The Origins of California Wine: Junipero Serra, the Apostle of California

Introduction – Californian Wine Today

California is one of the world’s most acclaimed wine production regions. It makes up roughly 90% of the wine industry of the United States. And if California were its own country, it would be the fourth largest producer worldwide, behind only the old giants of France, Italy, and Spain. Moreover, it is not simply the sheer size of the Californian wine industry that is noteworthy, but the quality of the wines made in Napa Valley and other parts of the state. For instance, in 1976 at a Paris wine tasting event, blind tasters ranked California wines above their highly successful French challengers.

What is especially unusual about this is that the California wine industry is comparatively very young. It only emerged around 250 years ago along the west coast. Much of its origins can be trace to one man, Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary often referred to as the Apostle of California. Here, we examine his pivotal role in the origins of Californian wine.

Father Juniper Serra

Serra was born on the 24th of November 1713 as Miguel Josep Serra on Majorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain. Spain was an intensely religious country in the 18th century, perhaps one of the reasons why young teenage Miguel decided to join the Franciscan religious order. There, he was given the name Junipero, after Brother Juniper, a companion of St Francis of Assisi who had established the religious order in the early 13th century.

Following eight years of study and prayer, Junipero was ordained as a full Franciscan in 1738. He subsequently taught philosophy at Lullian University in the city of Palma in Majorca. Soon after, however, he determined that missionary work was his life’s true calling and, in 1749, he headed for the Americas to begin a new life converting the “heathen” natives to Christ’s message.

Serra spent the 1750s and most of the 1760s engaged in various types of missionary work throughout Mexico, notably at the Sierra Gordo Missions in north-central Mexico on what was then the northern frontier of Mexico. His work there made him a senior figure in the religious life of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain which covered Central America, including parts of what is now the southern United States.

However, these latter territories, stretching from California eastwards to Texas, while theoretically Spanish possessions, were very thinly populated by European settlers, even by the mid-18th century. Thus, in 1767, Serra embarked on a new mission to head north from Mexico into California and to continue his conversion work to Christianity there.

The California Missions

Serra set out with several fellow Franciscans in 1769 from Baja California, the region of north-west Mexico immediately south of today’s US state of California. On the 16th of July 1769, he and his followers arrived at the site of what is now the city of San Diego. Here, they established the first of their religious missions in California, effectively a settlement run by the Franciscans. It would also become the first permanently settled Spanish and European town in California.

Over the next thirteen years, Junipero and an ever-growing number of fellow missionaries established further religious missions up and down the western coast of California. For instance, in 1776 they established the missions of San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco. The mission of Santa Clara followed early in 1777. In 1782, Serra established his ninth and final Franciscan mission, Mission San Buenaventura in what is now Ventura.

These missions were geared towards establishing relations with the natives of western and southern California and attempting to convert them to Roman Catholicism by preaching and establishing churches and schools. It is estimated that there were over 300,000 natives in California by the mid-18th century, people such as the Chumash, Luiseno, Cahuilla, and Cupeno. Thus, there were many souls to be saved, as Serra and his fellow Franciscans would have perceived it.

The Birth of California Wine

All of this missionary work soon happened upon an issue. As Roman Catholicism is centred on the celebration of the Mass to recreate the Last Supper, this, of course, involves wine – and with nine missions along the coast of California preaching to tens of thousands of natives, a lot of wine was soon needed. As Spanish settlements in California had been non-existent prior to Serra’s arrival and the natives did not have an indigenous wine industry, Serra and his followers initially imported large amounts of wine from Spanish settlements further to the south in Baja California. However, given the effort and expense involved in doing so, it wasn’t long before Serra and his fellow Franciscans elected to begin making their own wine.

Indeed, Father Serra had predicted the need for wine-making facilities even before arriving in Upper California. When he and his party arrived in San Diego to establish their first mission in 1769, they had brought with them cuttings from vineyards in Baja California. And, soon, they began planting them to establish California’s first vineyards.

The vines which Serra arrived with in 1769 were the legendary ‘Mission Grape’. This was a type of vitis vinifera which had first been brought to Mexico from Spain all the way back in the 1520s following the conquest of the Aztec Empire. The exact varietal involved remains a mystery, though it is known that it soon became known as ‘Mission Grape’, so strong was its association with the production of sacramental wine for missionary purposes.

