Rosenthal Vineyard Closes After Losing Tasting Room to Palisades Fireplace

A four-decade-old Los Angeles County vineyard began and run by a Hollywood household is closing. Mark Rosenthal says his Rosenthal — The Malibu Estate is winding down operations.

The vineyard’s Pacific Coast Highway tasting room, which was the model’s main distribution mechanism, was destroyed within the 2025 Palisades wildfire. Located on California state land by means of a lease, the federal government has not indicated when or even when it might enable industrial tenants to return. The web site is fenced off and has served as a staging and storage floor in the course of the in depth clean-up for the disaster, which destroyed greater than 6,800 buildings.

Rosenthal’s father George, now 95, constructed a mini-conglomerate enterprise with pursuits in all the things from actual property and file storage to personal aviation. But these in leisure know the household for his or her longtime flagship enterprises: Raleigh Studios, a big impartial soundstage operator, and West Hollywood’s legendary Sunset Marquis resort, a haven for celebrities — significantly from the music world — which was the topic of a 2025 documentary, If These Walls Could Rock.

George first planted grapes in Malibu’s Newton Canyon in 1985; the vines produced their inaugural classic six years later. The property now spans 240 acres. “It’s a remarkable place; you feel like you’re in Tuscany,” says Rosenthal. The micro-climate valley throughout the Santa Monica Mountains, the place vineyards had first been established earlier than Prohibition, later became a recognized American Viticultural Area. The vineyard got here to provide cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay and different varietals.

Even earlier than the Palisades catastrophe, the Rosenthals had skilled different setbacks with The Malibu Estate. An earlier tasting room on the Beau Rivage restaurant was misplaced after that building caught fire in 2012, after which 5 years later the Woolsey wildfire burned almost all of the Newton Canyon winery.

“It’s been one catastrophe after another, and at some point it wears you down,” explains Rosenthal. “There is pride in putting our family name on a bottle of wine — it’s been fun — but it’s also a business. Absent a significant distribution channel like the tasting room, it doesn’t make sense.” He says it’s not value pursuing one other room elsewhere. “We’ve thought about it, but the wine business has its own external difficulties,” citing considerably lowered demand as a result of youthful generations’ declining alcohol consumption.

Instead, he’s seeking to promote the Newton Canyon property. He notes it could possibly be transformed right into a luxurious inn or a rehab, given its pastoral setting.

Rosenthal, who notes he’s turning 67 and is “moving toward a family-office footprint,” bought the soundstages to Hackman Capital Partners in 2021. “There was a little bit of froth in the market,” he says. “I had a suspicion that the demand of the streamers for production would contract. I’ve been in the business for a long time. That was my suspicion, and it turned out to be correct. Whether it was prescient or lucky, I can’t tell you.” (Hackman is now beset by lenders and has misplaced management of a lot of its key holdings.)

Rosenthal has invested the cash he generated from the sale into an ongoing, eight-figure renovation of the Sunset Marquis. “The villas on Alta Loma are totally torn apart and with any luck I’ll have them back into service in November,” he says. “We’ll have the main building done by the [2028 Summer] Olympics. We don’t want to lay any of our people off, so we’re doing this project in sections.”

As for the Rosenthal vintages, “we will keep a library of it” within the household. Sept. 26 would be the closing day for a guided tasting on the winery. Bottles are actually supplied at a steep low cost to members of The Malibu Estate’s wine membership. “My aspiration is what it’s always been,” he says. “To have it go to the people who will enjoy it and appreciate it.”