The Best Winery to Visit in Los AngelesOkay, There’s Basically Just One. But It’s at Rupert Murdoch’s House!
I do not know how or if Rupert Murdoch is going to die. But I have a guess. A smiling Rupert Murdoch lifts himself from his wicker chair that sits next to the old wooden wheelbarrow and wisteria-surrounded wooden swings in his backyard. He chases his tween grandchildren through his vineyards, passing the chicken coop made of hand-carved stones that he had built at a cost of $35,000 in 2005, and collapses. I may or may not have stolen this from The Godfather. The important part of the story is that Rupert Murdoch has a winery. In Bel Air. And you can call to arrange a tour and a tasting. They’ll open the gate, you’ll drive down the driveway, bearing straight instead of to the right to the house where he spends more time than his homes in Montana, London, or New York, and drink Moraga wines. Which are quite good. I have done this three times. And talked to Murdoch about it. And each time it feels equally ridiculous. I first saw it without knowing what it was. I had taken the tram up to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and was looking at the amazing views from the hilltop at their gardens and said, “Is that… a vineyard?” Amidst some of the most expensive property in America, in a completely residential neighborhood, it looked like someone planted a lot of rows of grapes. It looked like it was put there by a painter who didn’t understand anything about land values.
So when I was asked if I wanted to go to the vineyard, I said “How high is the number I have to punch into the security box at the gate?” I checked the address three times, because it’s on a residential suburban street in Bel Air, toward the bottom of the hill. Other than being in Bel Air, it didn’t seem very impressive. And it certainly didn’t seem possible there was anything in the backyard bigger than a rose garden. But on the huge hill in the back, there is indeed over 16 acres of vines, growing Bordeaux red and white varietals. There’s an enormous cave for barrel storage that has stalactites and stalagmites, which are things that don’t need separate names. On the right is a driveway leading to the 7,500-square foot house that Murdoch bought for $28.8 million in 2013, after seeing the property listed in the Mansions section of his Wall Street Journal. The previous owner, the CEO of Northrop Grumman, planted the grapes in 1980 and made him promise to keep the winery. Murdoch, apparently, is a man of honor in the limited area of not ripping up grapevines he promised a fellow billionaire he wouldn’t destroy. He even promised me that his son Lachlan, who lives nearby in the Bel Air House used for the exterior of the Clampetts’ house in the Beverly Hillbillies, for which he paid about $150 million, promises to keep the winery after, and if, his dad ever dies. Though Murdoch told me eight years ago when I first interviewed him about it, two years ago he admitted that he’d given up on that idea. “It's a labor of love. But if you can afford it, it is worth it,” he said. If you’ve never heard Murdoch say the word “love,” then you are probably one of his children who isn’t Lachlan. It does feel like love has been put into the place. There’s a charming barn where they do elegant tastings with nice cheeses and charcuterie. Moraga makes only 400 cases of their $129 red, 300 of a $92 white (both in the style of Bordeaux), and a new $75 red that’s sort of a second label, called Matador, after Murdoch’s Montana ranch. Are the wines worth that much? Of course not. But they are quite good. They taste, if you have a decent imagination, like Bel Air: rich, powerful, elegant. The dessert wine they no longer make was really, really good. The $150 tasting on the property, which includes what is almost a solid lunch, is a better deal. It might be with Paul Warson, the charming, regular-guy winemaker who makes his own $20-$50 Warson wines, and previously made wines for Firestone Vineyards, owned by Bill Foley, the conservative billionaire. “I’m comfortable talking to people who can squash me like a bug,” Warson told me. And Murdoch told me he’s comfortable with you visiting his backyard. Pretty much. “Only by invitation. We're not going to make it like a public park. Not at all,” he said. “It's all part of trying to sell some wine, right? It's quite a job selling 10,000 bottles of wine every year.” The Moraga tasting is not just one of the weirder things you can do in L.A., it’s one of the weirdest wine tastings anywhere. You stand there, getting sloshed on big, high-alcohol California wine, eating thinly sliced prosciutto, staring at real estate used in a way that laughs at the laws of capitalism, seeing the warp of wealth inequality as a physical space, glimpsing how not merely Murdoch’s life might end, but how our society might too. This week’s wine question for the comment section: Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Corrupt Wine Writer, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
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Friday, January 3, 2025
The Best Winery to Visit in Los Angeles
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