CALIFORNIA'S HIDDEN WINE COUNTRY

 

CALIFORNIA’S HIDDEN WINE COUNTRY

California has 100 American Viticultural Areas (AVA).  An AVA is a distinct wine grape growing region with boundaries set by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).  Some you’ve heard of…Napa Valley, Paso Robles, Sonoma Valley, Mendocino, Russian River…others may have escaped notice such as North Yuba, Seiad Valley, or Covelo.

Once, the MAJOR wine producing area of the state was 40 miles east of Los Angeles in the Cucamonga Valley, better known today as the Inland Empire.  With commercial vineyards dating back to 1838, it is among the oldest wine grape growing areas in the state.  At over 20,000 acres at the start of Prohibition, it was also the largest.  At that time, it had more vineyard acreage than Sonoma and Napa Counties combined.

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With the booming expansion of the Los Angeles metro area, development pressures hit this area hard.  Skyrocketing land prices found many vineyards being sold, plowed under, and becoming housing tracts, shopping centers, highways, factories, and warehouses.  Little is left of the wide-open countryside I enjoyed as a youth.

Still, the old, historic vines have not completely disappeared but they still face enormous pressure.  Now, two larger producers and a couple of very small boutique wine makers are all that are left.  Sitting beneath the snow-covered peak of Mt. Baldy, this is California’s most endangered wine producing region.

It’s a Saturday with rain off and on, mostly on.  We start our day at the Original Pancake House in Orange County’s Yorba Linda.  After a filling breakfast of 49’r Flapjacks, we head over one of the last rural roads in the area, Carbon Canyon Road, which connects the area to the Inland Empire community of Chino Hills.  From there, we make our way over to our first stop, Galleano Winery in Mira Loma.

My grandmother lived a few blocks away when I was a kid.  We’d ride our motorcycles and horses for miles over the wide-open countryside here.  Now, it’s covered with houses, factories, and warehouses but at the junction of the 15 and 60 freeways, if you look to the east , there’s several acres of grapes being grown in the sandy soil.  On the street, you’ll be surrounded by warehouses.  If you turn at just the right stop sign (at Wineville and Merrill), you’ll enter a time machine and be on a small country lane with barns, farmhouses, animals, and the winery itself. 

This is exactly the way I remember Mira Loma from when I was a child.  It’s also so out of place these days as to be called “historic.”  The area is known for growing big, bold red grapes.  Zinfandel, Grenache, Mission, and Mourvèdre…all good grapes that stand up to the valley’s intensely hot summers.

At the back of the former truck mechanic’s garage is a small house that now serves as the tasting room.  Five tastes are $5 per person, price will be applied to any purchase.  While white wines are available (Galleano sources these grapes from other areas or contracts with other wineries to produce them), the reds are the star of the show here.  Cucamonga Peak Red, Legendary Pioneers Zinfandel, Old Vine Zin, Port, and Sherry are made very well here.

The valley terroir has a strong taste that infuses the wines made here.  Galleano is very good…and also very reasonable in price.  Wines here start at around $5 a bottle…good wine, too.  Many of the wines are also available in 4L jugs which make the price even lower and are great for parties.  We particularly like the haute sauterne, port, and Chianti in the jugs.

Be sure to grab a flyer from Centro Basco, a local Basque restaurant, which includes a coupon for two free glasses of Galleano wine with your dinner.

If you bring a picnic, this is a great place to grab a bottle.  Borrow a couple of glasses from the tasting staff, go outside to their little park, and have a nice relaxing lunch.  Nearby is a small zoo with farm animals such as geese and donkeys.  Hundreds of guinea pigs roam in their enclosure and a few peacocks preen.

I could spend an entire, relaxing day here but we’ve got another stop to make.

A few miles to the north, in the town of Rancho Cucamonga, is the other large wine maker here.  Joseph Fillippi has a winery and tasting room set up on Baseline Road, just east of Day Creek Boulevard off of the 210 freeway and a few blocks north of Route 66.  While there is a very small vineyard here, you can see the houses built right up to the winery’s walls…an eerie reminder that this place may not have too much of a future left.

More businesslike and industrial than Galleano, Filippi’s tasting room is a large retail establishment.  Tasting is not free here…$5 gets you five poker chips.  You trade a chip for a taste of wine.  With over 20 wines available for tasting, those five chips won’t get you very far.  If there are a few of you, share tastes with each other so you can try a larger variety of wines.

