andyman wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2023 5:37 am
enframed wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2023 11:24 pm
Last summer I picked some grapes in a really strange 100+ year old vineyard in the middle of an industrial park in Rancho Cucamonga. It was so strange picking grapes while surrounded by warehouses on all sides.
Today I picked up a bottle of the wine made from that fruit. Looking forward to drinking it soon.
Interested to hear back about this. I intuitively assume anything grown in a city will taste like shit due to smog and pollution.
In Rome there are beautiful orange trees around the streets of some government buildings. One night I saw an orange drop to the ground and went to peel it, but a security guard stopped me and just said "Trust me, you don't want to eat that".
Yeah I don't think pollution would be what the guard was referring to in Rome, probably to what unsavory things happen in the grove.
The vineyards are an hour east of LA, which is basically a big logistics/trucking/warehouse hub for southern California. At this particular one, diesel particulate would be most of the pollution around, but that would not make it into the finished wine. I imagine they wash/rinse the fruit before crushing, but I did not see the winemaking. The vineyards have been organic since planting. No rows, just head-trained vines scattered around. Some have died so there are holes, never replanted. It had been forgotten for decades. Now all these folks do it prune once a year.
LA and the surrounding area, before Prohibition, was the largest winemaking region in America. The oldest vine in America is in San Gabriel, planted in 1700s, the mission still makes wine from it every year (not for sale, IIRC). 75% of the jobs in LA were somehow related to the wine business. Much of downtown LA was once vineyard. So strange to think about that.