

Lard in Clara's day meant the real thing. I use Spectrum Naturals Organic Vegetable Shortening. It’s gluten-free, widely available at Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's, and on Amazon.

Yield depends on the size of your cookie. Small cookies yield about 3 dozen and can be baked in under 30 minutes if you have enough sheet pans to run multiple batches simultaneously. Larger cookies yield fewer.

I used two modern cookie scoops, testing each batch at 1 tablespoon and 2 tablespoons. The larger scoop made larger cookies, which also required longer cooking time. For larger cookies, I tested at 8 minutes then 12, but my oven needed 14 to 16 minutes. For smaller cookies, 12 minutes was right.

Oven temperatures vary and humidity affects baking. Use the visual cue, just golden at the edges, as your guide rather than the clock alone.

While You’re Here…

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a smile on Clara’s face, the smile on mine.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Raspberries, fresh lemon juice, sugar, vanilla extract, sea salt. Five ingredients, less than an hour, and somehow the most refreshing thing you can make on a hot afternoon. No dairy, no gluten, lighter than ice cream, and made with fruit you already have in the freezer. Which, if you’re smart about it, you always do.

I keep frozen fruit stocked year-round. A bag of raspberries has gotten me out of more than one afternoon slump. Make a batch of sorbet, store it for a month, or watch your family find it in twenty minutes and make another batch the next day. Either way, keep the freezer full.

This sorbet is part of a larger project. Last May, I made a whole collection of frozen things, part Helen Wissel Carnes, part Clara Weidman Baker, part me riffing on cocktail-driven versions of sorbet and ice cream alongside the ancestral recipes. This raspberry sorbet came out of that summer, out of a craving, and out of the fact that my mom and I cannot be in the same room as raspberries without eating them immediately. The full 2025 frozen collection is here.

Notes

A simple syrup, equal parts sugar and water, heated until dissolved and cooled, would make the sorbet smoother. I skipped it to keep things simple. Both versions work. Your call.

Pressing out the seeds can be tedious. They don’t bother me, and I don’t want to take the time. However, if you’d like it smoother and free of seeds, add the raspberries and water to a food processor, pulse until smooth, then push the puree through a fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl, one cup or less at a time. Use the back of a large spoon or a spatula to press the mixture through and retain the seeds. Repeat until all puree has been pressed through and discard the seeds. Pour the seed-free puree back into the food processor then add the sugar, lemon juice, sea salt and vanilla extract and process until completely incorporated.

The Tovolo Glide-a-Scoop Ice Cream Container, 1.5 qt, is a dream for storing sorbets and ice creams. Slides out cleanly, no digging.

A Chinois Fine-Mesh Cone Sieve makes pushing seeds and fibers through a puree considerably less miserable. The cone format lets you press thick puree through without wearing out your arm or your patience.

While You’re Here…

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a family’s affinity for raspberries.

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257 Years is a nine-part series on the history of wine in Southern California, from the Mission grape’s arrival in San Diego in 1769 to the region’s revival today. This is Part Three. Earlier posts are linked at the bottom.

If your email truncates, the full post is on the website and in the app.

This week, we turn back to the vine and step into a city that no longer thinks of itself as wine country. But once was. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. By the numbers. By the acres. By the gallons.

Last time, I traced a single grape from a sun-scorched plain in Spain to the soil of San Diego in 1769. This week, the story moves north. To Los Angeles. To downtown LA, specifically the streets you’ve driven past a hundred times without knowing what they used to be.

I’ve been pulling on this thread for weeks now. Every time I pull, something else comes loose. A vineyard in the courtyard of the county's oldest house. A Frenchman who shipped Bordeaux cuttings around Cape Horn wrapped in damp moss. A sycamore tree, four hundred years old, marking the entrance to a hundred-acre vineyard, that lived through everything and was finally cut down in the 1890s. A disease without a name that killed twenty-five thousand acres of vines, while no one understood what it was. The Tongva people who built it all and were forbidden from drinking what they made.

This is the story of how Los Angeles became the wine capital of California. And how it stopped being one. It is also the story of who built it. Most of the names on the wineries are not the names of the people who did the work. That matters.

Let me show you what I found.

The Adobe on Olvera Street

The oldest building still standing in Los Angeles County is on Olvera Street, in the heart of downtown. It was built in 1818 by Francisco Avila, a Californio rancher whose father had settled in the pueblo of Los Angeles thirty-five years earlier. In the courtyard, Avila planted a vineyard.

The vine he planted is still alive. As recently as 2016, it was documented as the oldest Mission vine in California still yielding fruit.

This is where the story of Los Angeles wine actually begins. Not in 1833, when a Frenchman arrived with cuttings from Bordeaux. Fifteen years earlier, with a Mexican-born settler planting Mission grapes in a downtown courtyard.

The Avila family had been in Los Angeles since 1783, two years after the pueblo was founded. Cornelio Avila, a Spanish soldier, arrived from Sinaloa with his wife and six children. By the time Francisco built the adobe, the family was three generations deep into the city’s founding. His son Miguel would later serve as Alcalde of San Luis Obispo and receive the land grant for Rancho San Miguelito, which today includes Avila Beach.

The vineyard on Olvera Street wasn’t an outlier. Manuel Requena had eight acres of vines, a little south of Aliso Street, on the east side of Los Angeles Street, before 1831. Pinney calls him a “man of “a well-cultivated mind, and a high order of intelligence,” making prizewinning wines from his Los Angeles vineyard before any French winemaker had set foot in the pueblo.

The story most people know about LA wine starts with a Frenchman. The truer story starts earlier. With Californios.

The Mission Engine

To understand how those Californio vineyards came to be, we have to go back to Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.

Founded in 1771 by Father Junípero Serra, fourth in the chain of California’s twenty-one missions, San Gabriel sat in the foothills east of what would become Los Angeles. It was positioned at the crossroads of three important Indigenous trade routes. Within decades, it would become the largest and most productive wine producer in Alta California, known as the Pride of the Missions and more abundant than any of the other twenty.

The Mother Vine planted at San Gabriel in the 1770s is still alive. It is a hybrid: the Mission grape crossed with Vitis girdiana, the native wild grape of Southern California. A vine that exists nowhere else on earth. The 2020 fire that destroyed much of the Mission’s roof did not kill it.

In 1786, cuttings from San Gabriel were brought to the Pueblo de Los Ángeles to establish the first plantings inside the city itself. By the time Francisco Avila built his adobe in 1818, the city had been growing Mission grapes for thirty-two years.

But none of this was built by missionaries alone.

The Tongva people, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin, were the labor force at San Gabriel. They planted the vines, pruned them, harvested the fruit, pressed the grapes, and made the wine. Julia Ornelas-Higdon, a historian at California State University Channel Islands who has spent five years researching the labor history of California wine, puts it plainly: “Wine was really a tool of conquest for the Spanish.”

