The Riboli family took this unique opportunity to create a new semi-sweet, semi-sparkling wine style, which today, they are a leader of. The other engages with that mainstream, seeks out commonalities with it, to sell wine that falls closer to its most common denominators.It all started in 1917, when the Riboli family founded Los Angeles’ historic San Antonio Winery. After surviving Prohibition and about a century later, the Riboli family has continued its artisan winemaking tradition through four generations.įrom within the tasting rooms of San Antonio Winery, customers repeatedly requested a sweeter, light, refreshing wine. It serves to remind us that the wine market is at least two markets, one that takes itself very seriously, perhaps too seriously, that serves to distinguish itself from the mainstream beverage market.

What it does best is occupy a niche that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Stella Rosa isn’t as fake as any of these, but that doesn’t make it altogether real, either. Stella Rosa is decidedly better than Boone’s Farm, than Arbor Mist or any of the hundreds of concoctions with lurid colors, additives and cloying sweetness that crowd supermarket and bodega shelves. And residual sugar inhabits literally thousands of wines from Germany, Austria, France - indeed, from all over the world. Residual sugar in wine, of course, isn’t anything new - hundreds of more expensive wines, from Kendall Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay to Meiomi Pinot Noir and the Prisoner, employ it to make their wines taste more plush and seductive. And you may enjoy the soda-pop sweetness, which ameliorates any perception of flaws, at least until the finish. You may not be troubled by the rush of sugar, the jumbled terpenic flavors that frame the wine as a stand-in for the missing alcohol. To my palate they have at least as much in common with soft drinks (7-Up comes to mind) as they do with, say, Robert Mondavi Cabernet.īut if you don’t drink Mondavi Cabernet, then this comparison may be meaningless to you. So how, you ask, does it taste? The Stella Rosa wines resemble wine, they’re reminiscent of wine, but no one who drinks wine regularly would mistake it for wine.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)Īccording to Anthony Riboli, sales of the Stella wines are particularly strong with women, as well as Hispanic and Asian buyers he will tell you that the tasting room is just like the melting pot that is Los Angeles, and in the several hours I spent there, I saw no reason to dispute this. The tasting room at the historic San Antonio Winery near downtown Los Angeles. Even through Prohibition, when they landed a contract to make sacramental wine for Roman Catholic masses, they’ve made wine - all kinds of wine, from jug wines to appellation wines much of the latter now comes from estate vineyards on the Central Coast. Market Watch, an industry analyst, estimates that sales will exceed 2 million cases this year.įor more than a century, through four generations, the Riboli family has been making, importing and selling wine. It has enjoyed double-digit growth almost since its inception, and its popularity shows no signs of slowing. The company has sponsored floats in the Rose Bowl, flown airplanes trailing banners down West Coast beaches, and placed a majority of its 400 billboards around the greater Los Angeles area, extolling you to “Taste the Magic” and to “Stellabrate.” So if you’ve never stellabrated, perhaps it’s time to get acquainted.Īccording to data from Nielsen, Stella Rosa is the top-selling import brand in the country. It’s an Italian import called Stella Rosa, created by the Riboli family, a wine company based not in Napa or Sonoma but in the shadow of Dodger Stadium, in Lincoln Heights.Įven if you haven’t tasted Stella Rosa - there are 22 different flavors to try - you can’t help but be familiar with the brand. It’s not Josh or Barefoot or Coppola, or Two-Buck Chuck. The bestselling wine brand in California isn’t from California.

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