Thirsty Dinosaur Vineyard
March, 2002

My friend Vic Abascal lives in a quiet neighborhood that sprawls up the side of a hill in West L.A. I meet him at his house, and we head up to the crest of the hill for our weekly run. His dog, Buck, pulls us up the hill by his leash.

Vic and I have been coming up here together for the past couple of years to run the oil roads that loop over the rugged landscape. He knows this land like his own back yard, because it practically is. He grew up in this neighborhood and moved back into his boyhood home after his father died. “My friends and I would cut holes in the fence and ride bikes, motorcycles, anything we could get our hands on, up here. Man, we would tear up these hills.” It’s easy to imagine him, age 10, sunburned and grimy, kicking up dirt on his Huffy, pissing off the nuns.

As I follow behind him I notice his compact body has lately become a solid slab of muscle. He has changed in other ways, too. He’s gone from being a guy who liked finding a nice bottle of wine at Trader Joe’s to a guy who haunts local wine tastings, whose shower stall is stacked full of wine bottles and whose kitchen has been given over to three massive tubs of fermenting grapes.

It all began with an old issue of Wine Spectator that a friend left at his house. Vic has always possessed a terrierlike vigor for life, sniffing out good bands, art, restaurants, thrift stores. He ranges from one interest to another with unbounded fervor. Lately he has been talking about actually growing grapes, but until today I assumed he’d be onto the next thing without so much as planting a single vine.

“Watch your step here.” Vic leads us off the road, and I follow him across a field of mustard weed.

We come to the crest of a knoll, and suddenly the hillside below comes into view. It is studded with row upon row of bright-blue grow tubes. Spilling out of the tops of these tight, azure corsets are fat, glossy grapevines — merlot, pinot noir, cabernet. Buck picks up a whiff of critter and takes off into the brush. I stand there, agog, trying to keep my footing on the 80-degree slope. I can hardly believe he cleared all this land, carried out the weeds, and dug each one of these 2-by-2-foot holes himself. He describes how he hand-watered 40 thirsty young vines, lugging in 5-gallon Sparklett’s bottles of water.

“I was walking Buck up here every day, and I just started opening my eyes and looking at which direction the plants were facing and what the soil was like. I wanted to have my own little vineyard and teach myself how to do it and make mistakes so that by the time I’m ready to do it for real, I will be good to go.” Apparently this site could have yielded a 60-gallon barrel of wine in two years, but this particular patch of land turned out to be on property owned by the Catholic Church and operated by nuns. The nuns called the police.

“The nuns were scared. They thought it was pot. The police came and pulled up a grow tube. My name was written on it, along with the name of the varietal. Turned out the sisters knew exactly who I was. They knew my parents.

“Actually, once they figured it out, they got pretty excited about the vines. They thought they were beautiful.” But Vic was told he had to remove the vines for legal reasons. He asked for and was granted permission to leave them until they go dormant this winter, so they can be dug up without being killed.

My tenacious pal, never one to quit, leads me to his second site, another quarter-mile down the road. The landscape here is eerie — utterly wild, but not quite natural. The native California landscape has been straitjacketed in cyclone fencing, carved up into service roads, and punctured by oil drills that churn and squeak, endlessly sipping from the ground.

But nature is putting up a good fight. The scent of wild anise mixes with the smell of crude. Vic has seen foxes, lizards, hawks, and once, at night, a pair of owls dive-bombed his head as he walked down this road toward his site.

Vic leads me around a broken, rusted piece of oil machinery the size of an Airstream trailer. On the other side, the landscape suddenly opens into three flat, sunny planes that Vic has carved out with a 5-pound pickax and named “The Thirsty Dinosaur Vineyard.” Another 60 vines stand in neat, blue rows. These vines are younger and just beginning to peek out from the tops of their grow tubes. They are all grown from cuttings he has either gotten over the Internet or snipped while on vineyard tours. “There’s some pinot noir from Burgundy. This is merlot from Chateau Petrus. All of this up here is cabernet. My goal is to make a really bitchen Bordeaux blend.” Vic sees no reason why he can’t make a first-class single-vineyard designate wine on this neglected piece of land.

What Vic will eventually make here seems almost secondary to what he has already created, a place of ordered beauty among the chaos of nature and the debris of man.

“Yeah, my biggest obstacles are going to be the glassy-winged sharpshooter, raccoons and kids on bikes.”

“Kids on bikes?” I ask, eyebrow raised, wondering what the 10-year-old Vic would have done if he had stumbled on a vineyard hidden in the chaparral.

“Yeah, kids fucking with my grapes.” He smiles at me, and the irony is clear to us both.

— Erika Schickel