The City of Angels has also been a hub for wine production, and here Thomas Pinney brings incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor to this chronicle of winemaking in Los Angeles from the late 18th century through its decline in the 1950s. Pinney also shows LA's wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: the labor of indigenous peoples, the Gold Rush population boom, transcontinental railroads, rapid urbanization, and Prohibition. California wine once meant Los Angeles wine, and Pinney reveals the lasting ways in which the industry shaped the metropolis.