California’s Lost Wine Country : Galleano’s Last Stand

The low-lying, weathered buildings show cracks; the sun-splashed courtyard is dotted with turn-of-the-century winemaking equipment, partially rusted and covered with cobwebs and dust.

This is Galleano Winery in Rancho Cucamonga, an area roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles that once was the largest wine-growing region in the United States. The winery looks pretty much as it did decades ago, and Don Galleano wants to keep it that way.

He could have refurbished the place with a coat of paint, a repaved parking lot, and perhaps even a neon sign for the tasting room, with a flashing hand pointing the way. But Galleano sees his winery as a living example of one of the most vital and energetic wine districts in U.S. history, a district that has steadily dwindled in recent years.

Galleano, caretaker of the last remaining family-owned and family-operated winery exclusively using grapes from Rancho Cucamonga, vows his property will always be here to represent the hard work that came before.

Half a century ago this east-west valley was home to more than 35,000 acres of vines (greater even than the Napa Valley is today) and more than five dozen wineries. Its decline was caused by a change in consumer tastes, real estate development and a lack of winemaking technology.

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In the late 1800s, this flat land in western San Bernardino County was a barren place of high sand dunes and an apparent lack of water. But by 1900, it was on the road to becoming a haven for Italian immigrants seeking to recraft the red-wine tradition of their native land.

Its subsequent decline saddens Galleano, who believes he must preserve its heritage.

To speak with Galleano--which anyone can do by showing up most Sundays for a tour--is to get a history lecture. First, however, you must get here, to the modest buildings along Wineville Road. And don’t drive too fast or you’ll miss the entrance.

“People say, ‘You’re the guy with the stories,’ and I like tellin’ ‘em,” says Galleano with a broad smile. He often starts his stories in front of his house, across the street from the winery.

“This house was built in 1895 by Col. Esteban Cantu, the governor of Baja California Norte,” Galleano says. “It was one of a series of summer houses he owned in this country, and my grandfather, Domenico--he was called Nino--bought it in 1927.” As Galleano talks, he continues through the winery with its huge, square concrete fermentation tanks--one so large that, with its wall removed, it is now a private tasting room.

The cellar also contains giant redwood vats of red wine, white wine, Sherry and Port. The smells are heady.

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The best place to catch Galleano’s act is inside the small, history-drenched tasting room. Nostalgia lurks in every cranny.

“See that clock?” he says, pointing to a huge, circular timepiece you couldn’t miss from a mile away. “I got it from Brookside (Winery). It had been at the old Italian Vineyard Co. Why, it was probably bought by Mr. (Secondo) Guasti himself.”

It was Guasti, a visionary from Piedmont, Italy, who, legend has it, upon observing one day in 1900 that winter rainfall runoff disappeared into the sand, discovered a lone grapevine in the desert floor. He dug down 24 feet before finding the tip of the roots in soil moist from the water table.

“This valley has exceedingly deep sand, so vines could send roots down to such depths that superficial drought couldn’t affect them,” says Thomas Pinney, a professor of English at Pomona College and author of “A History of Wine in America.”

Pinney says the sandy soil and accessible water table persuaded Guasti that he could develop the land into vineyards, so he bought eight square miles of land, founded the Italian Vineyard Co. and planted European vines--such warm-climate grapes as Grenache, Mourvedre and Syrah. He also brought entire families from Italy to settle the town he named for himself and to work the vineyards.

His efforts would one day become the world’s largest contiguous vineyard, 5,000 acres, surrounding Guasti.

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“My grandfather sold a lot of wine to the fishermen from San Pedro, mainly Yugoslavs and Italians,” says Galleano. “They would drive out here for two, three days at a time and have jack rabbit drives (hunts) in the sand dunes, and they’d eat at the local restaurants and they’d drink a lot of wine.”

Most of the history of this region is of just this sort--anecdotal. Few books exist on the area, and those that do are skimpy and poorly organized, with dates and even spellings tossed about rather casually.

In a 1976 article on the region for the Claremont Courier, Pinney wrote: “It is not easy to form an accurate picture of the (wine) industry in Cucamonga since it is so unsettled and no currently available guide is even approximately trustworthy.”

It is clear, however, that much of the wine tradition that existed here prior to 1920, the onset of Prohibition, was lost during the next 13 years. Galleano says many of the winemaking families gave up and left the area. A few, such as his, stayed on and sold grapes for home winemakers. (Prohibition laws permitted a head of a household to make 200 gallons of wine for personal use each year.)

When Prohibition ended in late 1933, the Galleano family was among the leaders in a second wave of development here. Over the next quarter century, Cucamonga Valley grew faster than any other wine region. Grape planting took off in earnest as wineries girded for increased demand. And the demand was largely for sweeter wines, such as Port and Sherry, which then were far more popular with Americans than table wine. And Cucamonga made excellent dessert wines.

At its peak in the early 1950s, more than 60 wineries sold wine to local and national accounts; winery sales rooms were busy on weekends with visitors from Los Angeles (Galleano has old cask cards showing that wine was $1 per gallon, but you had to bring your own empty jug). Grapes were shipped near and far for commercial and home winemaking.

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By 1962, the valley was producing the equivalent of 4 million cases of wine a year, more than 5% of all wine sold in the United States, including imports.

