Downtown Los Angeles may not be the Napa Valley, but it is home to one of California’s most historic wineries. Located east of Olvera Street, in a Lincoln Heights neighborhood crowded with warehouses, San Antonio Winery is a city landmark, still housed at the same location where it was founded 98 years ago.
This family-owned winery offers tours, tastings, a boutique wine and gift shop, and a restaurant on site. It’s a solid piece of history that’s stayed in business through lean and rich times, housed in an appealing building with a red tile roof. Once, vineyards surrounded the property, but today industry has taken over the area, and the winery now uses grapes from the owner’s family farm in Monterey. The company has planted two estate vineyards as well as opened a modern winery in the Paso Robles area.
But right on site in Downtown is where the winery produces varietal, table wines, and dessert wines, bottling and distributing them. Over 200,000 visitors take a tour and taste wine annually – both because the wine is compellingly good, and because it’s a really fun thing to do just minutes from the art district and Downtown’s historic core.
There was once a thriving wine region in Los Angeles, with vineyards lining along the Los Angeles River. In 1833, French winemaker Jean-Louis Vignes was the first to plant vines from Bordeaux and build a winery, but by the 1880s Downtown was actually the top spot for growing grapes and making wine in all of California. San Antonio Winery began as a small store on Lamar Street in 1917 in what was then Little Italy. Today it’s the last winery standing, and also the only one to have survived Prohibition.
Founder Santo Cambianica immigrated from Northern Italy and named his winery after his patron saint, Anthony. His nephew Stefano Riboli was the first to join his enterprise, which quickly grew to include the entire Riboli family. According to the winery’s website, the family survived Prohibition by creating sacramental sweet wines for the Catholic Church. The winery continues to make communion wines today. Additionally, the family created so-called health elixirs, which could be purchased with a doctor’s prescription at pharmacies, much as medical cannabis is obtained today.
Through the church wines and the elixirs, San Antonio Winery survived and even thrived. By the end of Prohibition, the winery was making 25,000 cases of wine each year, more than ten times its pre-Prohibition output. Today, the winery’s state-of-the-art facility produces around four million bottles of varietal, dessert and table wines yearly.
How good are these wines? Very. The winery bottles private labels for stores such as Trader Joe’s, but its unusual wine creations such as the Chocolate Bar Port or the low-alcohol Stella Rosa Black are stand outs to visitors touring the winery. That chocolate port? Fruit and chocolate notes make this a rich and vibrant after-dinner libation. Stella Rosa Black is a refreshing blend of blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, and of course grape wine that’s cold pressed and fermented in pressurized tanks, resulting in a light alcohol content of 5.5% alcohol by volume.
Other strong offerings include the San Simeon Chardonnay, redolent of oak and citrus, and a Vionier with strong floral notes. On the Maddalena label, there’s a fantastic Cabernet with plum and caramel notes. The winery is very diverse, and includes brands such as the San Antonio Artisan, La Quinta, Opaque, and the Ribboli Family Estates, each with defining flavor or varietal characteristics. They have a very good dry champagne, too.
Both free and more extensive paid tastings are available at the tasting bar which spans the length of the tasting room and wine shop at the front entrance of the winery. Taste without touring? Sure, but the free winery tour is a great experience, allowing visitors to view over 12,000 gallons of wine being made. You’ll view the oak barrels, aging racks, conveyors, and even the historic redwood tanks that form a wall in the winery’s restaurant.
The Maddalena Restaurant offers trattoria-style, traditional meals that are of remarkably high quality, and not just for tourists. Try the Linguini Scampi or the house made Lasagna. Lighter eaters will enjoy the salmon salad. And a must-try is the house-made Tiramisu. Guests walk in and order from the menu and the atmosphere is cozy and comfortable, and the food is served to your table.
After dining, browse the wine stoppers, imported wines, magnets and other knickknacks in the gift shop or report directly to the tasting room and wine shop. Whether oenophile or just a downtown resident in search of a good bottle of wine for tonight’s dinner, it would be hard not to appreciate the friendliness of the staff, the wide variety of the wine selections, and of course, the uniqueness of finding an historic family-owned and only winery in Downtown.
San Antonio Winery is located at 737 Lamar Street and is open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and until 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
