It was May 2014. I was selling wine in Texas. Jon Bonné texted me and said that there was something he wanted to show me. I needed to meet him in Los Angeles, and I could not tell anybody. Because of The New California Wine, I trusted him. I flew in and and met him in Silverlake, and we started driving East. I had gotten trapped in Glendora once before. That seemed pretty far away. We drove right past Glendora.
Soon, we exited the 210, and drove South. I was completely unprepared for what I saw. We were on a four-lane street, in the exurbs east of Glendora, There were bush vines, vineyards full of bush vines, on both sides of us. That was the day that I first saw Lopez and met Dominic Galleano. The day that changed my life.
This is the only photo that I have left from this day. By the time that I took this photo, we were at the Galleano Home Ranch, behind their tasting room. Jon is taking notes while Dom inspects a vine.
Here is the article that Jon was working on. He would not let me breathe a word of our visit until the story broke.
There has been a remarkable follow up to his piece. In the winter of 2024, Esther Mobley, the present wine editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, visited us and we spent a day with her in Cucamonga and at the the winery. This visit led eventually to this great article, perhaps the first journalistic piece ever to take Cucamonga seriously as a grape growing region.