When Tapia appeared before the governor, he handed him a simple map showing the parameters of the land he wanted, “El Paraje llamado Cucamonga,” or “The Stopping Place Called Cucamonga.” It covered three leagues of land—a swath of approximately 13,000 acres about forty miles east of the pueblo of Los Angeles. Maps didn’t need to be precise back then. They just needed a few obvious landmarks to delineate boundaries. Tapia’s map had a sketch of a mountain range at the top, a dotted line in the center which he marked “Camino que va a San Bernardino,” or “The road that goes to San Bernardino,” and a few lines depicting a hill and some creeks. Tapia asked that the governor grant his request quickly because “it was the season to commence a tillage and other business of the plains.”
I found this 185-year-old map archived in the Bancroft Library. The paper on which it is drawn is a faded yellow, but the lines are clear and well preserved. It is a simple sketch, done by hand. Tapia must have drawn it. I wonder, when he sat down at his desk to make the primitive map, if he imagined he was laying the groundwork for a storied vineyard and a future city.
On March 3, 1839, Governor Alvarado granted Tapia’s request. There was no acknowledgment that this area belonged to the Kukamongo tribe, the nomadic Native American group that had wandered the area for hundreds of years. It was as if a people who had made their home roaming the mesa by the San Gabriel Mountains didn’t exist.
Tapia had to survey the land, but like many rancheros, he was only obligated to designate boundaries by naming significant natural markers, like a big sycamore tree or a creek. A year after visiting the governor, Tapia performed a Mexican ceremony that spiritually bound him to the land. He took the paper proclamation granting him Rancho Cucamonga, set it on the ground, and walked over it with his boots. He then picked up stones and pulled up grasses, held them in his hands, and then flung them into the wind. The stones dropped and the wind scattered the grasses in all directions, like the four winds of heaven. In March 1840, Rancho Cucamonga was his.16
Tapia had picked an extraordinary spot, an oasis in the middle of an arid plateau. The new rancho nestled up against Mount San Antonio, the highest peak of the San Gabriel Mountains. Three creeks tumbled down from the hills, forming a marshy area filled with stands of sycamore, alder, cottonwood, and drooping willow trees at the base of a red hillock. Wild grapevines curled up the trunks and around the branches, offering a cooling green canopy for travelers. Tulle grasses pushed their way out of the boggiest patches.
Mexican law required that Tapia construct a house on his new rancho and inhabit it within a year. Despite the legal edict, it is not clear if Tapia ever seriously considered moving permanently from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga. The place was so isolated, so exposed to the bands of marauding Indians who stole horses and cows to fight against the encroaching settlements, that it might not have been safe enough. Instead, Tapia hired the domesticated Indian laborers whose world had been turned upside down when the mission system had been dissolved. They built him a large, fortress-like adobe home on top of Red Hill. The house had a commanding view, one that looked south over the mesa and north to the mountains. Tapia moved his cattle from near Los Angeles to the rolling hills of Rancho Cucamonga. He also made a decision that would have repercussions that resonated well into the twenty-first century: to plant grapevines and make wine.
* * *
The Los Angeles region in 1839 had a small yet vibrant wine economy. Winemaking had started with the Franciscan fathers who arrived in Alta California in 1769 to set up a string of missions. For a number of years, the fathers relied on ships from Mexico or Baja California to bring them wine for use in the sacrament. The ships came so infrequently, however, that there often wasn’t wine for religious ceremonies. There were wild grapevines in abundance in parts of California, but the grapes were small and bitter, and not usable for wine. Seeing the wild vines twist their way high up into the branches of trees gave Father Junipero Serra, the force behind the construction of the mission system, hope that grapes might thrive in California one day. After all, the soil in parts was rich, the sun was warm and constant, and there was ample winter rain. So in 1777, Serra wrote to the viceroy of Mexico, Antonio María de Bucareli, and requested that he send some grapevines up to their newest colony. “Some improvements could easily be introduced from [Baja] California,” wrote Serra. “For instance fig and pomegranate trees and grapevines.”
