The Oldest Winery West of the Mississippi

Before the Inland Empire was orange country and before it was suburb, it was wine country.

In eighteen thirty-nine, Don Tiburcio Tapia received the Rancho Cucamonga as a Spanish land grant and planted vines on the property. What grew there is recognized by the state of California, California Historical Landmark number four ninety, as the oldest continuously operated commercial winery west of the Mississippi River. The operation passed through several owners over the following century, including Secondo Guasti, who built one of the larger wine operations in Southern California, and eventually Joe and Connie Bono, whose winery became the surviving monument to a wine region that most people have entirely forgotten.

California wine in the popular imagination means Napa and Sonoma, the fog-cooled valleys of the North Coast, the particular combination of French varieties and West Coast sunshine that emerged as a national identity in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The Inland Empire wine region predates that story by more than a century, and it produced significant quantities of wine for California's domestic market through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the citrus economy and then suburban development transformed the land use.

The vines are mostly gone. The historical landmark designation remains at the Vineyard Avenue site. The name Cucamonga itself persists as a destination in Bob Hope routines and road comedies precisely because it sounds like the middle of nowhere. It was, for a while, the middle of somewhere.