The Old Alfalfa Field

Agua Dulce Winery, Sierra Pelona Valley AVA, Los Angeles County

By Patrick R. Dunn

The drive to Agua Dulce Winery leaves the Antelope Valley Freeway at the edge of Vasquez Rocks, where huge slabs of sandstone tilt out of the ground at odd angles. Captain Kirk fought the Gorn on those rocks in 1967, armed with a bamboo cannon he built from what he could find, and the landscape still looks like it could be another planet.

Past the rocks, Sierra Highway runs north through scrub and horse property. The houses get farther apart and the traffic thins, and then rows of grapevines start running along the right side of the road, forty minutes from Hollywood. Most people don't expect it.

The tasting room is open Wednesday through Sunday, and the regulars' advice is to carry a glass outside. I order the rosé, and it puts me back on the logging roads around the Rangeley Lakes in western Maine, a kid picking wild raspberries in late summer. The berries grew only where the cutting had opened the woods and let the sun reach the ground, along the edges of the roads and in the cleared patches, and never in the deep trees.

Picnics are welcome, so people bring their own food and stay a while. Most of them eventually wander past the vines to the back of the property, where a small farm animal sanctuary keeps donkeys. Going by the reviews visitors leave, the donkeys get almost as much praise as the wine. Down in the cellar, which stays at sixty degrees whatever the valley is doing outside, barrel tastings pour straight from the wood and finish with a picnic lunch. On Sunday afternoons the tasting room turns into a bingo hall.

October is when the place really comes alive. Stompfest is the harvest party. People pull off their shoes and climb into tubs of grapes for a stomping competition, and an I Love Lucy lookalike contest runs alongside the live music and line dancing. That seems only fair, since Lucy Ricardo's barrel in Italy is why most Americans know grapes were ever crushed by foot. It also closes a loop with the rocks down the road. Lucille Ball's studio, Desilu, made that episode, and a decade later it was Desilu that sent a Star Trek crew out to Vasquez Rocks to film Kirk and the Gorn.

None of it was supposed to be here. In the late 1990s this ground was planned for a second phase of 85 homes, an extension of an equestrian community called Sierra Colony Ranch built by two Los Angeles developers, Don MacAdam and Ray Watt. The land had long been known as the old alfalfa field, and nobody had farmed it in more than sixty years. With the housing market slow and the permits piling up, MacAdam decided he was finished building houses. "It was just getting too goofy," he said later. He and Watt sketched a winery on a cocktail napkin instead, and in 1999 they planted vines where the houses would have gone. The timing looked terrible, because the glassy-winged sharpshooter was killing vineyards around Temecula that year. But the nights in Agua Dulce run too cold for the insect, and the vines took.

MacAdam's plan rested on one bet: that people from the city would drive up the hill if given a reason. He skipped store shelves and spent about a tenth of the winery's revenue on radio and television ads aimed at the San Fernando Valley. When the doors opened in the fall of 2001, about a thousand people a weekend came up Sierra Highway. In the years that followed, local growers made the case that this valley was a place of its own. Their federal filing describes summer days that reach 102 degrees and nights that drop into the fifties, with cold air sliding down off the ridges to keep spring frost off the vines. One of the people quoted in it was Don MacAdam, on the way the hills and knolls keep turning the wind. In August 2010 the Sierra Pelona Valley earned its own AVA. Hollywood found the winery as it had found the rocks. It has appeared in Westworld and Parks and Recreation, and in 2022 it spent a season of network television playing a family vineyard in Sonoma Valley on Promised Land. The wine club has passed 3,500 members.

This summer the estate went to auction. Bidding closed live on August 15 at Monterey Car Week, on the same stage where collector cars sold for eight figures that weekend, and no result has been published. The tasting room has stayed open through all of it. Stompfest went ahead in October, and the Reserve Syrah got its release party.

The reserve wines are sold only at the winery, so anyone who wants to taste them has to make the drive MacAdam was counting on. The first vines went into the old alfalfa field in 1999. The 85 houses never went in at all.

Sources: San Fernando Valley Business Journal; TTB final rule establishing the Sierra Pelona Valley AVA, Federal Register, July 2010; The Signal, 2016 and 2019; Santa Clarita city event calendar; Concierge Auctions, July 2026; UC Davis AVA Project.