Malibu a center of the wine industry?
Maybe not a center, but a small, not insignificant part of California’s wine industry is the Malibu Hills Vineyard owned by Raleigh Enterprises, a firm based in Santa Monica and run by George Rosenthal, age 69.
Rosenthal has 23 acres of grapes planted in a small valley called Newton Canyon near Kanan Dume Road. From that modest vineyard comes Rosenthal-branded Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.
From the beginning, Rosenthal aimed upmarket toward high-end wines, both in quality and price (averaging $28 a bottle), where most wineries in Southern California, in the inland empire, aim toward the lower priced market, such as those in Cucamonga.
Although he has those 23 acres planted, Rosenthal has no intention of developing the additional 220-230 acres, partly because the terrain is unplantable, and partly because he wants his winery to stay small. It employs 11 people.
For Rosenthal, the success of his winery has been a long time coming. He bought the land in Malibu in 1979. It took several years of wrangling with the California Coastal Commission before he could plant his grapes, and then years of consulting with leading experts before he could put a wine that met his standards on the table. The first grapes were planted in 1987.
Rosenthal’s longtime dedication toward his goal is paying off, now that the ban against commercial grape pressing in Los Angeles County — a ban going back to the Volstead Act of 1919 (the act that made the name Eliot Ness a household word) — has been repealed.
“Now we can begin pressing and bottling our own wine instead of sending the grapes up to San Luis Obispo,” says Rosenthal.
Surprisingly, even though the land in Malibu — where homes average more than $1 million each–is expensive, it is not the only expensive piece of land in the 4,000 square miles of Los Angeles County planted in grapes. Tom Jones owns Moraga Vineyards in Bel Air. Most real estate people would agree that, acre for acre, Bel Air land prices exceed those of Malibu.
Rosenthal looked for the right piece of land for his winery for several years.
“I wanted a piece where the marine cloud layer doesn’t sit all day, so I’d have a combination of hot sun in the day and cool air at night, which the grapes seem to like,” he explains.
He found his Shangri-la on the eastern side of the mountains that run parallel to Malibu’s coast.
“It’s a real science in selecting land for a vineyard,” says Rosenthal. “It’s a combination of the soil, the climate, the prevailing clouds, etc., that makes up a good wine area.”
Rosenthal compares the area he selected climate-wise to Oakville, St. Helena and Rutherford in Napa Valley.
In one respect, it’s better: “It doesn’t get that cold in Malibu, so we don’t need the burners they use up North to heat up the fields when there’s a cold snap,” he says.
Among the experts consulted when he was first setting up the vineyard was Jim Efrid, who helped many other vineyards get started in California.
Are the Napa Valley vineyards jealous of an upstart in the south invading their territory?
“No, not at all,” says Rosenthal. “There is a great fellowship among winemakers. They are eager to taste our new wines just as we are theirs.”
Although Rosenthal is now converting the stable on his property to be the headquarters building of the winery, Malibuites don’t have to worry about freeloaders clogging the roads in search of a free glass of wine at Rosenthal’s Malibu vineyard.
“We do not have a public showroom,” says Rosenthal. “And we don’t intend to build one.”
There will be, however, small private tastings — invitation only.
Rosenthal would like to see other winegrowers plant in Malibu.
“It is good for the terrain,” he says. “The vines are less attractive as burnable material to a fire than the plants like chaparral and mesquite that are there already. The vineyards act as natural fire breaks.”
The Rosenthal wines are distributed nationwide, but not worldwide, and can be ordered at some Malibu restaurants.
Rosenthal takes pride in his knowledge of wines, and for a chief executive who is in charge of two hotels, a movie studio and a records storage firm, he speaks very knowledgeably about any aspect of the industry, especially the dire threat posed by a newly arrived pest for which no counterweapon has been found.
“The biggest threat to face California’s wine industry since the 1880s is the glassy-winged sharpshooter,” says Rosenthal. “Nobody knows where this pest came from, but it is a lot more dangerous to winemakers than the previous threat, the blue-winged leaf-hoppers, since it can fly farther than the hopper.”
Bug experts from UC Davis and UC Riverside are working on a solution, but so far the effect of the infestation has been extremely damaging in areas like Temecula, taking down 70 percent of the vines.
Rosenthal’s career reads like a Horatio Alger novel. A college dropout, he joined the Naval Reserve during the Korean war and worked on the predecessor to today’s modern submarine. Following his stint of active duty, he was invited by a friend to join in a housing venture in Orange County — then largely orange groves. He and his friend built tracts of single-family homes that sold for as little as $10,000. Later they moved operations to the San Francisco Peninsula.
Rosenthal then went on to building apartment houses in West Hollywood, and then to building shopping centers. Hotels followed that and his firm, Raleigh Enterprises, still owns two — the “W” in Westwood and the Sunset Marquis, both on the posh end of the scale.
He bought a movie studio in the late ’70s and recently completed a new building for Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach. Rosenthal doesn’t have anything to do with shooting movies — the studios are rented out to producers who need a place to film.
His newest venture is Filekeepers, a firm that helps entities like L.A. County store their tons of records.
A family man with two grown children, one, a son aged 40, who is president of his firm, and a daughter who works outside the firm as a lawyer, he is a new father all over again with a five-year-old.
Rosenthal is a skier and works out daily. At an age when most men think of retiring, he’s ready to carry his flag into battle in establishing the Rosenthal wines as a respected California wine on par with Napa Valley’s best.