The Tongva were prohibited from drinking the wine they made, outside of Catholic Mass. Ownership of winemaking tools was criminalized for Indigenous Californians. “California natives are the ones who planted, pruned, harvested the grapes, and did all of that work,” Ornelas-Higdon writes. “Yet the irony is that they had very limited access to the literal fruits of their labors.”

This is how the foundation of Los Angeles wine was laid. Not in a single founding moment. In sixty years of forced labor, conversion, and disease that decimated the Tongva population. The vineyards that the Californio families inherited after 1833 were not empty land. They were vineyards built by people whose names were not written down.

The Year Everything Shifted

Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821. In 1833, the Mexican government began secularizing the missions — taking the land from the Franciscans and redistributing it.

Mission vineyards passed into private hands. Ranchos became the new centers of wine production. Rancho Paso de Bartolo Viejo covered what is now Montebello, Whittier, and Pico Rivera. Henry “Don Enrique” Dalton’s Rancho Azusa stretched across present-day Azusa, Arcadia, Monrovia, Irwindale, and Baldwin Park. A Californio wine economy was emerging, grounded in the older traditions of the Avilas and Requena, now scaled to the ranchos.

Eighteen thirty-three was also the year Jean-Louis Vignes arrived.

The Frenchman and El Aliso

Jean-Louis Vignes was born in 1780 in Cadillac, a town in the Bordeaux wine country. He was a trained cooper. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1831, fifty-one years old, and within two years had acquired one hundred and four acres of land in the heart of the pueblo’s vineyard district.

Pinney maps the property precisely: it ran from Alameda Street on the west to the Los Angeles River on the east, and from Aliso Street south to First Street. One hundred and four acres, in what is now the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Today, Union Station sits inside what used to be his vineyard.

At the entrance to the property stood a giant sycamore tree. The Spanish word for sycamore is aliso. The tree gave the vineyard its name, “El Aliso,” and gave the street its name, too. Aliso Street is still on the map.

The tree was sixty feet high and twenty feet in circumference. When it finally died and was cut down in the 1890s, it was estimated to be four hundred years old. It had been standing when the Tongva villages were the only settlements in the basin. It witnessed the Spanish arrival, the building of Mission San Gabriel, the founding of the pueblo, the Mexican period, the rise of LA wine, and the beginning of its end.

Vignes planted the Mission grape on most of his acreage. But in 1833, he did something none of the Californio winemakers had done: he imported European Vitis vinifera cuttings from his native Bordeaux. Cabernet Franc. Sauvignon Blanc. He had the cuttings wrapped in damp moss and slices of potato to survive the journey around Cape Horn.

This is the moment most histories of California wine choose as their starting point. It’s not wrong, exactly. Vignes did bring the first non-Mission European varieties to California. The quality of the wine produced in Los Angeles changed because of him. He became one of the wealthiest men in the pueblo, known as Don Luis del Aliso.

But Vignes did not found Los Angeles wine. He arrived inside it. The Californios had been growing grapes for decades. The Tongva had been doing the labor for sixty years. Vignes raised the ceiling. He didn’t lay the foundation.

The City of Vines

By the mid-1850s, Los Angeles had a nickname: the City of Vines. It was not a marketing slogan. It was a description.

In 1857, California produced 385,000 gallons of wine. Of those, 350,000 gallons came from Los Angeles. That’s 91 percent. The county nearest to LA in scale was Santa Clara, with 150,000 vines. Los Angeles County had over a million.

Sonoma, Pinney notes, was just beginning to be heard from. Napa, hardly at all yet.

This was not a small wine region. This was the engine of California wine.

The figures of the era are worth naming. William Wolfskill, born in Kentucky, came to Los Angeles as a trapper and became the largest vineyard owner in the city. He would later expand into Yolo and Solano counties. Pierre Sainsevain, Vignes’s nephew, took over El Aliso and in 1855 became the first commercial sparkling wine producer in California. Charles Kohler and John Frohling, German immigrants, built Kohler & Frohling into one of the largest wine companies of the era. Frohling was also one of the founders of Anaheim, which was established in 1857 as a German-American wine colony. At its peak, the Anaheim Colony had over a million vines planted.

Matthew Keller, the kind of figure every era produces, claimed in his statistics that Los Angeles County had a million and a half bearing vines and another eight hundred and seventy-five thousand not yet productive, with plans for a million more cuttings the next season. Pinney notes drily that Keller’s numbers were “no doubt inflated.” But even with the inflation removed, the picture is the same. LA County was the dominant wine producer in California by a margin that’s almost difficult to believe today.

The transcontinental railroad arrived in 1876. Bulk wine could now be shipped to East Coast markets in refrigerated rail cars, bypassing the slow and expensive sea route around Cape Horn. The industry boomed.

The Hands That Built It

The boom did not happen because of the men whose names are on the wineries. It happened because of the workers whose names are not.

Ornelas-Higdon’s research is unsparing on this point. “If we peel back the layers of this history,” she writes, “we see this amazing, diverse industry that was really working class, that was immigrant, and that included a lot of populations of color.”

The labor force of Los Angeles wine in the second half of the nineteenth century included Indigenous Californians — Tongva, Chumash, and others displaced from the missions, often returning as wage laborers to vineyards their ancestors had built. It included Mexican Californios, both as landowners and as workers. In the 1860s and 1870s, vineyard owners began recruiting Mexican and Yaqui (Yoeme) laborers from the Arizona-Sonora borderlands.

But the most sought-after workforce of the era was Chinese immigrant laborers. They cleared the land. They planted the vines. They pruned and harvested. They dug the wine caves by hand.

Ornelas-Higdon documents the reasons: “They were stereotyped as being compliant and docile, which made them desirable. Also, vineyard owners could get away with paying them less money and putting them up in substandard housing for much less than what they would pay white workers.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 cut off the immigration that had built much of Los Angeles wine. By then, much of the work was done. The vineyards bore the names of the men who owned them. Not the names of the people who built them.

This is the history that gets edited out when California wine tells the story of itself. It is the history that has to be written back in.

The Mysterious Disease

In 1884, vines in the Santa Ana Valley began to show strange signs. Leaves browned at the edges. Fruit failed to ripen. Vines died slowly through the growing season rather than all at once.

In 1885, the disaster broke open. Whole vineyards in Anaheim turned to dead wood. Within a year, it was everywhere.

Growers gave the disease different names as they tried to understand it. The Mysterious Disease. The New Disease. The Los Angeles Rot. The California Disease. The Anaheim Disease. None of the names helped. The vines kept dying.

By the end of the decade, winegrowing in and around Anaheim was finished. Pinney documents twenty-five thousand acres of vineyard dead across Anaheim, the San Gabriel Valley, and San Bernardino County. The German colony’s million-plus vines were largely gone.

In 1891, the United States Department of Agriculture sent a pathologist, Newton B. Pierce, to investigate. His findings, published in 1892, identified a microorganism that had begun spreading in the Santa Ana Valley around 1884. Seven years before the federal government took it seriously. The disease that bears his name today, Pierce’s disease, is now understood as a bacterial infection carried by sharpshooter insects.