Unbeknownst to them at the time, Serra and his acolytes had actually established their first vineyards in one of California’s most fruitful parts. Later, when they attempted to plant vines near San Francisco, the combination of the cooler climate and the sea air proved less advantageous than the previously warmer climes of south-western California.

In the years that followed, the level of wine production by the Franciscans across western and southern California expanded as the number of missionaries and their servants at the nine missions increased and roughly 20,000 natives associated with them. Wine production flourished in particular at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel near modern-day Los Angeles, which eventually transformed into the centre of the Californian wine industry for decades to come. [Text Box 1]

All of this was not without controversy, though. Serra and his fellows Franciscans have been accused of severe mistreatment of the natives of California. Studies have highlighted how the thousands of natives who were involved at the Franciscan missions in the 1770s were subjected to corporal punishment. They were also effectively forced to convert to Christianity and treated as slave labour.

Some of this is partially explained by the severe methods employed by the Franciscans in the 18th century and Serra’s own personal habits. For instance, he practiced self-flagellation, whereby he whipped himself as a way of atoning for his sins. Nevertheless, the brutal treatment of the natives of Alta California casts a dark shadow over California’s early wine industry, much of which was initiated through the forced labour of local indigenous people.

The Early California Wine Industry, c. 1770–1870

By the time Junipero Serra died at Mission San Carlos in California in August 1784, the missions had begun to produce a sufficient amount of wine and brandy for their own subsistence. Four different types of wine were being made by this time, a sweet white wine, two different red wines, and a sweet wine fortified with brandy.

The methods used were admittedly primitive. Industrial-type wine presses were unavailable, so once the grapes were harvested, they were crushed using boards on sloped floors. The Franciscans had the natives dance until grape juice ran down the sloped floors into containers. These containers, more often than not, were cowhide bota bags in which the grape juice was fermented and stored after it had turned to wine. Unsurprisingly, visitors who came through California in the years that followed often commented that the wine they drank was good, but the techniques used to produce it were decidedly not.

For his role in converting the natives of California, Junipero Serra was canonised as a saint in 2015 (despite the opposition of Native American groups) and is generally referred to within the Roman Catholic Church as the Apostle of California. However, those whose concern has been with wine rather than religion, the state has given him the title of ‘Father of California Wine’.

This is a reasonably appropriate appellation for Serra to be given. Wine had not been produced in California prior to his arrival and he and his followers truly set in motion the state’s industry. Indeed, when an extensive record of the amount of wine being produced was made in the mid-1830s, it was noted that over 160,000 vines were being cultivated at Mission San Gabriel alone.

As a result of all of this, when California was ceded to the United States by Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, a sizeable wine industry already existed. [Text Box 2] The gold rush which followed from 1849 onwards brought huge numbers of settlers and riches to the south-west coast. As a more cultivated market for fine wines emerged, the industry matured.

Buena Vista Winery was founded in 1857 and the Hungarian-American viticulturist, Agoston Haraszthy, imported new grape varietals and wine production methods into the state in the 1860s. Thus, the seeds of California wine which Serra had begun to cultivate back in the 1770s fully matured decades later.

Read: California wines were introduced to the world’s notice by a significant event.

Wine and Pueblo de Los Ángeles

The Spanish pueblo of Los Ángeles, the full name of which was El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Ángeles, meaning the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, was established as the second Spanish civilian town in California in 1781. Five years later, the first vine cuttings were brought here from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, a Franciscan missionary settlement founded by Father Junipero Serra nearby in 1771. In the decades that followed, Los Angeles became the main urban centre of Alta California, first on the back of its many cattle ranches and then the Californian gold rush of the mid-19th century. Simultaneously, it grew into one of the main markets for Californian wine.