We taste several wines starting with the chardonnay and the Alicante rose and ending up with their cab/franc, zinfandels, and a variety of ports.  It’s all good but not quite as good as the wine we had earlier in Mira Loma.  That, and the fact that we just spent our money on tasting, meant that we bought the day’s wines at Galleano…not Filippi.

When will wineries stop being greedy with the tastes?  I always end up buying more where I can at least deduct my tasting fee from my purchase…this is not the case at Fillipi.

Still, they have decent wine and bottles starting at $3.95, which makes them quite a bargain compared to wineries up north and to the south in Temecula.

There is also a small appetizer bar here.  You can buy a bottle to take outside and share an app.  Not a bad way to spend the day.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the area’s other major tasting room, San Antonio Winery off of the 60 freeway in Ontario.  It’s also a nice place with complimentary tasting and they too have a small zoo.  A branch of the main winery in Los Angeles, this winery does not grow or produce wines here in the valley…it is strictly a tasting room.

At the end of the day, we drive back over the Chino Hills to Anaheim and have a nice dinner at the Phoenix Club, a private German club which has a restaurant and pub that is open to the public.  Here we finish the adventure, dining on schnitzel, sausages, and pretzels and wondering how much longer that handful of wine makers over the hill can last.

Darryl
Copyright 2011 – Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

THE COCKTAIL HOUR: Wine Tasting for Lent

It's the Lenten season where many forego hard liquor for forty days.  In the meantime, we’re tasting wines and beers for this week's Cocktail Hour.

This week, we taste a white and a red…just like you’d get from your wine club shipment!

The white is the Thornton 2008 Gewürztraminer.  Thornton is a winery in Temecula, California that is best known for their sparkling wines.  Temecula is a popular place to visit due to its proximity to Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego which are roughly all equidistant from it.  It’s a hot, dry area sitting south of Lake Elsinore and north of Escondido off of Interstate 15 inland and over the mountains from Camp Pendleton on the coast.

My gripe with the area is that they’ve succumbed to the Napa Valley disease…charging a lot for tasting, and charging a lot more for their wines even though  you can buy them at various retailers for less…because swarms of tourist descend upon the area each weekend.

That grievance aside, they do make some good wines here.

This Gewürztraminer is an example.  From grapes grown in the area, which is known more for reds than whites, this pale, greenishly yellow wine pours like syrup into the cup.  A sniff reveals a citrusy tart, sweet nose with a strong pear scent along with hints of honeysuckle and peach.  It smells like it’s going to be another tarty, immature white.

Drinking is another matter.  Like the pour, there’s a syrupy taste and mouth feel.  It’s not nearly as fruity or tart as the nose would suggest.  The taste is a nice, mature balanced flavor with hints of honey and apple.

Easily the best white wine I’ve had in at least eight months. 

At the winery, this will set you back $22.  The Wine of the Month Club has it for $14.99, while Tom’s Farms…alongside the 15 in Corona…has a 2004 for $9.99.  I’d bet a buck that they’d also have this vintage for less than the winery price too.

For the red, we’re going with a wine we’ve tasted many, many times and picked up while filming our California’s Hidden Wine Country video a couple of weeks ago.  It’s the Centro Basco Red from Galleano Winery in Mira Loma, California.

Here in the Cucamonga Valley it’s hot, dry and dusty…which makes it perfect for bold, red wines like zinfandel.  Centro Basco is a very good Basque restaurant not too far away in Chino.  Galleano produces their house wine, a red table wine blended with their zinfandel grapes.

The nose is peppery with hints of plum and currant.  It’s a dark, inky pour into the glass.

That pepper nose carries over into the taste.  It’s spicy with tastes of cherry and a tannic, oak smoothness.  Slightly pucker.  A perfect complement to the big, bold dinners served at Centro Basco.

There are only two places on this earth to get it.  As the house red at Centro Basco (where they call it a Claret) at $8 a bottle or here at the winery for $5 a bottle.  Yes, those prices are not typos.

You can also get a coupon for a free glass with your dinner when you have a free tasting at the winery.

It’s a much better wine than the price suggests and one of the true bargains in wine but you’ll have to travel to the Inland Empire to get it.  Definitely worth the trip, especially if that includes dinner at Centro Basco.

Cheers!

Darryl

ADVENTURES CLOSE TO HOME: The Genius Treatment

NOTE: We can't always be on the road so this occasional series of posts presents stories of a more general nature, things that happen to us while at home.  Hope you enjoy them...

There's not a lot my son can do. He can't play sports the way he'd like to; play a musical instrument; move out on his own...you get the picture...but there are some things he can. These he develops a passion for such as movies, gaining knowledge on sports, travel, etc.