In 1885, no one knew that. They only knew their vineyards were dying.

Several things were happening at once. The disease was one. Real estate was another. Los Angeles was growing fast, and land that had been vineyards became more valuable as building lots than as farmland. The citrus industry was rising. Oranges proved more profitable than wine grapes. Northern California, less affected by Pierce’s disease and benefiting from cooler nights, expanded rapidly. By 1890, Sonoma and Napa together outproduced Southern California by a five-to-one ratio.

The Sainsevain brothers, Pierre and Jean-Louis, closed El Aliso and moved east, into the Cucamonga Valley. They were not the only ones. The surviving Los Angeles winemakers pushed east, into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, looking for land that hadn’t yet been infected, urbanized, or sold to developers.

That story, What happened in Cucamonga, is the next installment.

What Remains

Walk through downtown Los Angeles today, and you can still find the bones.

Vignes Street still bears his name. Aliso Street still marks where the great sycamore stood. The Avila Adobe is still on Olvera Street. The vine in its courtyard is still alive. Michael Holland, a Los Angeles city archivist, makes small-batch wine from those vines.

The Ramona Vine still grows at Mission San Gabriel. Believed to be 249 years old, planted before the United States was a nation. It has grown as large as a tree, sprawling across the mission grounds. It is, by the Los Angeles Vintners Association's reckoning, the oldest tended grapevine in the United States. After the 2020 fire, the association harvested its grapes and made Angelica, the sweet, fortified wine that takes its name from Los Angeles itself, and that historians consider the first true California wine. They followed the padres' old method: fresh-crushed Mission grape juice, fortified with brandy before it could ferment, aged at least three years in barrel. One of the winemakers said it tasted like cherry cordial. A flavor profile unique in the world. It is, for now, sold out. I’m on the waitlist. So is everyone else.

The group that did that work, the Los Angeles Vintners Association, was founded in 2019 by Mark Blatty of Byron Blatty Wines, joined by Jasper Dickson and Amy Luftig Viste of Angeleno Wine Company, Patrick Kelley of Cavaletti Vineyards, and Ben and Katy Sposato of Acri Wine Company. They are working with growers across Southern California, from Agua Dulce to the Antelope Valley to Dulzura on the Mexican border, to revive the city’s lost winemaking tradition.

Other producers are scattered across the county. Charles Wine Co. in Santa Clarita’s Sierra Pelona Valley. Reyes Winery on fourteen acres in the same valley. Mighty Yee Wines, made by Linda Yee on annual trips to Sonoma. The work is small. The wines are real.

Los Angeles will probably never again be the wine capital of California. The land is gone, paved over, built up, far too valuable now for vines. But what was here was not erased. It was buried. And the people working today to bring it back, to plant new vines, to harvest the surviving old ones, to make wine that honors what came before, are doing something that matters.

The story told most often about California wine starts with a Frenchman named Vignes. The truer story starts earlier. With a vineyard in a downtown courtyard. With the Tongva who planted at San Gabriel. With a Californio named Manuel Requena. With a sycamore tree that watched it all and lived for four hundred years.

The City of Vines is gone. But the bones are still here.

If your family came to California for the land, to farm, to plant, to harvest, to build something out of the ground, I’d love to hear about it. The vines, the orchards, the fields. The work that doesn’t always make it into the history books.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

— Jennifer

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

• Part Two → Before Napa, There Was a Boat Leaving Spain

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a city of vines.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

I walked to the back room.

How is it 2 pm and the bed is still unmade?

Folded shorts piled on my arm, shirts that need to be hung, rolled over the pants, quietly wrinkling directly out of the dryer. The room smells like attic air, the AC overhead doing its best, rose geranium lavender lotion, and essential oils from the laundry, and underneath all of it, Archie. He needs a bath. He won’t go near water voluntarily, which means I have to chase him around the yard with a hose. He loves every minute of it. I do not.

Some days seem simpler, slower. Today is not that day.

The sun is sinking in from the west at 100 degrees. Ah, the bed. Always undone. I drop the laundry on the bathroom counter, scoot over to pull the gray sheets that were once white up over the pillows, tuck them in, and tidy the blanket so it looks like an adult lives here, not a hot mess. Who’s going to see it anyway? Just me.

Back to the clothes. I should shower.

My scattered brain is all over the place. Studying for wine tests, trying to remember every winemaking tool, all the steps needed to establish a vineyard, how a particular machine works. Really, all I want to do is drink the wine. A glass of Endless Crush Rosé of Pinot Noir from Inman Family Wines, pale, ballet-pink, crisp acidity, ruby red grapefruit and honeysuckle and watermelon, while sitting in the vineyard. The rest of it is science. Important, yes, I suppose. But my creative brain prefers taste, feeling, aroma, connection, memory, ritual. The stories are so much more interesting than the machinery.

Anyway. Shower.

The people who lived here before me, lunatics, I say this with love, had issues with doors and windows and removed all of them, including the shower doors. Which is why there’s a curtain. Organic cotton, sapphire design, white and sage, five years old. I lean toward the shower, pull the curtain, drag it to the right to make room, and barely turn the water on, just a trickle warming up, when I JUMP.

Is that a tarantula?

OMG OMG OMG.

WAIT.

Is that Archie?

That is my dog. Curled up in the back corner of the shower, his paws the only thing visible from where I stood. Black, tan, white, and fluffy. The tile was cool. The skylight pours heat in during the afternoon, which is exactly why spiders love this shower, and apparently, so does a 90-pound German Shepherd who needed somewhere to think.

I stood there hyperventilating.

He was warm on his ears when he finally got up. The top of him quite warm. He stretched, one long, slow, unbothered stretch, then walked straight out of the back of the shower, across the tile in front of me, out of the bathroom, and directly onto the bed. The one I had just made.

He didn’t apologize.

I stood there, still panting, laughing out loud at nothing. That’s when the idea came. Make brownies. Dark and unsettling and surprisingly welcome, just like the thing I thought had taken up squatting in my shower for the afternoon.

Next Time

A deep dive into the SoCal AVA, the wine region most people drive past without knowing it exists. Next week, I’m heading to Napa, Carmel, and San Luis Obispo. What I’m looking for, what I’m hoping to find, and what I’ll bring back to the table.

Come to the Table: The Reading Series

A reading series is launching in July: MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster, a dedicated chat, and a monthly discussion. Less newsletter, more gathering. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, a paid subscription is $60 a year.

Before You Go

What does your dog do that makes absolutely no sense and perfect sense at the same time?

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a German Shepherd with an attitude.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

In our family recipe box, among the well-worn cards and handwritten notes, I found a chocolate chip brownie recipe in my grandmother Clara Weidman Baker's handwriting. Even my mom, usually our family recipe detective, doesn’t remember it being made.

My first attempt followed the card exactly. I ended up with cookies. Delicious, but not brownies.

