LOS ANGELES — Donna Mills’ happy place is sitting in her backyard, drinking wine.
And if the bottle runs out? No problem.
She and her life partner, Larry Gilman, have loads at their fingertips, just a hop, skip and a three-minute walk away at their very own Mandeville Vineyards.
“I’ve always liked wine, but I never thought I’d have a vineyard,” Mills said.
She said Gilman kept talking about starting one with all the extra land behind their Brentwood home.
“I started seeing paths being cleared and rebar going on. And so he did it. And I said you can do it, but I got nothing to do with I,” Mills said.
But eventually she fell in love with it and become very much involved.
“There’s weeding to do, trimming to do, tucking,” she said.
Mills grew to fame as one of the most well-known soap opera stars of her time starring in “Knots Landing,” television’s longest running prime-time soap opera set in Southern California.
“It is another chapter. It’s a whole other world that doesn’t really have anything to do with my acting world,” she said.
And it’s something she and Larry share a passion for.
“With the 431 plants that we have, we will do between 50 and 75 cases a year. That’s between 600 and 900 bottles. Last year was our best year. We did 100 cases,” Gilman said.
Their vineyard is home to the only Malbec grown in Los Angeles — and it became their primary hobby during the pandemic.
“As crazy as I thought it was in the beginning, I’ve come to love it.”
Turns out, she came to rely on it during the pandemic — even calling it her savior.
“There’s something about working in the soil, with things that grow that’s just very fulfilling, very calming,” she said.
Watch “The SoCal Scene” at 9 p.m. every Thursday on Spectrum News 1 and the Spectrum News app.