A year later, on a bright day in May 1778, the Spanish clipper ship the San Antonio sailed into a cove along the Pacific Coast in an area that would one day be known as Orange County. The ship had spent sixty-nine days at sea, difficult days where the crew subsisted on dried beef and water and little else. But it had finally reached its destination.17
The ship carried precious cargo: grape cuttings from vineyards from the missions in Baja California. The Indian neophytes carefully carried the grapevines that had journeyed so far to their new home at Mission San Juan Capistrano, about ten miles inland. The cuttings thrived. Green shoots soon appeared from the once-dormant vines. Then the Franciscan fathers made an unexpected decision: the mission would have to relocate. So in the summer of 1778, the padres and their Native American followers moved to a new location.
Father Serra and the other Franciscans didn’t want to leave the grapes behind. They had waited too long, had thirsted too much, to abandon the grapes that might produce a steady supply of sacramental wine. Yet the season in which to plant the grapes had already passed. So they left the vines in the ground over winter. “Snow is plentiful, wherefore, until the severe cold moderates and the floods subside, the vine cuttings, which at your request were sent to us from the lower country, have been buried,” Father Pablo de Mugártegui wrote to Father Serra on March 15, 1779. The next spring, when the ground had warmed, the vines were uprooted and replanted.
It takes a number of years for grapevines to bear fruit, and the shortage of sacramental wine continued to plague the Franciscans. In 1781, Father Serra wrote to a padre at San Juan Capistrano expressing dismay at his dwindling wine supply. “I hope … that your vines will survive and bear fruit,” Serra wrote on December 8, 1781. “The lack of wine for Mass is becoming unbearable.”
It is not possible to pinpoint the date of the first vintage in California. No records remain detailing that significant event. But it probably happened in 1782.18 When Pablo de Mugártegui wrote his biography of the recently deceased Father Serra in 1784, he mentioned that the vines “have already produced wine, not only for use at Mass but also for the table.”
In a few decades, winemaking was an integral part of the mission system. All but four of the twenty-one missions produced wine for their own tables and for sacramental purposes. A few missions made enough wine to sell to soldiers or those living on the ranchos that soon spread out across California.
Wine grapes flourished particularly well at Mission San Gabriel, the fourth mission founded by Father Serra, which was nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, about ten miles east of present-day Los Angeles and thirty miles west of Rancho Cucamonga. Under the guidance of Father José María de Zalvidea and the padres who succeeded him, Mission San Gabriel developed 170 acres of some of the most productive vineyards in Alta California. It was known as La Vina Madre, or the mother vineyard. By 1829, the mission may have been producing from 400 to 600 barrels of wine a year.19
The Native Americans living at Mission San Gabriel did virtually all the work to make the wine. They cleared the ground of shrub and chaparral. They planted Mission grapes and tended the vines. They picked the grapes and carried them to the wine house, where they crushed them. The Indians fastened a cowhide, the hair side down, to four poles, leaving some sag in the middle. They put the grapes in the center and climbed inside to crush them by foot. The grape juice flowed into a tub where it fermented over a period of a few weeks.20 Some of that wine was later distilled in copper vats into brandy.
None of this work was voluntary. Many Native Americans first interac
ted with the Franciscans fathers because they were curious about their tools and the weapons carried by soldiers. The padres talked to them about Christianity and convinced the Indians to join them at the missions. Once baptized, however, the Native Americans suddenly found they had entered a contract of sorts, a contract they could not break. The Franciscan fathers regarded the neophytes as inferior, childlike beings. The Native Americans had no rights: they couldn’t live independently, they were sequestered into same-sex, often squalid, dormitories, and they were prohibited from riding horses or practicing their traditional ceremonies. They could not leave the mission. They were treated like slaves.
Life for the hundreds of Indians at Mission San Gabriel, and other missions around California, was rigid. They were summoned from activity to activity by ringing bells. “Field hands worked, played, prayed, ate, slept, married, and were even born and buried according to a system of bells,” noted one historian of California field laborers.21 Visitors to the mission in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries noted that the Native Americans looked unhappy. They rarely smiled or laughed and they lived in degrading conditions. The threat of punishment hovered. “They are kept in great fear, and for the least offense they are corrected,” one visitor to the San Gabriel mission noted in 1826. “They are … complete slaves in every sense of the word.”22
The Mexican government secularized the missions in 1833, and it led to the eventual disintegration of the winemaking operations at Mission San Gabriel. Before long, the small pueblo of Los Angeles was the center of winemaking in the state. Americans and Europeans who had come to Los Angeles after Mexico loosened Spain’s restrictive policies on immigration joined Californios in planting vines. The banks of the Los Angeles River were soon dotted with thousands of grapevines, forming a bright green, cooling swath.