So I went back in. Brown sugar for density and chew. White sugar for the crackly top. Dutch-processed cocoa for depth. Dark chocolate chips folded in and scattered over the top. What came out the other side was rich, fudgy, and completely its own thing, still connected to the original card, just finally finished.

The card made cookies in her kitchen. It makes brownies in mine.

Notes

The crackly top is the sign they're done. Watch for it alongside the set edges. Don't pull them early. Dutch-processed cocoa is worth seeking out here. It delivers a deeper color and richer chocolate flavor than natural cocoa.

While You’re Here…

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a cookie that became a brownie.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Come in. Sit down. There’s wine open, and something’s in the pantry. Whatever you’re in the mood for, we’ll find it.

That’s the feeling of this place. No agenda, no dress code, no expertise required. Just good company, something worth eating or drinking, and the kind of conversation that doesn’t wrap up neatly because it isn’t supposed to.

I’ve been thinking about MFK Fisher lately, the way she’d have Julia Child, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Ruth Reichl, a long list of merry chefs over, and they’d visit, cook something, drink, wander outside, sit, and talk until the light changed. Nobody was performing. Nobody was teaching. They were just people who loved food and wine, and each other’s company, and that was enough.

That’s what I’m after here.

What this is

Writing about the table: what we pour, what we cook, what we inherit, and who we become when we finally sit down. Essays about living, with food and wine as the honest way in. California wine history that goes back further than most people think to look. Recipes that show up when the season calls for them, with the stories still attached.

Not a course. Not a brand. Just someone paying attention and writing it down.

Where to start

If you want to know what the writing sounds like, wander into the archive. The 257 Years series, tracing California wine from the Mission grape forward, is the longest thread. The recipe essays are shorter and arrive with something attached: a story, a season, a person who cooked this before I did.

If you want to know who I am, the About page has the longer version. The short version: I spent a long time in advertising telling other people’s stories, which was interesting until it wasn’t. Now I live in the desert with a German Shepherd named Archie who has opinions about everything and no concept of personal space.

What’s coming

More essays. More wine history. Recipes when the season calls for them. A reading series launching in July 2026, first book: Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher, plus a discussion and a dedicated chat.

How it works

The writing and the recipes are always free.

The reading series and dedicated chat are for paid subscribers — $60 a year.

Pull up a chair. There’s always room.

— Jennifer

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a book you discovered in grandma’s attic.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Every year, without fail, the birthday bell rings for my mother Joy.

The one that calls the whole family in, clears the calendar, and turns an ordinary weekend into something worth remembering. This year, it rang for her 84th, and we answered the way we always do. Loud, happy, and slightly over-catered.

Mom arrived at a phone already full of calls and texts. But honestly, the phone had been ringing all week. An event every single night, Monday through Sunday; friends and neighbors show up to celebrate her. By the time the family gathered for the weekend, she had already been thoroughly, joyfully celebrated. We were just the finale. My little sister celebrated up north in beautiful Carmel with her own family, but she and her crew called all week, for the birthday, for Mother’s Day, for all of it. Which is its own kind of showing up. By Friday night, the rest of us were at dinner, toasting her with something good in our glasses and something better in our hearts. Saturday was the pool, cocktails, presents, and Mexican Train running long into the evening, the way it always does when nobody wants the day to end. Sunday was brunch at home. Waffles, mimosas, bacon, sausage, berries, nuts, whipped cream, the jacuzzi, the pool, and the particular kind of slow happiness that only happens when everyone you love is in the same backyard.

The dogs had opinions about all of it. Max, the golden retriever, did what Max does. Dumped his entire self into the pool, then half-asleep in the shade like a lion who has decided he’s earned it. Roxy, the little shepherd mix, wanted absolutely nothing to do with the water, thank you very much, though she remained deeply devoted to Archie’s general vicinity. And Archie, true to his shepherd nature, spent the afternoon changing the water level from the edge of the pool without actually getting in. Supervision, not swimming. He has standards.

A birthday in this family is never just a day. It’s a gathering. Not always this extravagant; sometimes it’s smaller, quieter, a dinner and a cake, and the right people around the table. But it’s always intentional. Always worth stopping for. That’s the ritual. Not the specific dishes or the specific games or the specific cocktails, but the decision to show up for each other and make it matter. Even from Carmel.

Betty Williams, one of my favorite Substack food friends, recommended oversized silicone ice cube trays, and now there are two colors of them living in my freezer and my mom’s. Big ice cubes deserve big occasions. Some rituals you inherit. Some you stumble into. Some you order in a two-pack.

Mom’s favorite cake has always been angel food. Not because it’s fancy. It isn’t. Not because it’s complicated. It’s not that either, though it does have opinions about greased pans and proper cooling technique. She loves it because it’s light and floating and a little bit magical, and because, for as long as she can remember, it has meant celebration.

This year, I made it from scratch. No box. Just cake flour, egg whites, baker’s sugar, a touch of almond extract, and enough love to justify the stand mixer. Topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, because some things don’t need improving, just showing up.

Next Time

A German Shepherd, a shower curtain, and a tarantula that wasn’t there.

Before You Go

Some weekends write themselves in without any help at all.

What does your birthday ritual look like? Is it a gathering or a quiet dinner? A cake that’s always the same or one that changes every year? A game that runs too long because nobody wants it to end?

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a cake that became part of the family.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.

Angel food cake is one of those rare things that looks like it should be difficult and isn’t. Airy, fluffy, melting on the tongue like cotton candy but considerably more refined, this vintage sponge dates to the 1800s and has a mysterious history rooted in whispers of Near and Far Eastern origins.

Made with cake flour, baker’s sugar, egg whites, cream of tartar, and fine salt, it reaches its peak with vanilla, almond extract, and a splash of citrus. Top it with fresh fruit and whipped cream, and it becomes something else entirely: an edible canvas. Make it yours.

This is my mother’s favorite cake. So much that it usually comes from a box, because when she wants it, she wants it now.

For her 84th birthday, I made the classic version from scratch, just for her. She ate two slices. She didn't say anything for a moment. That was the review. It was worth every egg white.

Notes

Angel Food Cake doesn't care for grease. It's fussy like that. So don't grease the pan. And it prefers to cool upside down. Reminds me of Archie.

Immediately out of the oven, invert the pan onto the neck of a bottle or rack and cool for 2-3 hours to prevent the cake from collapsing. The best tube pan to use has a removable bottom, which makes it easier to remove the delicate cake cleanly.

Cake flour is low in gluten and perfect for those whose bellies resist traditional flour. I use Swans Down Cake Flour or King Arthur Unbleached Cake Flour when baking cakes.

Remove eggs from the refrigerator before you start. Separate the yolks from the whites while still cold, then let the whites come to room temperature before whipping. They'll have more lift and the cake will rise beautifully.

Serve with whipped cream and fresh berries. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, on their own, mixed, or cooked into a compote.

Once everything is ready, gather 'around the table and toast to Mom!

I know she’d say it’s better than the box. She’d be right.

While You’re Here…

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a cake that became part of the family.

