California Dreamin': Singular SoCal Wines from Rajat Parr
5/17/23 -
As Abe Schoener tells it, the idea for Scythian Wine Co. started as a dream. He had already grown enamored with a small group of historic but long-overlooked vineyards in and around the greater Los Angeles area and wanted to enlist the help of fellow winemaker and friend Rajat Parr to bring them back to life. Abe recalls being in New York at the time and, being so moved by this vision of making wines with Raj using fruit from these magical vines in the heart of Southern California, he left himself a voice memo as a reminder to text Raj at a reasonable hour. The response? A simple thumbs up emoji.
Before prohibition Los Angeles and its surrounding area was a central hub of California winemaking, first planted by Spanish Missionaries in the late 1700s with the Mission (Pais) grape. By the mid-1800s the juice was flowing from over 100 vineyards, bolstered by an influx of growers who came originally seeking gold but instead found their version of it in making wine. While the gold rush sprouted a number of wineries throughout Los Angeles, it also led to the speedy growth and urbanization of the city and pushed many growers north to Napa and Sonoma, which would soon overtake L.A. as California's preferred winemaking locale. By the time prohibition hit, many of the vineyards in SoCal had been sold and ripped out in favor of citrus, walnuts, or good old-fashioned city development. There were a few surviving stragglers, including some, like the Lopez Vineyard, that were used as "shipping vineyards" with the new laws allowing (or at least not explicitly forbidding) at-home winemaking. Many of these sites went dormant for years, with little interest in Southern California wine from consumers and winemakers alike.
It's not just that the vineyards are part of the forgotten Los Angeles wine history that makes them so special. These sites were planted over 100 years ago, are still on their own rootstock, and have never seen the use of chemicals or in some cases even machinery in the vineyards. It's an uncompromising climate that requires special attention - picking at just the right time to retain acidity while achieving optimal ripeness can be challenging, and farming without the use of irrigation in an area plagued by drought is ambitious, to put it optimistically. However the results are a testament to this painstaking work and tell a unique story of place - from the Lopez Vineyard in San Bernardino with its Zinfandel and small plots of Palomino, to the Francis Road Vineyard in Ontario and the Galleano Home Vineyard in Jurupa Valley where Alicante Bouschet and Palomino were once used to make fortified wines, to the long abandoned Lone Wolf Vineyard in Temecula with its original plantings of Mission - the wines are truly remarkable in their singularity while connected by a common thread which is the vision of winemaker Raj Parr along with collaborator Abe Schoener.
The Scythians were a nomadic people, and this ethos permeates the Scythian Wine Co. project through and through. While the wines are an homage to these special vineyards around Los Angeles, the winemaking itself is extremely minimalist and could ostensibly happen anywhere. The goal was always to make pure and honest wines that tell their own story, wines that defy categorization and can make themselves equally at home on high-end restaurant menus as well as backyard barbecues. To that end Raj and Abe are doing something truly special - but don't take my word for it, try some of these mind-blowing wines for yourself! Jeff DiLorenzo