The wine made was mostly drunk at home or traded locally. Los Angeles was still extremely isolated. Clipper ships only pulled into San Pedro, thirty miles away, a few times a month. The wine and brandy were not particularly good, either, as the men making it did not have much experience. In 1827, the French captain Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly, who spent a year traveling up and down the Pacific Coast on the ship Héros, noted its inferiority. “The vine succeeds very well; but wine and brandy extracted from it are very inferior to the exquisite taste of the grape used for it, and I think the inferiority is to be attributed to the making rather than the growth.”23
It took a French immigrant named Jean-Louis Vignes (pronounced “vines”) to recognize that there was a market for wine outside of the Los Angeles area. Vignes is credited with being the first commercial winemaker in the state. His nephews would also play a large role in developing the California wine industry. They also would be instrumental in elevating the reputation of the Rancho Cucamonga vineyard.
Vignes, a rotund man with graying muttonchops, was an itinerant Frenchman who landed in Los Angeles around 1831. He had been born in 1779 in Béguey, near Cadillac, right in the heart of the Gironde, the wine-growing region of Bordeaux, and grew up surrounded by vineyards and vignerons making wine. Vignes’s father was a cooper and taught his son the art of making barrels. At the age of twenty-two, Vignes married, and he and his wife had four children. They were Catholic and very religious. Why, then, did Vignes leave them all behind when he was forty-seven? Was it wanderlust? Economic uncertainty? No one is quite sure, but a letter written by a friend with whom Vignes traveled provides some clues. “Vignes had been forced into exile as a result of troubles caused by his loyalty, his misplaced tenderness and his over-zealous desire to be of service.”24
Vignes boarded a French merchant ship traveling to the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii, as part of a crew on its way to China. He ended up staying in the islands for a few years, earning a living by raising cattle and managing a rum distillery. When that closed, Vignes decided that better economic opportunities lay in California.
Vignes was fifty-two or so when he traveled from Monterey down to Los Angeles in 1831. Most men that age would be looking to slow down, to enjoy the remaining years of life. Not Vignes. He saw how well grapes grew along the banks of the Los Angeles River and in the vineyards that spread out from the water. The weather was perfect—warm, sunny, with good rain in the winter, but no frost. The terrain must have reminded Vignes of his home in Bordeaux, where vineyards covered the hills and fields, and life was centered on the seasons of the grape. Vignes soon knew he could make a living as a winemaker.
With the money he had made in Hawaii, Vignes purchased 104 acres on the west side of the Los Angeles River, right near the main road leading to San Bernardino. (The land is now home to Union Station.) The distinguishing landmark of his property was an ancient sycamore tree towering more than sixty feet high that could be seen from miles around. The tree’s branches spread out 200 feet in diameter, creating a welcome umbrella of shade. Vignes built his wine cellar right near the tree. His vineyard was soon known as El Aliso, which is Spanish for sycamore. Vignes became known as Don Luis del Aliso.
Within a few years, the vineyards and Vignes’s home became a gathering place for Los Angeles, a place people enjoyed visiting for parties and meals. The centerpiece of the estate was a quarter-mile-long arbor draped in grapevines. Thirty-five acres of grapes extended along the river, along with orchards of oranges, lemons, pomegranates, and other fruit trees. “Mr. V’s vineyard is doubtless a model of its kind,” said one visitor in 1847. “It was a delightful recreation to stroll through it.”25
By 1840, Vignes had more than 40,000 vines in production. He stored the wine in oak casks he had made by hand.26 The wine was widely regarded as the best around, the result, perhaps, of Vignes’s lifelong exposure to winemaking. “We drank today the wine of the country, manufactured by Don Luis Vignes, a Frenchman,” Lt. W. H. Emory, an American, wrote in 1847 when he was part of the group of soldiers occupying Los Angeles during the Mexican War. “It was truly delicious, resembling more the best description of Hock (a German white wine) than any other wine.”27
Thirteen years after Vignes left France, his family sent one of his nephews, Pierre Sainsevain, to see if he was still alive. Sainsevain, twenty, arrived in Los Angeles in 1839, and was the first in a long string of Vignes’s relatives who would immigrate to Los Angeles and form the core of a vibrant French community.