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257 Years is a nine-part series on the history of wine in Southern California, from the Mission grape’s arrival in San Diego in 1769 to the region’s revival today. This is Part Two. Earlier posts are linked at the bottom.

If your email truncates, the full post is on the website and in the app.

This week, we turn back to the Vine and step onto a boat crossing from Spain to Mexico, headed for a land not yet called California.

I’m excited to tell this story. To call you to the table, to circle up and listen together. Their story, our story. I’m waiting for the questions, the interruptions, the surprise. If you're a curious human like me, this one is for you.

I have a habit of being drawn to the question underneath things. And this week, I’ve been following a vine. Literally. A five-century journey of a single grape, the way it feels to pull on something and find it leads somewhere unexpected.

From a sun-scorched plain in the heart of Spain, onto a ship, across an Atlantic Ocean, into the desert of Mexico, and out in two directions — south through Peru and Chile and over the Andes into Argentina, north through Baja California and into the soil of San Diego in the summer of 1769. A single grape variety. Five centuries. Four continents. And a story that turns out to be the foundation of everything California wine became. And everything it nearly lost.

Let me show you what I found.

257 Years: Spain, Mexico, and the Vine That Crossed an Ocean: Part Two.

There are vines in Cucamonga, California, right now that are over 100 years old.

Most people drive past them on the 10 freeway without knowing they’re there. The land looks like everything else in the Inland Empire. Dry, sprawling, squeezed between warehouses and subdivisions. But those old vines are still in the ground. Still producing.

And a winemaker named Rajat Parr, one of the most respected in California, co-founded a wine company called Scythian, named after the ancient nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppe. The vineyards Scythian works with, the company says, have “defied all odds to remain rooted in the ground.” The goal: to tell their stories in the glass once more, and to safeguard California wine history before it disappears.

Here’s the thing about those vines.

They didn’t start in Cucamonga.

They started in Spain.

Castilla-La Mancha. Early 1500s.

Flat and relentless, a high plateau in the geographic heart of Spain, the land Cervantes chose for Don Quixote because it embodied a particular stubbornness, a refusal to be defeated by hostile conditions. Brutal summers. Hard winters. Soil as pale and thin as bone.

The grape grown here was called Listán Prieto. Dark-berried, drought-resistant, relentlessly productive. Not a grape of celebrations or courts. A workhorse, valued for toughness and yield, for surviving what would kill a more delicate vine.

In the 16th century, Listán Prieto was carried from Castilla-La Mancha to the Canary Islands. Those volcanic islands rising from the Atlantic off the northwest coast of Africa, the last landfall before the open ocean.

The Canary Islands were the crossroads of the known world. Every Spanish ship heading to the Americas stopped there: water, food, livestock, seeds. And vines. Living cuttings, wrapped carefully, tucked into the hold, carried west toward a continent that had never tasted European wine.

The vine went with the ships.

Mexico. 1524.

Hernán Cortés had just finished conquering Tenochtitlan. He was building a new civilization on the ruins of the old one, and he understood that civilization required wine. For the Church. For the settlers. For the fundamental European belief that to plant a vineyard was to plant permanence.

So he issued a decree. The Ordenanzas de Buen Gobierno — the Ordinances of Good Government, dated March 20, 1524. Among its mandates: every holder of an indigenous labor grant was required to plant 1,000 vine shoots annually for every 100 people under their care. The ultimate goal was 5,000 vines per 100 inhabitants. Penalties for non-compliance.

The vine was not optional. It was the law.

The grape they planted was Listán Prieto, carried from the Canary Islands. In Mexico, it became known simply as the Mission grape. For nearly a hundred years, it remained. And quietly began to change. In the hands of farmers, friars, and Indigenous laborers across New Spain.

From Mexico, the grape moved in two directions. South, with Spanish missionaries and conquistadors, into Peru by the 1550s, Chile by 1554, and across the Andes into Argentina, where it took on new names: Negra Corriente, País, Criolla Chica. Same vine, different soils, different stories.

But before it moved north, it found shelter.

In 1597, in the desert of Coahuila, Franciscan friars founded the Mission of Santa María de las Parras in a valley ringed by mountains, fed by underground springs, and protected from the raids that would devastate vineyards farther north. They found wild vines already growing there. Calcareous soils that suited the Mission grape. They planted. They made wine.

That mission site is where Casa Madero stands today — the oldest continuously operating winery in the Americas. Nearly 430 years of unbroken production, from one valley in the Mexican desert.

The vine had found its first real home in the New World.

The Road North.

From Parras, the Mission grape moved steadily up the spine of New Spain, on mules, in the hands of Franciscan friars, following the mission system northward through New Mexico, Texas, and Baja California.

In 1697, Juan María de Salvatierra planted vines at the Loreto Mission in Baja California, beginning a chain of plantings that would eventually reach Serra in San Diego, seventy-two years later.

The vine moved the way all important things move, slowly, carried by people with purpose, planted wherever those people stopped long enough to believe the place might hold.

San Diego. July 16, 1769.

Father Junípero Serra, 55 years old, traveling on a chronically infected leg so painful he had to be lifted onto a mule for parts of the journey, raised a cross on Presidio Hill above a bay on the Southern California coast, said Mass, and founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá.

The first European settlement in Alta California. The first of twenty-one missions.

In the weeks that followed, they planted the Mission grape.

The vine arrived in San Diego with a force that wasn’t only spiritual. The mission system Serra founded depended on the labor, often forced, of the Kumeyaay people whose land it occupied. The grape that crossed an ocean to reach this soil was planted, pruned, and harvested by people who were largely forbidden from drinking it. That story will run alongside this one for the rest of the series.

By 1771, Serra had moved north to found Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, just east of what is now Los Angeles. The vines planted there, what came to be called the Mother Vine, or the Ramona Vine, are still alive. Over the centuries, the Mission grape at San Gabriel crossed with Vitis girdiana, the native Southern California grape, producing a hybrid found nowhere else on earth. The Spanish vine had married the California one.

In 2020, a fire destroyed much of the Mission’s roof and many of its priceless artifacts. The Los Angeles Vintners Association, a small group of winemakers working to revive the city’s lost winemaking tradition, harvested grapes from the surviving historic vineyard and made half a barrel of Angelica, the fortified dessert wine that historians consider the first true California wine.

One of the winemakers said it tasted like cherry cordial. A flavor profile, he said, unique in the world.

The Mission grape spread up the California coast to San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Carmel, and San Francisco. Twenty-one missions, and at each one: a vineyard. By the early 1800s, Mission San Gabriel alone was producing tens of thousands of gallons of wine and brandy annually, supplying other missions, settlers, and trade routes along the Pacific coast.

And it centered on Los Angeles. The city that would become the original wine capital of California, the story we’ll tell in the next installment of this series.

Which brings us back to Cucamonga.