One thing Tim loves is his music. Hopefully, I've inspired it, but he has great and evolving taste in music. For Christmas or birthday presents, he only has one request. iTune cards.  Along with his noise cancelling headphones, it's a great convenience for those hours long drives or flights to help him pass the time easily.

Tim loves his iPod and he has the largest capacity one ever made at 160GB.  He loves to boast that he's up to whatever this weeks number of songs are...in the thousands...so you can imagine his dismay not too long ago when his beloved iPod would no longer sync with iTunes on his computer or anybody else's.

Not only that, but when he logged onto iTunes, his account was empty.  A blank slate.  Easy you say, just sync the iPod with iTunes and problem solved but iTunes would not recognize the device. The backup and sync icons were grayed out.

A little backstory will come in handy here. One day, a few months ago, Chrome...the Google browser that Tim prefers to use...would no longer work on his laptop. Nothing that anyone at Google or the many offering advice on the Internet could suggest would work.

The last resort was reinstalling Windows 7. The update only install didn't work so we backed up his data and did a complete reinstall.

That fixed the Chrome problem. Unfortunately, now we had the iTunes problem.  Again, nothing we could find would fix it except I was finally able to get our desktop to recognize it and sync the songs on the iPod into iTunes but Tim still could not sync newly bought music back down to the device.

While resetting the device (wiping it clean and starting over, basically) would be the option, the empty iTunes window on Tim's laptop had me scared from trying this option. I didn't want to be on the hook should my son lose thousands of dollars of music, so a trip to the Apple Store and the Genius Bar were in order.

I booked a reservation online at the store in Rancho Cucamonga, a 28 mile drive away. It's only 12 miles to our closest store in Pasadena but we'd have problems parking and it's not free either. An extra 15 minutes would be a small price to pay not to have to deal with the crowded conditions in Pasadena.

We made a day of it. Tim got dropped off to see an early matinee of 'Whiplash' in Claremont. Letty and I had a snack for breakfast and did some clothes shopping. Our plan was to meet up again after the movie, have a quick lunch, then head to our appointment.

The Apple Store is located in Victoria Gardens, a giant outdoor mall that is so big it has several streets within to drive your car around.  It also has two streets called Main Street (north and south) and, of course, we picked the wrong one to park on. By the time we found the store, we'd whittled down our lunch time to 30 minutes.

The plan was revised to go to the store and see if maybe we could check in early.  No dice.  We are told to come back 10 minutes ahead of our appointment and check in.

The Apple Store site said our visit with the genius should only take 15 minutes so we decided to put lunch off until after our visit.

Coming back at the appointed time and checking in, we're told to wait at a nearby table to be called for the genius. Ten minutes later our name is called and, seeing Tim in the wheelchair, we're told to wait where we are and the genius will come out to us.
I set up Tim's laptop and iPod so we can get right to work.

25 minutes later, we're still waiting for the genius.  When we ask, we're told we're next on the list.  What was going on when they called our name to go up to the bar? Who knows, we're never told.

The same guy that told us to wait at the table for the genius now comes and tells us to head to the bar. What happened to the genius coming out to us? We're told they could help us at the bar better.

I break down our setup,head to the end of the bar (where a foldout platform is deployed for wheelchairs) and set it up again. We tell the genius the problem. She doesn't want to hear it, at least from us. She wants to hear it from Tim.

"It won't sync," he says.

"What are the symptoms?" she asks.

"It won't sync."

See, the problem is that Tim relies on his in-home IT specialist (me) to diagnose the technical problems. He can't really describe whats happening because he didn't deal with it.

Finally, I tell her she needs to listen to me because I'm the only one who can describe what's been going on.

OK, it needs a full reset. I make sure to ask that Tim will not lose any of his purchases.  No, he won't but anything he's copied from a CD (about a thousand songs) will be deleted.

Wonderful.

Reset commences, genius disappears ("I'll be right back."), and the synching begins.  About 10 minutes later, it appears the sync is complete but we want to make sure the genius looks it over and gives her OK but she's nowhere to be found. Out of the 25 or so employees just standing around the sales floor, she isn't one of them. Eventually, we ask what happened to our genius and someone goes to look for her.

She was out back smoking a cigarette. Finally, she give her OK and our hour and a half at the Genius Bar is over.  What an ordeal.

Stomachs rumbling, we finally head over to a nearby Fuddruckers to have a giant hamburger to quell our hunger.

Remind me why it is everybody is so crazy over Apple products again...

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved