‘Promised Land,’ set in Sonoma Valley, follows winemaking family drama

There’s plenty of backstabbing, innuendo and dysfunctional family drama in “Promised Land,” the new TV show set in Sonoma Valley that premiered on Monday, Jan. 24, on ABC.

The only missing ingredient is Sonoma Valley.

What about those lush, sprawling vineyards we see in the pilot? Welcome to the wine country of northern Georgia. And the cellar rooms and bottling plants in later episodes? That’s Agua Dulce Winery near Santa Clarita and Mizel Estate in Thousand Oaks.

“I thought when I wrote a show set entirely in Sonoma that I’d written a Georgia-proof script, and then they sent us to Georgia,” said showrunner Matt Lopez in a video interview. Lured by tax incentives, the cast and crew shot the pilot in the South before returning to California to film subsequent episodes.

What is being hailed as one of the first network dramas to feature a mostly Latino cast, “Promised Land” is described by ABC as “an epic, generation-spanning drama about the Sandovals, a Latinx family vying for wealth and power in California’s Sonoma Valley.”

Lopez, who lives in Los Angeles, is unapologetic about his love of “Dallas,” the ’80s nighttime soap opera that triggered “Who shot J.R.?” hysteria long before memes were memes. Instead of oil, this time it’s vino, as domineering patriarch Joe Sandoval (played to cocky perfection by John Ortiz) looks to hand over the reins of Heritage House, the family winery he’s built into the third-largest in America, setting up obvious comparisons to “Succession” (and thus, “King Lear”).

What starts with an illegal border crossing quickly dives into a web of subplots as the eldest daughter strives to become CEO, an estranged gay son returns home looking for revenge and another is addicted to painkillers. Bottles (although beer bottles) crash against skulls. Employees are fired for being undocumented. A hit-and-run accident triggers a cellphone news alert: “Local Latinos, tired of being invisible, demand justice.” And one of Joe’s sons confronts him about his past, delivering one of the show’s best lines: “You climb up the ladder and then you pull it up behind you.”

Wine Country-centric shows

Also streaming on Hulu, “Promised Land” is one of a trio of new wine-obsessed shows. There is also “The Kings of Napa,” which centers on a Black family-owned winery left rudderless after the exit of its patriarch, and “Grand Crew,” an urban sitcom set in a wine bar with an all-Black cast.

But if Napa had “Falcon Crest” and Santa Ynez Valley had “Sideways,” this wasn’t to be Sonoma County’s long-awaited big break. Producers briefly toyed with the idea of filming locally, Lopez said, but there weren’t enough viable soundstages in the Bay Area to make it worthwhile.

As it stands, there’s no actual footage of Sonoma County, not even a drone shot. There were discussions about possible second-unit filming in vineyards near Fort Ross along the Sonoma Coast, but it never happened.

The closest producers ever came to Sonoma County was when the network ordered a custom crush of wine bottled by Robledo Family Winery bearing “Heritage House” labels to put in gift baskets for “Promised Land” premiere parties. Or maybe it was when Ortiz called up fellow actor Squire Fridell to ask if he could drop by Fridell’s Glen Lyon Winery near Glen Ellen to learn more about winemaking.

“John came in and we did a tour and a tasting, and he asked questions, trying to get a handle on what it took to be a winemaker,” said Fridell, who played Ronald McDonald in TV commercials in the ’80s.

“Promised Land” reviews so far have been mixed. A Hollywood Reporter critic called it “a slightly above-average broadcast attempt to do ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty’ … for a Latino audience.”

And Variety deemed it “a big and messy show with so many avenues to go down that it sometimes has trouble choosing which should matter most.”

What do local Latino winemakers think?

Sonoma County Latino winemaking families who watched the premiere on Monday also had varied reactions.

Comparing it to the telenovelas they’ve watched, both Amelia Ceja at Ceja Vineyards and Olga Fernandez at Guerrero Fernandez Winery were intrigued enough to watch the next episode and likely the entire season. Aldina Vineyards co-owner Monica Lopez found it unrelatable and couldn’t imagine tuning in for more. And Ana Keller at Keller Estate Winery couldn’t quite make it to the end of the first episode but thought she might give it another chance if it were ad-free on Hulu.

“It has a very Southern California vibe to it,” said Keller, who grew up in Mexico City and took over as estate director of her parents’ winery in 1998.

“The entire show is very non-Northern California.” The storyline that moved her the most was the one with the shortest airtime, she said.

“It was when the young girl, who’s a maid, is sitting in the truck trying to get fake (citizenship) papers and the guy says, ‘Just go out there and work hard.’ I think that’s the reality I most often encounter with Latinx and Latinos in Sonoma County.”

Ceja, who first picked grapes at age 12 after moving to Sonoma County from the small town of Las Flores in Jalisco, Mexico, found the first episode very watchable “even if it’s cheesy,” she said.

“There are so many other cheesy series, why can’t there be a cheesy Mexican American family drama about winemaking? I just hope it exposes viewers to people of color also being in the wine industry. I think that’s important.”

Fernandez and her husband, Martin Guerrero, migrated from Morelia, Mexico, in 1985 and worked their way up, with Guerrero starting on the production line at Korbel, before founding their own winery in Windsor in 2004.

Watching the Sandovals squabble Monday night, “I couldn’t really relate to the characters that much,” Fernandez said. “It’s almost too unrealistic. I was hoping they might show more about winemaking and the winery, but maybe it’s too early to tell from just one episode.”

For Lopez, whose parents published “Lowrider” magazine in Southern California before moving to Sonoma County and planting a vineyard in the late ’90s, the show was hard to fathom.

“Family-run businesses don’t run like that, at least my family doesn’t,” she said. “We’re not all being manipulated by our father. It just felt very Hollywood.”

Maybe it will feel a little more like Sonoma Valley if “Promised Land” gets picked up for another season.

“What I would really love to do is, in Season 2, even if we don’t film entire episodes up there, is get up there with a splinter unit and film the harvest up there,” said show creator Matt Lopez. “Go up there and get drone shots and film the heck out of it and create a universe or a library of Sonoma film roll that we can then use in the show. Because, for me, verisimilitude is everything.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to include the correct premiere date for “Promised Land” on ABC.