The old vines that Scythian Wine Company is working with today, those hundred-year-old survivors along the 10 freeway, they are the direct descendants of what Serra planted. The Mission grape’s lineage runs through them. The story that began in Castilla-La Mancha crossed the Atlantic, survived the desert of Mexico and the long road north through Baja California, and arrived here. In this soil. And somehow stayed.

Enough clonal variation occurred over centuries of geographical separation that the Mission grape of the Americas and the Listán Prieto of the Canary Islands now grow as distinct expressions of the same vine. The genetic thread is unbroken — but the journey itself shaped them differently. The vine that landed in San Diego in 1769 had become something that belonged to this continent, this soil, this story.

That’s what a vine does, given enough time and enough miles.

It becomes the place it grows.

One grape, five centuries, four continents. Known as Listán Prieto in Spain, Mission in California, País in Chile, Criolla Chica in Argentina, Negra Peruana in Peru. The thread never broke.

If your family carried something with them, a recipe, a vine, a name, a habit you can’t quite explain, I’d love to hear about it. The thread doesn’t have to be wine.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

— Jennifer

• Part One → 257 Years: How Southern California Lost and Found Its Wine

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a single grape variety.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Before Archie, there was Negra.

An English pointer, beautiful and certain of herself, who climbed into my lap uninvited in a backyard in Hungary while her parents watched from a comfortable distance. I brought her home with me. We had the most fun together. When she passed at twelve, I was lost in the way you are when a dog goes, not just sad but unmoored, like something that had been quietly holding the room together was suddenly gone.

I told myself I couldn’t do it again.

I meant it for years.

Then a post appeared in my feed. A German Shepherd needed a home. I jumped in the car and went to see him.

What I learned in that visit: Archie had lived with a family until he was five. When Covid arrived, his family surrendered him, reasons unknown, the way reasons so often go unknown when animals are returned. The only no-kill shelter in the valley took him in, which saved his life, because a dog like Archie, sensitive and large and already grieving, would not have lasted the noise and chaos of a regular shelter. He spent fourteen months there. Then one day at a rehome house with two dogs and eight cats, which lasted exactly as long as you'd expect.

Then I showed up.

He liked me immediately. He jumped into my car. We drove home.

It was an ordinary January day. But a happy one.

He was a lunatic for the first two months. Jumping on every piece of furniture. Throwing up from stress. Doing all the things a dog does when he’s trying to believe that this time might be different, that this person might be the one who stays. He needed to test it. I understood.

He’s a 100-pound baby now. Black and tan, with a white star of fur on his chest and a little pit bull face you can see if you look. He’s eight, almost nine. He’s been at my side, literally, ever since that January morning.

His morning ritual: he wakes me at six by bouncing on the bed until I get up. He dances and jumps on his tennis ball while I prepare his food. He eats it all in seconds. Then he either grabs a toy and shakes it triumphantly or rockets through the doggy door to bark at whatever neighbor has had the audacity to exist near the castle.

When I cook, he becomes Hootch. Named for the drooling that begins the moment anything hits a pan. He talks. Whines, barks, full sentences of complaint, because to him, I am simply too slow at making anything.

He’s not wrong.

He’s been with me for three years, and exactly where he belongs.

Tomorrow is National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day. I don’t tend to organize my life around calendar holidays, but this one I’ll take. Because I almost didn’t get another dog. Because Archie almost didn’t make it to me — one wrong family away, one regular shelter away, from a very different ending.

If you’re thinking about it, this is me telling you to go. Visit the shelter. Sit on the floor. See who comes to you.

They will jump in the car. They always know.

When something important happens, I cook. Not to celebrate exactly. More to give my hands something true to do while the rest of me catches up with what just occurred.

The afternoon Archie came home, I should have made Clara’s spicy oatmeal raisin cookies. I know that now. Great-grandmother Clara Baker’s recipe box holds a lot of wisdom in a small space, and her oatmeal cookies, with their unexpected cloves, their butter and lard mixed together, their sweet milk, are exactly the kind of thing you make on a January afternoon when your life has just quietly shifted.

I’m making them now, three years late. Archie will get his own version. The two of us in the kitchen, each with something worth eating, marking the day in the only way that makes sense.

The Human Recipe

Clara’s Spicy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This recipe comes from Clara Baker’s recipe box, written in her hand. I’ve kept it true to her. The cloves are not a mistake. Archie gets his own cookies.

Makes approximately 3 dozen | Prep: 15 minutes | Bake: 10 to 13 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 c. flour

• 2 c. rolled oats

• 1 t. cinnamon

• 1 t. cloves

• 1 level t. baking soda

• 2/3 c. butter and lard, mixed (or all butter — the older truth is the mixed)

• 1 c. sugar

• 2 eggs

• 4 T. whole milk

• Vanilla, to taste

• 1 c. raisins, chopped

Method

Sift the flour, oats, cinnamon, cloves, and baking soda together. Melt the butter and lard, then stir in the sugar. Add the eggs, milk, and vanilla. Combine with the dry ingredients. Fold in the raisins.

Drop by spoonfuls onto a well-greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350°F until just golden at the edges — about 10 to 12 minutes. Clara didn’t specify the temperature. This is my best interpretation of what her oven instinctively knew.

The cloves are the thing. Warm, quiet, a little unexpected. Like most good inheritances.

Notes

This can all be done in today’s mixer, quicker and slightly easier, though I chose to make it the way Clara would have - spoons, whisks, bowls.

I did use a modern cookie scoop, testing the cookies at 1 tbsp and 2 tbsp. The larger scoop made larger cookies — duh — but also required longer cooking, 14-16 minutes.

The Dog Recipe

Archie’s Cookies

For Hootch: A Dog-Safe Cookie

Archie’s own. Simple, safe, made with love, and fully aware that he will eat his in approximately four seconds.

Ingredients

• 1 c. rolled oats

• 1/4 c. peanut butter (unsalted, xylitol-free — check the label every time)

• 1 ripe banana, mashed

• 1/4 c. unsweetened applesauce

Method

Mix together until a soft dough forms. Roll into small balls and flatten slightly on a parchment-lined sheet. Bake at 350°F for 12 to 14 minutes until firm. Cool completely before offering to Hootch.

He will still drool through the entire process. This is unavoidable.

Notes

I used a dog bone cookie cutter for fun. I’m sure I like it better than he does. He couldn’t care less. Just wants the treat!

Made 10. You could certainly get more out of the small rolled balls, 20 or so.

If you have an animal at your side, mark the day you got them. Not the birthday. The arrival day. The day they jumped into your car, crawled into your lap, or appeared in your feed at exactly the right moment.

Cook something. Put their name in it if you want. Tell someone the story.

If you’ve been thinking about a dog, a cat, or any creature in need of a home, tomorrow is Adopt a Shelter Pet Day. The no-kill shelters need you. The dogs who’ve been waiting need you. Go sit on the floor. See who comes.

And if you’re not ready, that’s okay too. You’ll know when you are. A post will appear in your feed. A dog will jump into your car.

It will be an ordinary day. But a happy one.

