The Ghost of Glera: Discovering Ancient Vines at Bear Creek Redwoods, California

There are moments in wine that feel less like research and more like time travel.

A few weeks ago, while hiking with my dad through the rolling hills of California’s Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve, I found one of those moments.

Tucked among the trees and overgrown pathways stood an old brick trellis, nearly hidden beneath a curtain of vivid green grape leaves. The structure itself felt like something from another century—weathered, elegant, and quietly reclaiming itself through nature.

And climbing across those bricks? Glera.

The same grape most people know as the star of Prosecco.

At first glance, it seemed impossible. Why would Glera be growing in the middle of a forest preserve in California?

But Bear Creek Redwoods has a story.

In the early 1900s, Dr. Harry Tevis built a grand mansion and estate in what is now Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. Tevis, a wealthy horseman, businessman, and lover of grand landscapes, created an extravagant mountain retreat complete with gardens, vineyards, stables, and terraces.

Though much of the estate has disappeared with time, traces of it remain: old stonework, stairways, garden walls, foundations, and apparently, forgotten vines.

Seeing Glera growing there felt oddly poetic.

What is Glera?

Glera is an ancient white grape variety from northeastern Italy, most famously associated with Prosecco. For years, people casually referred to the grape itself as “Prosecco,” but in 2009, Italy officially renamed the grape Glera in order to protect the name Prosecco as a geographic designation.

Today, true Prosecco comes primarily from the Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia regions of Italy.

Glera is prized for producing wines that are:

• Light-bodied

• Fresh and aromatic

• High in acidity

• Lower in alcohol

• Filled with notes of green apple, pear, white peach, honeysuckle, citrus, and white flowers

  
  

Unlike Champagne, which is often richer and more structured from extended lees aging, Glera-based sparkling wines tend to feel bright, easygoing, and joyful.

It is the kind of grape that tastes like brunch, springtime, and the sound of someone saying, “Let’s just have one glass,” before opening a second bottle.

A Grape with a Long Memory

Finding Glera in California is unusual, but not impossible. California has a long history of experimental vineyard plantings, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when wealthy landowners, immigrants, and horticultural enthusiasts imported European vines to recreate pieces of the Old World.

Dr. Tevis’s estate was known for its elaborate grounds and cultivated beauty. It is entirely possible that Glera—or another early Italian white grape—was planted as part of the estate’s gardens or vineyard experiments.

The vines I found were thick, twisted, and sprawling across the brick pergola like they had been there for decades. Maybe longer.

And that is the thing about grapevines: they are stubborn survivors.

Long after mansions crumble, people move on, and histories are forgotten, vines remain. They continue climbing. They continue leafing out in spring. They continue trying to bear fruit.

Why Old Vines Matter

One of the reasons I am so drawn to indigenous and historic grape varieties is because they connect us to the people who planted them.

Someone, at some point, chose those vines.

Someone cared enough to bring them there, train them over those bricks, and imagine a future where they would grow.

That old Glera-covered trellis at Bear Creek Redwoods is more than a beautiful remnant of a forgotten estate. It is a reminder that wine is never just about what is in the glass.

It is about memory. It is about migration.

It is about survival.

And sometimes, if you are lucky, it is about stumbling across an ancient vine in the woods and realizing that history is still alive, quietly climbing toward the sun.

The old ruins make the Glera discovery feel even more magical because Dr. Harry Tevis’s estate was not some simple country house—it was essentially a mountain fantasy world hidden in the redwoods.

Tevis purchased the property in 1906 after the earlier Flood family mansion was damaged in the earthquake. He rebuilt it as a massive Swiss chalet-style mansion surrounded by gardens, fountains, stables, a Roman plunge pool, a library-clubhouse, and a private water system large enough to serve what was essentially its own tiny village. He eventually expanded the property to more than 1,000 acres and employed dozens of gardeners to maintain rare plants, experimental gardens, and cultivated grounds.

The preserve today still carries traces of that extravagant world: brick walls, stairways, foundations, retaining walls, old roads, remnants of water systems, former stables, and the scattered ruins of what later became the Jesuit seminary known as Alma College.

Even after fires, earthquakes, and decades of abandonment, parts of the estate still remain hidden beneath the forest canopy. 

Standing beneath that crumbling brick trellis, it was easy to imagine what the estate must once have looked like—gardeners tending vines, fountains running, horses in the distance, and guests walking beneath the pergolas with a glass of something sparkling in hand. Long after the mansion burned and the gardens faded, the vines still bear their memory.