A Vineyard of Labor: Mission Wine and the Coerced Labor of Native Americans

California is now one of the great wine regions of the world, an industry worth tens of billions of dollars. Its origin story is usually told in a warm, romantic light: Spanish friars in brown robes, planting the first vines beside their whitewashed missions. But that story has a second half that the postcard leaves out. The mission vineyards were built, planted, tended and pressed by Native Californians, most of them living and labouring under coercion — and their forced work is the true foundation beneath California wine. To tell where California wine came from honestly, both halves have to be told.

The vine comes to California

Winemaking in Alta California began with the Spanish mission system, founded from 1769 when Junípero Serra established the first mission at San Diego. Wine was a necessity, not a luxury: the friars needed it for the Mass. Around 1779 the padres planted California’s first true vineyard at Mission San Juan Capistrano, where journals record some two thousand vines going into the ground¹.

The first vintage followed in 1782, and the first winery in Alta California was built at San Juan Capistrano the next year — earning the mission the name Viña Madre, the mother vineyard. From there the vine spread up the coast with the mission chain that Serra and his successors drove northward².

The Mission grape

The vine they carried was a single, tough variety that would dominate California wine for almost a century: the grape known simply as Mission, or Listán Prieto. Its journey was itself a story of empire. Native to Spain, it crossed the Atlantic with Jesuits and conquistadors in the 1500s, took root in Mexico, and then moved slowly north with the Franciscans — the same grape that, elsewhere in the Spanish New World, became known as País in Chile and Criolla in Argentina³.

It was not a great grape, but it was a survivor: productive, heat-tolerant and forgiving. For decades it was the backbone of nearly all California wine, from sacramental wine to everyday drinking to brandy.

San Gabriel: the mother of California wine

If San Juan Capistrano was the mother vineyard, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel became the great engine of mission wine. At its height it ran three wine presses and eight brandy stills, turning out something like nine thousand gallons of wine and three thousand gallons of brandy in its best years — an industrial operation by the standards of the frontier⁴.

This was no incidental sideline. Wine and brandy were among the missions’ most valuable products, traded for goods the missions could not make themselves, and San Gabriel’s output helped make the young settlement around it — the pueblo of Los Angeles — the centre of California winemaking for the next hundred years⁵.

Angelica: California’s first original wine

The missions also gave California its first distinctive wine. Mission-grape table wine spoiled easily in the heat and the rough conditions of early California, so the friars fortified it with grape brandy and a good dose of sweetness, creating a rich, sweet wine they called Angelica — named, like the city, for the angels⁶.

Angelica proved far more stable than ordinary Mission wine, and it became wildly popular — especially during the Gold Rush, when a thirsty, cash-rich California drank all the sweet wine it could get. It was, in a real sense, the state’s first signature bottling, and it is still made by a handful of producers today⁷.

Who did the work

Here the romantic version falls away. The friars did not build or work the vineyards themselves. That labour fell to the Native peoples of California — the Kumeyaay around San Diego, the Tongva (Gabrieleño) at San Gabriel, the Chumash on the central coast, the Luiseño and many others — whom the missions called “neophytes”⁸.

They did everything. Native Californians cleared the ground, dug and planted the vineyards, tended and harvested the grapes, trod them, worked the presses and stills, and carried and stored the wine and brandy. Every gallon that flowed from San Gabriel or San Juan Capistrano passed through their hands. The mission wine economy did not merely use their labour — it rested entirely upon it.

California’s first wine was planted, tended and pressed by the hands of the people the missions had set out to conquer.— on the mission vineyards⁸

A system of coercion

That labour was rarely free in any meaningful sense. Native people were drawn or pressed into the missions and baptised, and once baptised were generally not permitted to leave; those who fled could be pursued by soldiers and brought back. Life inside was regimented and enforced with corporal punishment, and the crowded, unfamiliar conditions were lethal⁹.