Archie's Cookies

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Next Time

Part Two of the 257 Years series on the history of wine in Southern California, tracing the Mission grape from Spain to San Diego in 1769.

Before You Go

Who is at your side right now, and what’s the story of how they got there?

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a dog who chose me.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

Some people make a room louder when they walk in. Then there are others who are pulled to a quiet room. My cousin Lea arrived this week, as she always does. Quietly, warmly, already interested in what you have to say.

We had three days together. The first afternoon, we stopped at Farm in Palm Springs, that warm, farmy pocket of good food surrounded by Coachella people, fueling up before the festival, then to HALL to pick up wine, then to my mother’s for dinner. The next day was hers again. And the morning after that, I had them come to me. My dining table, the one that doesn’t get enough use. Tall ceilings, morning light, green visible through the window. We ate the pie. The coffee was long, the conversation longer.

Lea and I are similar. We both prefer the smaller room. The cup of coffee over the party of ten. The one-on-one chats over the loud gathering, where someone always needs to be the center of it. There’s a kind of relief in sitting across from someone who already knows this about you without having to say anything.

We stayed at that table for a long time.

It’s been a full few weeks.

The wine history series launched. The oven ran hot on Helen’s pie, and I made it again. I’ve been researching, writing, publishing, updating, and building, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I forgot to just sit down.

The table reminded me.

I brought the pie. Helen Carnes’s cream pie, made twice now, with California blueberries, whipped cream, and a pinch of nutmeg. A decadent breakfast. They were up for it. Every slice disappeared. Each element good on its own: the cream filling, the jammy blueberries, the cold drift of whipped cream on top. And together, something better than any of them separately.

Earlier, when we arrived at my mother’s, I opened the door from inside, and Archie somehow already knew. Before Lea was even visible, he was hollering. That full-body German Shepherd announcement, equal parts bark, conversation, and pure joy. He is not an easy dog with people. Hesitant, protective, opinionated about strangers. But Lea. And my sister Jackie. And my mother. For them, he hollers. For them, he runs. He covered Lea’s face in the kind of greeting that leaves no ambiguity about how he feels, and then spent the afternoon near the waterfall, the sound of it putting him slowly to sleep in the heat.

He understands something about people that takes the rest of us longer to learn.

Lea has moved on to Missouri now, to visit more cousins, to gather around more tables. My sister Julie is there. The family spreading itself across the country the way families do, finding each other in kitchens and around chairs, catching up on the things that matter.

This is what the table does. It gathers. It gives you somewhere to finally sit down. The moment when you stop running toward the next thing and let the present one be enough. A dining table that deserved a morning. A pie made twice, finally right. A dog who hollers for the people he loves and sleeps by the waterfall when the day is done.

Next Time

Archie’s arrival on an ordinary January day. Clara Baker’s oatmeal cookies, a shelter pet, and the afternoon everything quietly changed.

Before You Go

Go find your table this week. The one that doesn’t get enough use. The one with the right person across from it, and nowhere to be. Bring something worth eating. Stay longer than you planned.

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what's worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a quiet morning with Lea.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

No apron. That’s what I remember first.

Great-grandmother Helen Wissel Carnes cooked in her everyday clothes, in a kitchen so small you couldn’t turn around if two people were standing in it. I was somewhere between seven and ten years old. She was in her late seventies. The counter was tiny. The stove was close. She smiled. Patient, calm. She directed me to do a few small things with care.

She was born in 1896. Her family had come from Bavaria in the early 1800s, moved through Pennsylvania, through Ohio, and finally settled in Indiana. She lived through Prohibition, the Depression, and two wars. She cooked through all of it. For her children in the 1920s, for her grandchildren after that, for great-grandchildren like me, in a kitchen that never seemed to get any bigger.

She didn’t need an apron because cooking wasn’t something she put on. It was just what she did. Quietly. And if you wanted to help, you could.

She died at 83. The recipe box went to my Aunt Kathy.

I’ve been thinking about Helen lately. About the black book, written in fancy serif, where her recipes live. About the note at the top of this one: Mary Jane recipe. Mary Jane was her daughter. My grandmother. Which means this recipe moved between them, mother to daughter, daughter’s name written in her mother’s hand, the way these things travel.

I could make any pie. But I keep coming back to this one. Old Fashioned Cream Pie. Six ingredients, a technique so simple it almost sounds wrong. You spread the dry mixture in an unbaked shell. You pour the cream and milk over it. You trust the oven.

What I didn’t know when I started was that Helen’s recipe is almost certainly her family’s version of Sugar Cream Pie — the official state pie of Indiana, a Hoosier staple for generations. Of course it is. The ingredients are different from the standard version, the method distinctly hers, but the spirit is the same. A humble, honest pie, made from what was always in the pantry, baked until it set. She didn’t need to call it anything special. It was just what she made.

Helen would have made her cream pie in the winter or for a holiday. I’m making it in April, for the blueberries I’m adding, two months ahead of her blueberry season, because California runs on a different clock. The San Joaquin Valley, a few hours north of here, starts its blueberry harvest now and carries it through June. Half of California’s agricultural output comes from that valley. The blueberries in my April market didn’t come from my backyard. They came from one of the most productive farming regions on earth, running a full season ahead of Indiana’s. Same fruit, earlier sun, different soil. She would have found that remarkable, I think. Maybe a little extravagant.

The base is hers. The method is hers. I’m just bringing what the season is offering right now. Fresh blueberries, a little sugar, cooked jammy and bright, spooned over the top and left to set. Her cream pie underneath. My whipped cream on top.

Some recipes just wait for the right kitchen to find them.

The Recipe

A note before you begin: this recipe comes from Helen’s black book, written in her hand, Mary Jane’s name at the top, but I’ve changed the margarine to butter and added the blueberry layer as my own contribution to the lineage.

A note on ovens: I made this pie, and my oven ran hot, which darkened the crust more than I wanted. Watch yours carefully in the final stretch. Every oven has its own opinion about baking times. Start checking at 40 minutes. The pie is done when the filling is thick, bubbling, and a light crust has formed on top. If yours comes out darker than expected, know that the filling can still be perfect underneath.

This is also a pie worth making twice. The first time you’re learning the recipe. The second time you’re making it.

The Pastry: Helen’s Method

If you choose to make the shell from scratch, I’d encourage it. Makes 2 crusts; freeze the second for next time.

• 2 C flour

• 1 t salt

• ⅔ shortening (Crisco or vegan)

• ¼ cup cold water

Sift the flour with the salt.

Remove ⅓ C of this mixture and set aside in a small bowl. Add ¼ C cold water to the reserved flour and mix to form a smooth paste.

Add ⅔ C Crisco or vegan shortening — both work — to the remaining flour (1⅔ C). Cut the shortening in until the pieces are the size of small peas. Add the flour paste to the shortening-flour mixture. Mix thoroughly until the dough comes together and can be shaped into a ball.

