Cucamonga Valley

Once one of the largest vineyard districts in California, with tens of thousands of acres of own-rooted, dry-farmed vines in deep granitic sand east of Los Angeles. Almost all of it was built over during the postwar expansion of the Inland Empire. What survives is a scatter of pre-Prohibition and Prohibition-era plantings, some of them wedged against airports and freeway interchanges, farmed by a few families and bottled by a small number of producers who go looking for them.