California’s Lost Wine Country : Cotes de Cucamonga

Although it was a successful wine-growing region as early as 1902, the Cucamonga Valley’s greatest claim to fame would occur much later, in the 1950s, in train station sketches on Jack Benny’s Sunday night TV show, when unseen actor Mel Blanc would announce, “Train leaving on track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc- (pause)-amonga.”

Now Gino Filippi hopes to gain more formal recognition for the area. He has filed a petition with the federal government seeking approval to use a Cucamonga Valley viticultural appellation. It would permit wineries using grapes from the area to say so on the front label of their wine bottles.

Filippi is the grandson of Joseph Filippi, founder of the J. Filippi Winery, which once had eight tasting rooms sprinkled around Southern California.

His petition seeks to make formal the area known as Cucamonga Valley, 15 miles west of San Bernardino. The proposed 171-square-mile area is bounded on the north by the San Gabriel Mountain foothills and on the other three sides by various natural boundaries including creeks and watershed areas.

If the petition to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is approved (in about a year), the greatest beneficiaries will be Don Galleano, owner of the largest winery in the area, Galleano Winery, and brothers Gino and J. P. Filippi, who operate J. Filippi Winery.

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“The greatest benefit is more local identity,” says Galleano. “People here need to take pride in the work that has been done, to realize that the people who lived here before literally turned sagebrush and wild country into a cultivated paradise, and they did that with a lot of hard work.

“I believe the Cucamonga Valley appellation will pay a tribute to those people.”

Gino Filippi looks at it from more of a business angle. “We can produce nice wines from our grapes,” he says, “but because we had no appellation, we’ve been bypassed by the consumer.”

Without a regionally specific appellation, all wines coming from the area had to carry the appellation of “California,” which Filippi says leads people to think it is a lower quality wine blended from a variety of areas.

The Filippi family sold the J. Filippi Winery property to a development company last December, but the Filippi brothers intend to revive the wine business. Gino Filippi says the winery will move from its original site in Fontana to the former Regina Winery in Etiwanda, which for the last 30 years has been a vinegar-producing plant. The Regina facility is being leased to the Filippi family by the city of Rancho Cucamonga. The municipality, with 115,000 residents, has done much to protect the viticultural history of the area, acquiring Regina (as well as other historic, wine-related properties) in its quest to maintain the wine history.

The brothers have redesigned the J. Filippi Winery label, but even if the AVA request is granted, most of their wines wouldn’t be able to use the “Cucamonga Valley” appellation. Their current releases include fruit grown in Northern California.

The only other active bonded winery premise in the area is Rancho de Philo in Alta Loma, owned by 85-year-old Philo Biane, former chairman of Brookside Vineyards.

Biane produces a few hundred cases of Sherry each year here. He is beloved locally and is praised for being the first to widely plant grapes in the now-thriving Temecula Valley in southern Riverside County. That came in the 1960s, when Brookside grew to become the largest winery in Rancho Cucamonga, with storage capacity of 8 million gallons.

Brookside pioneered the off-site tasting rooms that once dotted many Southern California communities’ shopping centers. At its peak, Brookside had 35 such tasting rooms, including some in Arizona and Illinois.

The company was acquired in the early 1970s by Beatrice Foods of Chicago, which closed it in the late 1980s.