The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848

The Mexican-American War erupted as a result of a dispute over where the Mexican-American border would lie in what is now Texas. The US favoured the Rio Grande as the border, but the Mexican government argued it should lie at the Nueces River further to the north-east. War broke out in 1846. In the two-year conflict which ensued, the United States achieved a total military victory, advancing into Mexico and taking Mexico City itself.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo saw Mexico cede an enormous expanse of territory to the US, stretching from Texas through to the modern-day states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. One of the often-ignored benefits this conferred to the United States is that the States acquired total control of the nascent Californian wine industry, one which had been in development since the 1770s and which had begun to expand significantly following the war as American settlements out west exploded from the late 1840s onwards.

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Further Reading

Steven W. Hackel, Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Berkeley, California, 2013)

Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, California, 1989), chp. 9.

 

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On this Day

28 September 1542 – On in this day in 1542, the explorer Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo landed with his expedition on behalf of the Spanish monarch, King Charles V, at San Diego Bay in southern California. It was the first time that a European expedition had reached California. In the weeks that followed, his small armada of three ships explored much of the coast as far north as the current San Francisco. However, because of how geographically remote California was from the main centres of Spanish settlements in Central Mexico, the Spanish did not establish colonies there for over 220 years. When they finally did, it was as a result of Franciscan missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra. These established settlements such as San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, Ventura, and San Francisco. The Franciscans along the coast began planting vineyards in the 1770s and 1780s to make sacramental wine. Thus, well over two centuries after the Spanish first discovered California, the California wine industry was established by Junipero Serra and his followers.

16 July 1769 – On this day in 1769, Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan missionary from Spain, founded the first of his nine religious missions which he went on to establish along the coast of California between 1769 and 1782. This first mission was Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá on the south bank of the San Diego River in what is now San Diego Old Town. The goal of Father Serra and his followers was to convert the tens of thousands of Native Americans who lived in southern and western California to Christianity and to pave the way for Spanish colonisation of the region. Roman Catholicism is centred on the celebration of the Mass and thus requires wine. It is, therefore, not surprising that Serra and his followers quickly introduced the so-called ‘Mission Grape’ to California, a type of vitis vinifera which had been widely grown by the Spanish in the New World since the 16th century. By 1782, when Serra established his last mission, Mission San Buenaventura, vineyards had been planted by the Franciscans next to many of their missions, the first step in the development of the Californian wine industry.

References

1. ‘California’, in Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to Wine (Third Edition, Oxford, 2006).
2. Steven W. Hackel, Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Berkeley, California, 2013).
3. Robert H. Jackson, From Savages to Subjects: Missions in the History of the American Southwest (London, 2019).
4. https://winehistoryproject.org/the-first-father-of-california-wine-fray-junipero-serra/ [accessed 30/6/22]; Irving McKee, ‘The Beginnings of California Winegrowing’, in The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March, 1947), pp. 59–71.
5. Desmond Seward, Monks and Wine (Second Edition, London, 2021), chapter 11.
6. Mission’, in Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to Wine (Third Edition, Oxford, 2006).
7. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/why-native-americans-oppose-junipero-serras-sainthood/432876/ [accessed 1/7/22].
8. https://winehistoryproject.org/the-first-father-of-california-wine-fray-junipero-serra/ [accessed 30/6/22].
9.  Irving McKee, ‘The Beginnings of California Winegrowing’, in The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March, 1947), pp. 59–71.
10. California’, in Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to Wine (Third Edition, Oxford, 2006).
11. https://winehistoryproject.org/the-first-father-of-california-wine-fray-junipero-serra/ [accessed 30/6/22].
12. Irving McKee, ‘The Beginnings of California Winegrowing’, in The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March, 1947), pp. 59–71.
13. California’, in Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to Wine (Third Edition, Oxford, 2006).
14. Harry Kelsey, Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo (San Marino, California, 1986); Wendy Kramer, ‘Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo: Citizen of Guatemala and Native of Palma del Rio: New Sources from the Sixteenth Century’, in The Journal of San Diego History, Vol. 62, Nos 3–4 (Summer – Fall, 2016), pp. 217–248; https://winehistoryproject.org/the-first-father-of-california-wine-fray-junipero-serra/ [accessed 29/6/22].
15. Steven W. Hackel, Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Berkeley, California, 2013); Irving McKee, ‘The Beginnings of California Winegrowing’, in The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March, 1947), pp. 59–71; Randy Leffingwell, California Missions and Presidios (Stillwater, Minnesota, 2005).