With another set of hands to rely on, Vignes decided to sell his wine in other parts of the state. California was still sparsely settled, so trade between the small pueblos was limited. Vignes sent young Sainsevain on a mission to sell wine up north. “In 1840, I started out on the ship ‘Moosoon’ with a cargo of his wines and brandies, for the ports of Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco, and sold them at the good price of $2.00 per gallon for the whites, and $4.00 for the brandies,” Sainsevain recalled years later.28 Historians consider this the first commercial sale of wine in California.
Vignes’s wine may also have been the first California vintage to be destroyed in a fire. In 1842, Vignes presented a barrel of his wine to the French sea captain Duflot de Mofras and asked that it be delivered to King Louis Philippe of France to show what a Frenchman could do with California grapes. Mofras agreed to transport the barrel. He brought it as far as Hamburg, Germany. He left the wine there for storage. A short time later, a fire destroyed the warehouse and with it Vignes’s hopes to show off California wine.
So when Tapia planted the first vines at Rancho Cucamonga in 1839, winemaking was already established in southern California. He could probably see that immigration was increasing. As settlers built homes and raised families, demand for wine would increase. With his businessman’s eye, Tapia may have regarded wine as a prudent investment.
Tapia used Native American laborers to clear about an acre of land of chaparral, chamise, sagebrush, and manzanita. They then planted about 565 vines. They used Mission grapes, the hardy, high-yielding, long-living vines that the Franciscan fathers had been using for decades. The vine was resistant to disease, grew well in hot
weather, and thrived in the sandy, loamy soil of Rancho Cucamonga.
The grapes planted by Tapia that year on the fertile fields in Rancho Cucamonga were the basis of a wine lineage that would last more than seventy-five years.
* * *
No evidence remains of Tapia’s presence on Rancho Cucamonga’s Red Hill. One cool fall day, I drove to the top of the hill—really a knoll—to find the plaque that marks the site of his adobe home. Tapia certainly knew his real estate. Red Hill is now one of the nicer neighborhoods in Rancho Cucamonga, which has about 170,000 residents. Comfortable one-story older homes (the city is mostly full of newish tract development) sit on large lots with lawns. Cedar and maple trees dapple the sunlight. Some of the houses overlooking the valley have sweeping views of the mountains to the south. The person who had told me about the marker wasn’t sure of its whereabouts, so I drove around looking for it. I walked up and down driveways and pushed back bushes and flowers. Nothing. It seemed like all marks of Tapia’s home were gone.
Months later I learned that the plaque, an official California historical marker, was actually located a half mile away in a less residential section of town. I never located it personally, but the picture online showed that it read: “The large adobe house was abandoned in 1858 when his heirs sold the rancho. The adobe soon disintegrated into its native earth.”
Reminders of Tapia’s winemaking were easier to find. People in the area believe that a long rectangular building located in a strip mall off the old Route 66, near the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Vineyard Avenue, is the site of Tapia’s original winemaking operation, although the historical documentation proving that is scant. Hugh and Ida Thomas, a local winemaking family, acquired the property in 1920. The original vines had been dug up three years earlier and the Thomases replanted the area with grapes that produced “Old Rancho” wine. Longtime residents described the Thomas Winery as both a park and a museum. Orange groves, rosebushes, sycamore, and avocado trees created a lush landscape, while old wine barrels, bottles, presses, and other winemaking gear scattered around lent a historical twist. The Thomas Winery flourished for almost fifty years, eventually passing into the hands of the Filippi family.29 Then in January 1969, after a spate of heavy rain, Cucamonga Creek spilled over its banks. A wall of water six feet high came through the winery’s back door, pushing boulders, brush, and stacked wine barrels through the fragile adobe walls.
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