The Brief

When Terri Huerta called local winemakers about a problem with a meandering vine at Mission San Gabriel in the city of San Gabriel, she thought she'd get gardening help. Instead, she sparked a revival of L.A.'s oldest wine.

Mission San Gabriel's 250-year-old grapevine, one of the oldest living vines in California, continues to produce grapes for the Angelica wine revival.

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Brandon Killman

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LAist

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The vine in question isn't your typical grapevine. It's a 250-year-old beast with a trunk so massive two people can't wrap their arms around it. Because it served as the source for cuttings that spread throughout California's early vineyards, it’s now known as the Mother Vine.

For centuries, it just sprawled across the mission courtyard like some ancient, living pergola that refuses to quit, with no one taking any notice of the grapes flourishing each season.

But now, thanks to a group of determined local winemakers, that fruit is being transformed into Angelica, a sweet wine fortified with brandy that Franciscan missionaries made there in the 1700s — making it the city’s oldest wine.

A limited edition batch was launched Nov. 28 by the Angeleno Wine Company. There are fewer than 200 bottles for sale, and at $75, it's not cheap. But break that down by the vine's age, and you're paying 30 cents per year of history.

How it started

The collaboration began in 2020 when Huerta, director of mission development at Mission San Gabriel, reached out to the Los Angeles Vintners Association looking for help to manage the grapevine.

The association — a partnership among three L.A. wineries: Angeleno Wine Company, Byron Blatty Wines and Cavalletti Vineyards — sent winemakers Mark Blatty, Patrick Kelly, Jasper Dickson and Amy Luftig to assess the situation. They found something bigger than a courtyard cleanup project. They found grapes. A lot of them.

"The vine was full of fruit, and I told them it was just a nuisance every year," Huerta recalls. "They asked, 'What are you going to do with all this fruit?' and I said, 'I really don't know.'”

That's when the group offered to help take it off Huerta’s hands.

Grapes from Mission San Gabriel's 250-year-old grapevine used in the Angelica wine revival.

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Courtesy of John Pryor

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Wine history

Although the Napa Valley now reigns supreme as the region’s wine industry, L.A. once was the center for the entire state. Mission San Gabriel’s vine was planted by Franciscan friars after the establishment of the mission in 1775 to make sacramental wine to be used during mass. DNA analysis has since revealed its forebears: It's a hybrid of Spanish Listán Prieto grapes and native California Vitis girdiana.

This vine’s cuttings helped launch the many vineyards that began to crop up around the newly founded grape fields, which became numerous. By 1850, L.A. boasted over 100 vineyards. If you look carefully, even today, the city of L.A.’s seal has a bunch of grapes hanging at the top.

The official seal of the city of Los Angeles.

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Courtesy city of Los Angeles

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The wines were popular with fortune seekers headed north to the Gold Rush. The industry flourished until 1883, when an outbreak of Pierce's Disease destroyed thousands of acres of vines across SoCal. Urban sprawl replaced vineyards with housing through the mid-20th century.

Today, almost nothing remains of L.A. 's once-dominant wine industry — with the exception of the Mother Vine and a handful of its descendants scattered across the city.

Across from Union Station a direct descendant is still growing over tourist and vendor heads. It’s a 200-year-old vine at Olvera Street's Avila Adobe, the oldest standing residence in the city of L.A.

Storing up the grapes

The winemakers started picking the fruit at the Mission in 2020. But it wasn’t enough to make a substantial batch of wine, so the grapes were stored. For the past five years, the winemakers, joined with volunteers, have harvested the fruit each season, carefully packing it away.

In the meantime, they began to dig into mission records for mentions of grapes and winemaking. One day they came across a document from the 1800s, which outlined a recipe for Angelica, a fortified wine made from grape juice and brandy.

"Angelica is said to be made by mixing one gallon of grape brandy with three of grape juice, fresh from the press," it said. "It is a thick, sweet and strong drink, yet of very delicate flavor."

The fortification wasn't just about taste — it was a necessity. In an era before refrigeration, adding brandy preserved the wine, allowing it to survive California's heat and long journeys between missions.