The human cost was staggering. Introduced diseases tore through the mission populations, and across the mission period, from 1769 to secularisation in the 1830s, deaths vastly outran births — by tens of thousands. The productivity of the mission vineyards cannot be separated from a system that devastated the Indigenous peoples of California and permanently shattered their way of life.

A voice from inside: Pablo Tac

Remarkably, one Native Californian left a written account of that world. Pablo Tac, a Luiseño boy born at Mission San Luis Rey in 1822, was educated by the friars and taken to Rome, where — before his death at just nineteen — he wrote a history of his own people and their life under the mission, one of the very few Indigenous accounts of the era in existence¹⁰.

Tac wrote as a convert, and with pride in what he had learned, yet his pages also record the losses of his people and preserve the Luiseño language and customs the missions were erasing. His voice is a rare and precious counterweight to the friars’ own version — a reminder that the people behind the mission vineyards were not anonymous labour but a civilisation, with its own memory, caught in the machinery of the missions.

Serra and the reckoning

All of this now sits at the heart of a bitter public argument, focused on the mission chain’s founder. Junípero Serra was canonised as a saint by Pope Francis in 2015 — the Pope offered an apology to Indigenous peoples during his visit — but the decision provoked outrage, and in 2020 statues of Serra were toppled across California¹¹.

To some Catholics, including some Indigenous ones, Serra was a devout founder who defended Native people against worse abuses by soldiers and settlers. To many Native Californians and historians, he is inseparable from a system that killed and coerced their ancestors. Both views now travel with every glass of wine that traces its ancestry to the missions.

From missions to a wine industry

The mission era ended abruptly. When Mexico secularised the missions in 1833–34, their lands and vineyards were broken up and passed largely into private hands. But the wine did not stop — it went commercial. In 1833 a Bordeaux-born vintner named Jean-Louis Vignes founded a winery in Los Angeles, imported European vinifera vines, and in 1840 made the first recorded commercial shipment of California wine up the coast¹².

From that point the industry grew fast, and by the 1850s and 1860s the humble Mission grape was giving way to finer European varieties. But the vineyards, the know-how, the market and the very habit of California winemaking had all been established first at the missions — which is to say, they had been established by coerced Native labour¹³.

A fuller story

The Mission grape and the mission vineyards genuinely launched what is now a colossal industry, and that matters to the history of wine. But so does the human cost. A complete account of where California wine came from does not erase the friars — it simply widens the frame to include the Native Californians whose coerced labour actually made it, and whose descendants are still here. Their story belongs in the glass too.

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References

1. California Missions Foundation — Wine at the California Missions. californiamissionsfoundation.org ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Junípero Serra. www.britannica.com ↩
3. Wine-Searcher — Listán Prieto (the Mission grape). www.wine-searcher.com ↩
4. Forbes — How California Missions Started the State’s $84 Billion Wine Industry. www.forbes.com ↩
5. American Historical Association — What’s in a Bottle? Conquest and the Origins of California Wine. www.historians.org ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — angelica (wine). www.britannica.com ↩
7. LAist — Raise a Glass of Angelica, as LA’s Oldest Wine Is Resurrected. laist.com ↩
8. Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian — California Missions. americanindian.si.edu ↩
9. KQED — “How Do We Heal?” Toppling the Myth of Junípero Serra. www.kqed.org ↩
10. The California Frontier Project — Life at a California Mission: Pablo Tac, a Native American Perspective. www.californiafrontier.net ↩
11. National Catholic Reporter — Controversial Junípero Serra Supported by Some Indigenous Catholics. www.ncronline.org ↩
12. PBS SoCal — California Wine Country Began in Los Angeles (Jean-Louis Vignes). www.pbssocal.org ↩
13. Encyclopaedia Britannica — California (mission secularisation). www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Places California’s mission origins in the global story of wine.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Honest on wine’s entanglement with colonisation and coerced labour.

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