Divide into two parts. Roll each out to about ⅛ inch thick on a lightly floured surface. Use one for this pie. Wrap the second and freeze it.

This is Helen’s pastry method, likely drawn from an original Crisco recipe or the same tradition. I used a vegan shortening. It worked perfectly. The paste technique creates distinct, reliable flaky layers regardless of which shortening you use. She knew what she was doing. The recipe holds up across a century and a few ingredient swaps.

Helen’s Old Fashioned Cream Pie

From the recipe box of Helen Carnes, Indiana

Serves 6 to 8 | Prep: 20 minutes | Bake: 50 to 55 minutes | Chill: 2 to 3 hours or overnight if adding blueberries

For the Filling

• 2 T flour

• 1 T cornstarch

• ¾ C sugar

• ¼ t nutmeg

• 2 T butter, softened

• 1 C heavy cream

• 1 C whole milk

Mix flour, cornstarch, sugar, nutmeg, and butter together until crumbly. Spread evenly in an unbaked 8-inch pie shell. Pour the cream and milk over the top. Do not stir.

Bake at 425°F until the pastry is light brown and a crust has formed on the filling (about 10 minutes). Gently break the filling crust with a rubber spatula and stir the mixture carefully. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake until the filling bubbles thick and a light crust forms on top (40 to 45 minutes — start checking at 40).

This is the moment you trust her. It looks improbable until it doesn’t.

Remove from oven and cool completely before adding the blueberries.

For the Blueberries (Jen’s Addition)

• 3 C fresh blueberries (California season April through June)

• 1 T sugar

• 1 T of fresh lemon juice

• Pinch of salt

Combine 2 cups of the blueberries, sugar, lemon, and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir gently until the berries release their juice (about 5 minutes), then add the remaining cup of blueberries and continue stirring until the mixture thickens to a jammy consistency (about 5 more minutes). Cool completely, then spoon over the top of the completely cooled pie. Refrigerate 2 to 3 hours until set.

The blueberries are the one place I departed from Helen. She would have made the most of whatever the Indiana summer offered. I used what California is offering right now. The pie belongs to both of us.

For the Whipped Cream

• 1 C cold heavy whipping cream

• 1 T sugar

• 1 T vanilla bean paste

Chill the bowl and wire whisk attachment for 30 minutes. Mix on medium-high until you have soft, stiff peaks. Cool until ready to serve. Lasts for 12 hours in the fridge.

To Serve

A slice of pie, a dollop of cream, a pinch of nutmeg, and a sprig of mint.

That’s all it needs.

Helen would have poured coffee. Strong, black, exactly right for this pie. If you want to honor that, do the same.

Helen's Cream Pie With Fresh Blueberries

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Next Time

Three days with Lea, a dining table that deserves more use, a dog who hollers, and the week I finally sat down.

Before You Go

What recipe are you holding that you haven’t made yet? The one still in someone else’s handwriting, waiting in a box, waiting for the right afternoon. Or the one you’ve made and it didn’t work, and you made it again anyway because you knew it was worth figuring out.

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a name written in a mother's hand.

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Jennifer Ann Blair writes. Food, wine, a German Shepherd named Archie, and whatever the day brings.

There’s a special feeling that comes when you send something into the world that mattered to you.

Not relief exactly. More like the hush after a door closes. You stood in a room and said something true, and now the room is empty, and you’re standing in the hallway, wondering if anyone was listening.

I published the first post in the wine series this week. 257 years of Southern California wine history, two great-grandfathers, a draft card, a valley buried under freeways. I’ve been researching and writing it for months, and now it exists outside of me, which is the strange thing about publishing. The work stops being yours the moment it goes out. It belongs to whoever reads it now. I hope it finds the people it’s meant for.

That’s the week that was. History. Archives. 1769. The weight of what got buried.

Now it’s Sunday.

Outside my window, the desert is doing its best April impression, which turns out to be extraordinary. Everything is green right now, genuinely, improbably green, the kind of green the Coachella Valley only manages for a few weeks before the summer heat arrives and reasserts itself. Blue skies. A good breeze. Seventy-five degrees and worth every one of them. Somewhere not far from here, tens of thousands of people are at a festival doing the thing festivals do — music and heat and the joy of being briefly somewhere that feels like nowhere else.

I’m at my desk with a cup of coffee. Archie’s on the couch.

It’s, genuinely, a perfect morning.

Yesterday I went to the kitchen to make Helen Carnes’s cream pie for the first time.

Helen was born in 1896. She cooked in a kitchen so small you couldn’t turn around in it. Her recipes live in a black book in fancy serif, passed down through my Aunt Kathy, and they are, I’ll be honest, often a question mark. They rarely come with clear directions, temperatures, or quantities that make obvious sense. Rarely with any of the reassurance a modern recipe provides.

This one has four lines — in my dream.

The pastry worked beautifully. The blueberry compote, California berries, a little sugar, no lemon, came out jammy, bright, and exactly right. The filling set the way it was supposed to: thick and creamy.

But the oven had other ideas.

It ran hot, the crust darkened more than I wanted it to, and I had to pull it out ten minutes early. The filling was still perfect underneath, but not fully cooked. The pie was a work in progress. Not the one I wanted to photograph and hand you on Wednesday. One more try, and we'll know for sure whether it's the oven or the recipe — or both.

I’m making it again.

This is the thing nobody tells you about cooking from old recipes. The first time is rarely the real time. The first time you're learning the recipe. The second time, you're actually making it and hoping it comes out right. Helen probably made this pie a hundred times without thinking. I have some catching up to do — the research ends and your hands take over, a slower, more forgiving kind of knowing, considerably more likely to involve a pie that needs to be made twice.

The second pie is coming this week. Fingers crossed the crust will be perfect like it was, because the pastry recipe worked. The blueberries will be sweet and saucy, as they were, because they were my recipe from years of making jams and sauces. The whipped cream will be dolloped on top with a pinch of nutmeg. And the cream pie's interior will be fully cooked and edible. The pie will be perfect. Or it won't be. Either way, I'll have learned something Helen already knew.

One week you’re in the archive, diving into threads that go back 257 years. Next, you’re standing at the counter with a question and a hot oven, making something Helen made without thinking, in a kitchen you can still picture, in a house that no longer exists.

The recipe is the archive. The kitchen is the excavation. And sometimes you have to make it twice. Especially when the recipe is 80 years old, and the person who wrote it isn't around to show you.

It’s a beautiful Sunday. The weather is the kind that makes you want to stay in it as long as possible, the kind the desert offers like a gift before it takes it back in June. Go be in it. Set something good on the table tonight. And if you have a recipe you've been meaning to try from someone who's no longer here to show you how, this might be the week. Even if you have to make it twice.

Next Time

The second attempt at Helen's cream pie — and whether the oven or the recipe was really to blame.

Before You Go

I’m at the table. Write back. I read every one.

If this landed, tap the heart. It helps more people find the table.

Jennifer Ann Blair writes about what’s worth remembering — a recipe, a person, a pie worth making twice.

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