You’re right Ken - it isn’t flavored. My bad. I was focused on the lemon, which a number of people in the LA area said was traditional, but honestly I’m no expert on the subject. And I’ve never heard of it from Chardonnay.
But Angelica does have considerable aging potential. Cappelli compares it to Port in that respect - fortified and slowly oxidized to produce something akin to a tawny Port. It used to be a mix of roughly half juice and half brandy but I think that today sufficient brandy is added to get it to 18%. The reason people today partly ferment the juice is that the TTB has decided that to be called wine there has to be some fermentation, but from what I’ve read and been told, that was not necessarily the practice in the 1700s and 1800s.
Gypsy Canyon in Santa Rita makes some from vines that supposedly date to the 1880s.
Because you guys like this kind of stuff, if you haven’t read this great resource from UC Davis, here are a few excerpts:
"Angelica, as it used to be made (and apparently is no longer), was not so much a wine as a fortified grape juice, such as the French call mistelle and the Spanish mistela: this is a drink that properly belongs to the class of cordials rather than of wine (compare the Scuppernong wines of North Carolina). To a must that has not yet begun to ferment, or has only partially fermented, brandy is added in such quantity as to arrest the action of the yeast. This was an effective way to handle the Mission grape, which under the hot skies of southern California gave a fruit almost raisined, rich in sugar but low in acid, so that its dry wines were flat and unpalatable. With the sweetness retained, and the preserving alcohol supplied by the addition of brandy, the juice, christened angelica after the City of the Angels, became a popular wine—some will say deservedly, others not.
The methods used in the missions were of the simplest, though such descriptions as exist do not always agree and are not always very clear. As in New Mexico, the ready availability of cowhides and the relative scarcity of wood determined the choice of materials. The standard method of crushing seems to have been by pouring grapes onto a cowhide, perhaps suspended over a receptacle, and then setting an Indian to treading the grapes with his feet. The juice expressed by this means was caught in leathern bags, in barrels, or in brickwork cisterns (some of these remain at San Gabriel), where it fermented; red wine, of course, fermented on the skins and stems of the crushed grapes; for white wine, the juice was drawn off to ferment separately. The skins might then go into a primitive still for brandy.[28] Most of the Franciscan fathers were natives of Spain and may be supposed to have had at least a general notion of how wine was made. "
And then there’s this:
Mission wine, which thus became practically extinct in the second quarter of the century, nevertheless had a curious survival in an unlooked-for part of the world. In the 1920s, in Paris, an English wine lover encountered an expatriate Pole who told him that, at the turn of the century, at Fukier’s, the best restaurant in Warsaw, “the choicest and most expensive dessert wine” came from California. The Englishman, finding himself not long after in Warsaw, remembered what he had been told, went to the famous restaurant Fukier and asked for its California wine. He naturally supposed that it must be California wine such as other restaurants had, and was curious to know how it could be both the most expensive and the best available in a distinguished restaurant. The waiter told him that, fortunately, there were a few bottles still left, some of which were brought to the curious diner: “Imagine my surprise when I found that they were of wine from the Franciscan missions of California grown during the Spanish period, a century and a half or so ago. The wine was light brown in colour, rather syrupy, resembling a good sweet Malaga in taste, and in good condition.” The age is a bit exaggerated—in all likelihood the wine was from the 1820s and therefore just a hundred years old—but the recrudescence of such a wine in so unexpected a place is sufficiently surprising and pleasing. The description is pretty much what one would expect if the wine were an previous hit angelica next hit type such as described earlier. And it is curious to note that this latter-day description agrees with one of the earliest accounts of mission wine: the German traveller Langsdorff, calling at Mission San Jose in 1806, noted that the wine of the place is “sweet, and resembles Malaga.” It is not likely now that anyone will ever have a chance again to taste the Franciscan wine of Old California.