Two of the winemakers, Dickson and Luftig, were especially interested. They’d been making wine from grapes grown locally in the SoCal region since 2018 at their winery Angeleno Wine Company, which produces everything on-site near Chinatown.

They became intrigued by the idea of recreating Angelica. Following the historical recipe, they pressed fresh Mission grapes and fortified the juice with brandy before fermentation. Then they used the solera system — a traditional Spanish method that blends wines across multiple vintages — aging the wine in oak barrels for years.

Initially, they made limited batches solely for the company’s wine club members, which quickly sold out.

This year’s Angelica is the group’s third batch but the first to go on sale to the public. It includes grapes that have been harvested from 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

The wine pours a pale cherry color and has a syrup-like consistency. The brandy comes through right away, caramel and warm spices with refreshing acidity cutting through the sweetness. It's thick, decadent and undeniably strong — a small glass (or two) is all that’s needed after a warm holiday meal.

The harvest

Harvesting the grapes doesn't look like the romantic wine country fantasy you see in magazines.

Instead of long rows of vines with grapes easily accessed, harvesters have to pick the fruit from below the canopy.

"Everyone has to bring ladders because we're picking like this," Dickson says, gesturing upward in the Mission’s courtyard. "We're literally placing ladders on ancient monks' tombstones to reach the fruit above the graves."

This year the harvest happened in October.

Volunteers harvest grapes at Mission San Gabriel for the Angelica wine revival project.

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Amy Luftig

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Angeleno Wine Co.

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John Pryor, a volunteer, has done multiple harvests. He describes it plainly: "You're not in a vineyard. You're in a garden at a Catholic church. The vines are trellised 12 feet high and go on for a hundred yards."

For his daughter, 27 year-old Meg Pryor, seeing the massive trunk drove home what "old" actually means.

"Whenever we're there, I'm thinking, 'People were doing this a century ago, two centuries ago,'" she said.

John and Meg Pryor help harvest grapes from Mission San Gabriel's historic grapevine for the Angelica wine revival project.

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Courtesy of John Pryor

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Understanding who most of those workers were centuries ago means confronting some difficult issues. Huerta of Mission San Gabriel acknowledges the mission system relied on Indigenous labor, and the vine's hybrid nature suggests native plant knowledge may have contributed to its development.

But she doesn't shy away from the complexity.

"You can't tell Mission history without including all the parts," she says. "You can't tell one story without telling another story. Winemaking has always been a part of L.A. history. The grapes were brought by the Franciscans. They didn't just start here in California. They started in Mexico, so its complexity makes it interesting, but it also makes it controversial."

Going forward, Angeleno Wine Company plans to release a limited batch of Angelica as a seasonal offering each year, as long as the Mother Vine continues to produce fruit.

Kaan Ayhan scored on the final kick of the match, and Turkey beat the United States 3-2 Thursday night for its only win of the World Cup.

Auston Trusty scored in the third minute and Sebastian Berhalter got a tying goal early in the second half for the Americans, who had already won Group D with victories over Paraguay and Australia. Coach Mauricio Pochettino’s team will meet Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Round of 32 on Wednesday.

Pochettino fielded nine new starters for this low-stakes game, but Christian Pulisic entered in the 58th minute. He hadn’t played since the first half of the Americans’ opener due to a calf injury.

Arda Güler and Orkun Kökçü scored in the first half of a resilient performance by Turkey, which had already been eliminated after losing its first two matches despite largely dominating both statistically.

Turkey improbably won in the eighth minute of stoppage time when Can Uzun got the ball in space on the back post and pushed it past sprawling goalkeeper Matt Turner to Ayhan, who slid to knock it home.

The game’s meaninglessness didn’t matter to the raucous sellout crowd that packed SoFi Stadium. The American team’s fan base has been energized by its strong start to this home World Cup -- and this Los Angeles-area crowd was still chanting and standing when Berhalter airmailed a long corner to Trusty, who made the stadium shake when he banged it home inside the back post.

