Winemaker Lum Eisenman — Johnny Vineyardseed

“So who is Lum Eisenman anyway?"

That’s what I asked myself when I first started doing these columns. That’s  because I kept bumping into this man, figuratively speaking.

“Lum helped me out a lot,”said pioneer Ramona Valley vintner John Schwaesdall of Schwaesdall Winery, talking about his early days in winemaking.  

Beth Edwards, co-owner of Edwards Vineyard & Cellars, told me she and her husband Victor had been members of the San Diego Amateur Winemaking Society where they studied under Eisenman.

Joe Cullen, owner/winemaker of Cactus Star Vineyard at Scaredy Cat Ranch, said he learned the craft by reading a lot.

"I met a lot of people who made wine," he said. "I was fortunate enough to meet a man named Lum Eisenman.”

The annual competition for Ramona Valley wineries is called the Lum Eisenman Ramona Valley Wine Competition. One of its stated purposes is “to honor Lum Eisenman for his significant and continuing contributions to grape growing and wine making in San Diego County,” in the words of a press release for last year’s event.

I started thinking of Eisenman as a 21st century version of Johnny Appleseed, only with grapes. When I finally met him in person and made the analogy, he smiled, modestly.

He was born Wesley Lamar Eisenman but has preferred the nickname Lum since he first got it as a child. He has never thought about having a commercial winery.

“I’ve gone through the numbers and found I could make more money as a physicist,” he said.

Eisenman, 81, was a research scientist and physicist, first with the U.S. Department of Commerce and later for the military.  He retired 15 years ago.

He was born and raised in Riverside when the area was predominantly in citrus and grapes. He was in high school in the latter stages of World War II, when a farm labor shortage led to him working in the citrus groves and vineyards.

“I was happy to get paid, but it was also considered one’s patriotic duty,” he said.

Eisenman started making wine while a college student, sharing it with family and friends.

After marrying as a college junior, he stopped making wine for “12 to 14 years.” When he moved to Del Mar in 1971, the urge to make wine returned. Grapes were scarce in San Diego county at that time, so Eisenman sought out the vineyards of his youth in Rancho Cucamonga. He found many of those vineyards had been paved over. But he discovered stray surviving vines crawling up the chain link fences on the sides of the roads. He harvested those grapes, inspiring his first private label, “Cote de Freeway.”

Eisenman started taking courses at UC Davis while still working as a physicist because of an interest in wine chemistry. He went on to study oenology (the science of winemaking) and viticulture (the science of grape growing). He began sharing his knowledge, founding the San Diego Amateur Winemaking Society (SDAWS) in 1983 and teaching courses and workshops at MiraCosta College. While teaching these courses he met and mentored many of the future winemakers of the Ramona Valley.

In 1999, Eisenman published The Home Winemakers Manual, which has been called the Bible of wine making for San Diego county vintners.  The book is available for free on the Internet at www.winebook.webs.com .

I told him I saw a connection between his willingness to share his knowledge and the similar sense of cooperation I’ve seen in the Ramona Valley wine community.

“That’s not unusual,” said Eisenman. He said the whole wine industry “is unusual in viewing competitors in a positive fashion, rather than a negative fashion. “

Eisenman is still teaching. He also voluntarily tests wine samples both for his home winemaking students and for many new commercial wineries who don’t yet have the needed equipment. He judges a number of wine competitions, including the one named after him.

Lum is also still bottling “Cote de Freeway”, but using a more select class of grapes. He makes his wine from the now burgeoning vineyards of San Diego county, including the Ramona Valley.

“I think Ramona has the potential of becoming a really significant viticultural area,” he said.