Full Belly Files | Appreciating California’s Oldest Vine

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on November 25, 2022. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

I grew up a couple miles from where the suburbs encroached — and eventually devoured — Mirassou Vineyards in the foothills of East San Jose, where my dad’s side of the family had settled as shepherds around the late 1850s.

But it wasn’t until I started writing about wine after college that I realized how integral those old vines were to the development of California’s wine industry in the late 1800s, and that the Santa Clara Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains predated the now-famous regions of Napa and Sonoma as commercial winemaking hubs.