Trusty’s goal was the Americans’ seventh of the tournament, tying their scoring record for any World Cup before knockout play even begins. It was also the 173rd goal of this tournament, breaking the record for the most combined goals scored in a World Cup set in Qatar four years ago — and doing it in four fewer matches.

Turkey evened it in the 10th minute with an excellent two-man game from Baris Alper Yilmaz and Güler, the 21-year-old Real Madrid rising star.

Berhalter tied it in the 49th minute by running on to a loose ball about 20 yards from the net for a vicious strike.

Pulisic replaced Tim Weah in the 58th minute for his first game action since the first half of their 4-1 victory over Paraguay nearly two weeks ago.

Pulisic said this week that he is ready to play again after coming out at halftime with a calf injury in the Americans’ home World Cup opener. The AC Milan midfielder entered the 2-2 game to an enormous roar, and he created a scoring opportunity just a couple of minutes later with a dynamic run down the left side.

Pulisic nearly scored again in the 63rd minute, but his quick shot off a nice pass from Berhalter was knocked off the goalpost by Turkey goalkeeper Ugurcan Cakir, and Brenden Aaronson botched the resulting sitter.

The traditional way of voting in Huntington Beach could be upended after a judge’s ruling this week in a case accusing the city of diluting the electoral power of its Latino residents.

What happened?

The judge ordered Surf City to adopt ranked-choice voting for the November general election. Ranked-choice voting is where voters rank all candidates in order of preference, so if your first choice is eliminated, your vote transfers to your second-choice candidate.

It’s also the type of voting that helped Zohran Mamdani seize victory in the New York City mayoral race.

Why it matters

The ruling comes in a legal challenge to the city’s at-large elections, arguing Latino voters are unfairly disadvantaged and unable to elect a candidate of their choice. Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig Griffin agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that “racially polarized voting has regularly occurred in Huntington Beach elections.”

The backstory

The case was brought to court more than two years ago by the nonprofit group Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and Victor Valladares, a Huntington Beach resident and local Democratic activist.

They argued that the city’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Oak View had suffered decades of neglect, in part because residents there lacked the voting power to get representation in city government.

The bigger picture

Dozens of cities across Orange County and elsewhere in California have faced similar challenges to at-large elections over the past decade. Most have settled out of court by adopting district elections, whereby voters elect a candidate to represent their area, rather than citywide.

The change has coincided with an increase in Latino city council members in some Orange County cities.

Why ranked-choice voting?

Judge Griffin wrote that ordering the city to adopt ranked-choice voting was a “less drastic remedy” to bolster Latinos’ voting power than district elections. Currently in Huntington Beach, all residents vote citywide for city council seats, and the top vote-getters win.

With district elections, only people within a particular district can vote for a particular seat, which advocates say helps ensure districts see themselves represented in their local government bodies.

Among the advantages of a ranked-choice system, advocates say, is that it gives voters more freedom to vote for their favorite candidate, even if they think that person won’t ultimately win.

What does the ruling say, exactly?

The ruling orders Huntington Beach to implement ranked-choice voting for the November 2026 general election, if the Orange County Registrar of Voters can support the quick switch. The ruling also calls for the city to elect all seven councilmembers at once, rather than staggering the elections, as it currently does per the city’s charter.

Judge Griffin had delayed his ruling earlier this year to consider the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which ruled that race cannot play a role in the drawing of voting districts. Griffin ultimately determined that “nothing in Callais alters this Court’s decision” in the Huntington Beach case.

What’s next?

Both sides have two weeks to raise objections to the tentative ruling. Kevin Shenkman, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said he would not be surprised if the city appeals. City Attorney Mike Vigliotta told LAist in an email that his office is “reviewing the decision with outside counsel that litigated the case and determining next steps.”

We reached out to the Orange County Registrar of Voters for comment, and did not hear back before publication. If and when that changes, we will update this story.