However, the bubble was soon to burst. Only five years later, in 1967, statistics show, more dry wine was sold nationally than sweet. And winemaking technology hadn’t yet advanced to the point where good table wine could be made from such warm-climate grapes. Thus began the rapid decline of Rancho Cucamonga as a vine capital.

The lack of demand for Cucamonga wine came at the same time that demand rose for land for housing and office buildings, spurred by the development of Ontario International Airport and other projects. And the vineyards were ripe for the picking.

Galleano, 42, nearly gets misty-eyed when he speaks of the decline of the area as a wine center:

“When I was growing up, I was looking at all these guys in the twilight of their lives, still growing grapes and still making wine,” he says. “They were tired. They were looking at real estate. You know, farming for most people is a way to hold onto the land until you can sell it for a price much higher than what you bought it for.

“My grandfather lived a perfectly happy life growing grapes and making wine. But in the 1960s, when it became tough to sell the wine, when they knew they had bought the ground for $500 an acre and they were offered $5,000 an acre to sell it for development, well, can you blame them?”

So the vineyards with their ancient, gnarled vines and small wine cellars all became expendable.

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The Galleano Winery can’t avoid the sounds of a busier world. Trucks gazoom along I-15 on the other side of the ancient vines; jet engines shriek into Ontario Airport, a couple of miles northwest.

But the winery buildings, sitting under the flight path and in front of the winery’s three acres of old vines, cluster alone. The only neighbors are grazing cattle. A car passes so infrequently that, when one does, you wonder whether the driver is lost.

Last December, the J. Fillippi Winery in Fontana, across the 10 and 15 freeways to the northeast, was sold to developers and will move to another location, leaving Galleano as the last holdout making wine at its original site. But his decision to preserve the heritage here was made long ago.

“I made the decision in 1977,” he says. “This history has to be preserved, it’s going so fast. I’ve been given an opportunity, and I’m not gonna blow it.”

Ironically, however, it is development--a word that is otherwise anathema to Galleano--that permits him to save his little five-acre rancho and, with luck, 62 acres of vineyards nearby.

Galleano is involved in the development of a 50-acre parcel on Aero Highway in Rancho Cucamonga that is just a half-mile from the $11-million Epicenter, the stadium of the local minor league baseball franchise, the Quakes.

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The vines on Galleano’s development site are gone now; the land is graded and has curbs, gutters and sewers; buildings of 12,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet are planned.

More vineyard land sits adjacent to the Epicenter. Galleano swears it will be buildings before long.

He acknowledges the irony of using the funds from a destroyed vineyard to save another.

“I know it sounds odd that I would be developing a vineyard into buildings, but it’s to save one. That five acres,” he says of his own ranch with finality, “don’t move.”

And he intends to convert more land to agriculture. One parcel adjacent to his home was zoned for industrial use some years ago. When the economy turned sour, he says, “Bank of America took the property over. I’m trying to buy it. If I can, I’ll change it into an agricultural preserve.

“I’m looking for areas that have been designated as open space. I want to plant grapes to take care of the needs of this winery and other wineries that think we’re doing something right here.” He becomes passionate when he speaks of the great quality of Mourvedre, Grenache and Muscat of Alexandria.

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Last year Galleano processed virtually all the grapes grown on the last remaining 1,850 acres of vines in the Cucamonga Valley, and he sold a third of a million gallons of wine in bulk to other wine companies, such as Bronco, Franzia and Delicato. R.H. Phillips Winery in Esparto, near Sacramento, annually buys large amounts of Galleano’s red wines to blend into its successful “Night Harvest Cuvee Rouge,” which sells for about $6 a bottle.

Says R.H. Phillips’ winemaker, Ron McClendon: “I’m surprised at the color he gets in his Grenache. It’s really a powerhouse, full of fruit. And the Mourvedre has a special character, fresh fruit and smoke.” He says nearly a fourth of the “Night Harvest Cuvee Rouge” is Galleano’s Cucamonga wine, “and that wine needs his fruit,” says McClendon. “It’s the signature of that wine.”

Most of the wine Galleano markets in bulk comes from vineyards owned by developers waiting until the real estate market improves.

“We have a wonderful vineyard right down the street that’s owned by General Dynamics,” says Galleano. “It’s got old dry-farmed Grenache and Zinfandel. They’re thinking of putting a golf course on it, but until they do, we get the grapes.”

Some of those grapes go into the table wines Galleano sells at his tasting room. The red wines are rustic and rough-hewn but they are nowhere near as coarse and earthy as many of the country wines of the past. Still, they are wines happily at home in a water glass aside a hearty stew. Galleano uses no small-oak aging, preferring to leave the wine in large upright redwood vats for a year to soften before bottling.

One classic example is the 4-liter bottle of Zinfandel for $7.75. Customers may also buy a ceramic crock with a spigot, for dispensing the wine. Galleano also sells his gutsy red wines to Basque sheepherders, who, he says, love his wines. He also makes the house wine for Central Basco, a popular Basque restaurant in nearby Chino. Galleano’s white wines, particularly the Muscat, are fresher than they were in the past, but most of them offer a trace of residual sugar, so they are aimed more at picnics, patios and parties than fine dining.

Galleano may not be crafting Chateau Latour. But he is honoring his great-grandfather’s heritage by preserving a trace of what once was a huge and flourishing industry now fast evaporating--a blessing still on view down remote Wineville Road.