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San Francisco Chronicle​

Why I traveled hundreds of miles to this disappearing California wine region

For a long time, my only association with the city of Rancho Cucamonga was as the setting of the defunct Comedy Central series 'Workaholics.' If you've seen the show, which follows a trio of stoners who flit between their office-park telemarketing job and subdivision rental home, you might find it impossible to believe that this San Bernardino County city could have any connection to wine. But Rancho Cucamonga and the surrounding Cucamonga Valley is in fact an essential landmark on the map of California wine. Once the epicenter of the state's early wine industry, it fell victim to urbanization in the mid-20th century until its vineyards all but disappeared. The Cucamonga Valley's rise, fall and, now, possible redemption is the subject of a major story I published on Wednesday. I hope you'll give it a read. In today's newsletter I want to explain how I came to write about this beleaguered southern California wine region, hundreds of miles outside of the Chronicle's typical coverage zone. I started hearing mutterings of Cucamonga (and not just on the 'Workaholics' subreddit) a few years ago. Winemaker Abe Schoener, formerly of the Scholium Project, told me he was relocating from Napa to Los Angeles for the express purpose of working with Cucamonga Valley vineyards like Lopez Ranch. When I visited Raj Parr at his winery vineyard in Cambria, he poured me wines from his Scythian Wine Co., a brand he created just for Cucamonga vineyards. Suddenly, I noticed, a lot of producers were making Cucamonga wine: In addition to Parr and Schoener, there's Scar of the Sea, A Tribute to Grace, Herrmann York, Carol Shelton and Municipal Winemakers. And I'd read Frances Dinkelspiel's excellent book 'Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California,' which devotes an entire section to the salacious early history of wine in Cucamonga, where the battle for control of one revered vineyard resulted in five murders. Probably, somewhere, there was a story there, but I didn't know enough about Cucamonga to really know what the story was — certainly not enough to convince my editor to send me down there. Sure, it's got an interesting past, but what was the news hook? Former Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné had written an article about Cucamonga in 2014, depicting the area as the wine-region equivalent of a ghost town. It seemed like this was a story for the history books, not today's paper. But then last fall I got a call from Erik Castro, a talented Bay Area photographer who has shot many wine stories for the Chronicle over the years. (He also made all the photos for Bonné's book 'The New California Wine.') Erik had been spending time down there with Schoener, documenting the 2024 harvest at Lopez Ranch and vinification at Schoener's urban winery in Los Angeles. He provided me with a key piece of information: Lopez — the largest remaining vineyard in the Cucamonga Valley, planted in 1919 — had been sold to a plastics manufacturer and was slated for development. Just as it was gaining renown with these up-and-coming winemakers, it was going to vanish. There was the hook. In March, I drove down and spent a day with Schoener, treading through the sandy soil at Lopez, whose gargantuan, leafless vines resembled tumbleweeds swaying in the wind. We visited the vineyard that he calls Maglite — because it's next to the flashlight factory — where scattered, century-old vines blended into the scraggly landscape. (It's known to others as the Francis Road Vineyard.) If there hadn't been a small crew pruning that day, I wouldn't have clocked it as a vineyard at all. I understood why Erik's photojournalist eye had been drawn to this place, with its unexpected, incongruous visuals. This place has none of the typical wine-region romance. The Cucamonga Valley is a seemingly endless expanse of logistics hubs and chain retail. It's home to the largest Amazon warehouse in the U.S. And yet the few hundred acres of vines that improbably survive, remnants of the Cucamonga Valley's former glory, are hiding in plain sight. Still, I didn't really get the full picture until I returned in May, clocking a single-day roundtrip from SFO to Ontario International Airport, to spend the day with Domenic Galleano. The owner of the valley's last commercial winery, Galleano has made it his life's mission to save the last of the region's vineyard acreage — and maybe, I learned, even expand it. To write about wine is to write about a sense of place. This story is about the potential erasure of a place: the transformation of a slice of earth from something distinctive and extraordinary — a wine paradise unlike any other — into something colorless. This is a common American tale, unfolding in small towns, suburbs and cities across the country. The question becomes whether anyone is interested in preserving the local color. In the Cucamonga Valley, a few people are. This story is about them.