How to attend Huntington Beach City Council meetings

• Huntington Beach holds City Council meetings on the first and third Tuesday of each month at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 2000 Main St.
• You can also watch City Council meetings remotely on HBTV via Channel 3 or online, or via the city’s website. (You can also find videos of previous council meetings there.)
• The public comment period happens toward the beginning of meetings.
• The city generally posts agendas for City Council meetings on the previous Friday. You can find the agenda on the city’s calendar or sign up there to have agendas sent to your inbox.

LAist staff writer Sammy Marvin also contributed to this report.

A judge has ruled that a Metro bus project in a congested area of Los Angeles can go forward, for now, without incorporating bike lanes that street safety advocates argue are required by city law.

The $400 million project will add dedicated bus lanes along a more than 12-mile-long stretch of Vermont Avenue between 120th Street and Sunset Boulevard. The stretch of road has among the highest rates of pedestrian deaths and injuries in the city.

The ruling from June 15 is a preliminary decision on an injunction request that’s part of a lawsuit brought by Joe Linton, who argues that L.A.’s role in the design and permitting process of the project triggers Measure HLA street safety improvements. The L.A. City Attorney and Metro have rejected that interpretation of the law.

Linton filed the lawsuit in April 2025. He is the editor of the transportation publication Streetsblog LA. Linton is filing the suit as a resident of L.A., not in his capacity as an editor for Streetsblog.

What is Measure HLA?

In 2015, the L.A. City Council adopted Mobility Plan 2035, which identified networks of streets to improve with protected bike lanes, pedestrian signal improvements, bus lanes and other enhancements.

Seven years later, frustrated with a lack of progress on the plan, the local nonprofit Streets for All began campaigning for Measure HLA. The ballot measure, which was passed by voters in 2024, legally requires the city to implement Mobility Plan upgrades when it repaves at least one-eighth of a mile of a street located in one of the networks.

What are the key issues at stake in the lawsuit? 

There’s been a longstanding disagreement over whether Measure HLA applies to Metro’s work in city projects. Metro and the city of L.A. say the ordinance only applies to projects the city leads. Streets for All and Linton say the question of who leads a project is a technicality and that the city is obligated to follow Measure HLA because it’s responsible for approving certain elements of the project’s designs and permits.

The Mobility Plan calls for bike lanes along the same stretch of Vermont Avenue that Metro is working on.

Linton’s lawsuit says the city didn’t implement the bike lanes in accordance with Measure HLA when it resurfaced Vermont Avenue service roads in the past and that it should implement the improvements as part of the Vermont Transit Corridor project.

What are the details of the injunction? 

As the lawsuit plays out in court, Linton requested an injunction that sought to prevent the city from approving final design plans for the project without the bike lanes that Measure HLA calls for.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Kristin Escalante denied the request on June 15. Escalante wrote in her decision that the city neither initiated the project nor selected Vermont Avenue for resurfacing and won’t be constructing the project itself.

“Metro’s coordination with the city does not transform the project into one made by or undertaken by the city,” Escalante wrote in her decision.

In April and June, Escalante denied Linton’s requests for pre-trial judgement on two other issues in his lawsuit, including deciding if resurfacing work on Vermont Avenue service roads triggered HLA-mandated upgrades and determining whether the city’s HLA ordinance represents an “impermissible amendment” of the ordinance.

What happens next?

The ruling is a preliminary decision. Linton said his legal team is preparing for the case to go to trial.

 “We didn’t lose at the end of the day,” Linton told LAist. “It’s a setback, but it’s a skirmish and not the outcome of the battle.”

Metro said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

LAist reached out to the L.A. City Attorney and did not hear back.

Are other legal battles taking place? 

Yes, there are two additional ongoing lawsuits that are related.

Linton filed a second lawsuit saying L.A. is using loopholes, like “large asphalt repairs,” to skirt Measure HLA requirements.

Separate from Measure HLA, Metro is working on another bus rapid transit project to connect North Hollywood and Pasadena with construction set to begin this summer. Metro filed a lawsuit in May saying Burbank is, without authority, refusing to grant the transit agency construction permits. On June 18, Metro filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to get the necessary permits so it can begin construction in July and ensure the bus project is ready for the 2028 Olympics.