Best Albariño Wineries Los Angeles Near Me

4worldlovers: With a focus on unique varietals, Angeleno Wine Co. aims to push the boundaries of what Southern California wine growing can be. Tannat, Graciano, Godello, Loureiro, Treixadura and Alicante Bouschet are some of the unique varietals that Angeleno makes into wine every year. Our wines are naturally made and 100% vegan. We strive to make wines that are elegant, balanced and that express Los Angeles' unique character: a growing region where the desert meets the sea.

Jasper Dickson was born and raised in Sunnyvale, California where his fascination with winemaking was established in his earliest years. His father was a home winemaker who would take Jasper with him to vineyards and wineries. The seeds were sown and Jasper was hooked: the smell of fermenting wine, the vibrant greens of surrounding vineyards. All made an impression that would last a lifetime. Soon after moving to Los Angeles Jasper met Juan Alonso, and the rest is history.

Amy Luftig grew up outside Cincinnati, Ohio and moved steadily west over time, pursuing a career in public policy and health care access. Along the way, Amy became obsessed with wine after volunteering during harvest. She decided that nothing was more fun than cleaning wine barrels, shoveling grapes out of a fermenter, picking fruit in the earliest hours of the day and spending countless sober and not-so-sober moments with the soulful, hard-working types who gravitate towards the winemaking path.

Los Angeles, 1833: Commercial winemaking began in California when Jean-Louis Vignes built his winery beneath a giant sycamore named ‘El Aliso’ (featured at the center of our logo). Los Angeles used to supply wine to Northern California and the East Coast; when a bottle said ‘California Wine,’ people knew it came from Los Angeles. “The most striking fact about the history of winemaking in Los Angeles…is the completeness with which it has been forgotten.” – Thomas Pinney, Historian

We work with small, family owned, Los Angeles County vineyards where organic and sustainable viticulture is practiced. The Alonso Family Vineyard in Agua Dulce is planted to unique Spanish grape varietals brought here by our salty friend Juan Alonso from his native Galicia, Spain. Hidden down dirt roads in the west end of the Antelope Valley, the Swayze Vineyard is where you will find a former schoolteacher meticulously caring for his vines, juxtaposed against the rugged landscape and climate of the high desert.

4worldlovers: Carbonic maceration is an old winemaking technique that is very much in vogue today, as it is one way to produce the sort of fresh, low-tannin glou-glou wines that those in the in-crowd are clamoring for—you know, the type of wine that you guzzle from an old jug with XXX stenciled on it during a hot summer’s eve on the porch while your old hound scratches at her fleas as you creak back and forth on granny’s rocking chair, hoping in vain to catch a faint breeze. Received wisdom would have it that the technique originated in Beaujolais, but if you examine the techniques employed in historic winemaking regions you’ll see that carbonic maceration, avant la lettre, is a very old method indeed—found even in Rioja, Bordeaux and likely Champagne practiced long before the rise of machine harvesting in the 19th century.

The recipe for making carbonic macerated wines is thus: take whole grapes and, trying not to crush them, carefully load them into a vat and seal the lid. Then, if you are in a hurry, pump in a bit of natural carbon dioxide, or if you are not, don’t (the grapes will, in time, generate CO2 on their own) and then go away and leave the vat alone for a week or so. Maceration means soaking, and here, we’re soaking grapes in carbon dioxide.

We partially understand what transpires next, but some magic remains a mystery. We know that in the absence of oxygen, grapes metabolize their sugar and begin to ferment at the intercellular level, without yeast, generating a bit of ethanol. This magical process also generates a spectrum of fruity aromatic esters (sometimes, you’ll hear folks using the adjective “bubble gum” to describe the aromas of carbonic macerated Beaujolais, but this is incorrect—the bubble gum aroma is a function of the 71B yeast strain exploited by conventional Beaujolais producers). In addition, the resulting wine will tend to be juicier and lower in mouth-drying tannins. And don’t get me started on intercellular fermentation and succinic acid, unless you want to be so bored, you’ll need both a double shot of espresso and a couple of clothespins to keep your eyelids from shutting. Intercellular fermentation gradually weakens the skins of the grapes and eventually, the grapes collapse and die, poisoned by their ethanol and releasing their partially fermented juice. Now, don’t feel bad for the grapes, as they’re dying doing what they love, which is to give us pleasure.