Walk the paved loop through Rancho Cucamonga's Central Park on any Saturday morning and you will pass dog walkers, a soccer practice breaking up near the tennis courts, maybe a family staking out a picnic table. What you will not notice, unless someone points it out, is that a few dozen yards off the trail, tangled in buckwheat, sit vines that have been rooted in that same ground for more than a century.
That is not a metaphor. It is a literal, physical fact about a public park most residents have already walked through without knowing what was under their feet, and the city itself is now the reason those vines are coming back into view.
What the buckwheat was hiding
For years, Gino L. Filippi and the team at Historic Galleano Winery quietly kept a small stand of old vines alive inside Central Park, pruning, watering, and managing pests on vines nobody was tracking or celebrating. In October 2024, that informal caretaking turned into something bigger. The City of Rancho Cucamonga and Galleano Winery formalized a partnership to preserve and expand the park's grapevines, with 2 to 3 new acres planted in spring 2025 and another 5 acres planned to follow. The healthiest of the roughly 150 surviving old vines, which are head-trained, dry-farmed, and grown on their own roots rather than grafted rootstock, are being set aside as designated Historic Blocks inside the park.
According to reporting on the project, the city's arrangement with Galleano actually covers a 9-acre lease inside Central Park's 30-acre footprint, land the city has long envisioned for running trails, an amphitheater, tennis courts, and playgrounds. The vines were not planted deliberately as a park feature. They survived by accident, tangled in weeds, until someone at City Hall picked up the phone and asked Galleano and Filippi to help figure out what was actually growing there.
The plan now goes well past preservation. Those vines, along with hundreds of new plantings, are meant to anchor a Central Park Viticulture Pavilion, complete with a café, patio, terraced seating, and an education center aimed at teaching kids about grape growing and the city's own agricultural history. As economic development manager Tanya Spiegel put it while walking the site, "You see other communities around the state where they've communicated their wine history better, like Sonoma."
Why City Hall got into the wine business
This did not happen in a vacuum. In 2022, Rancho Cucamonga approved an Agricultural Overlay, a zoning designation meant to keep historically farmed land from converting to other uses. Filippi has said he wishes it had existed a few years earlier, back when a developer tried to turn a 100-year-old Zinfandel vineyard into extended-stay hotels. That vineyard did not survive. The Central Park vines almost didn't either, and the difference this time is that the city decided the loss was worth stopping.
It is worth sitting with how close this city came to losing its wine identity entirely, because the numbers involved are not small. In the early 1900s, Cucamonga Valley vineyards stretched across roughly 45,000 acres, close to what Napa Valley farms today. The Galleano family alone once worked about 1,600 of those acres. Today they farm around 400 of the roughly 450 acres of vines left anywhere in the valley, a footprint that now spreads beyond Rancho Cucamonga into Fontana, Jurupa Valley, and Ontario. Across the region as a whole, something like 1 percent of the original vineyard acreage still exists.
The Gateway Vineyard is the version of this story that did not get saved. Situated near Ontario International Airport in front of an office park, it held 26 acres of Zinfandel planted just after Prohibition and was farmed by the Galleano family for 30 years. It now sits as overgrown lawn. Kaiser Steel's 1942 plant in Fontana, the freeway construction that followed through the 1970s, and a wine market crash in the 1950s did the rest, closing all but about 10 of the valley's original wineries and pushing San Bernardino County's population up 213 percent between 1940 and 1960. The main commercial strip through town today runs Vitamin Shoppe to Home Depot to Hobby Lobby to Chili's, which is exactly the kind of streetscape that makes it easy to forget any of this happened here at all.
The winery on Baseline Road isn't Filippi anymore
If you have been to a wine tasting on Baseline Road at some point over the past decade, there is a good chance you knew it as Joseph Filippi Winery. That building and its surrounding property have actually been owned by the City of Rancho Cucamonga since 1993, with the Filippi family leasing it and operating it as a working winery, reception center, and gift shop for generations.
That lease changed hands in February 2025. New ownership under National CORE renamed the property D'Ellena Winery, a deliberate nod back to the Ellena brothers, whose Regina Winery originally operated at this address before the Filippi family ever took it over. The new head winemaker, Ryan Pedvin, has committed to sourcing grapes exclusively from local Rancho Cucamonga and Santa Barbara growers, including a limited-batch red Zinfandel made from Lopez Ranch fruit and a white Zinfandel pulled straight from D'Ellena's own on-site vines. Winemaking on a project like that typically runs 6 to 18 months from harvest to a finished, aged wine, and the timeline reported when the transition was announced pointed to early spring 2026 releases. Given that it's now August 2026, those wines should already be on the tasting counter. The d'Ellena Winery tasting room currently pours Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 8 p.m.
So the building has not disappeared. The name, the ownership, and much of the wine list have. If your mental map of local wine still says "Filippi," it is a few names out of date, and that is a small but real signal of how fast this scene is shifting under a name most people assumed was permanent.
Where the wine actually lives now
None of this requires a drive to Temecula or a weekend booked around Paso Robles. As of this summer, Yelp's current ranking of Rancho Cucamonga's wine tasting rooms lists a working circuit that fits inside a single afternoon. One stop on that circuit is technically a short drive over the city line, and that is part of the point: the family keeping Rancho Cucamonga's own vines alive doesn't even pour its everyday tasting flight inside city limits.
| Where | What's actually in the glass | Why it fits the story |
|---|---|---|
| Galleano Winery (Jurupa Valley) | Zinfandel, Grenache, dessert wines and ports from vines the family has farmed since 1927 | The Galleano family is the same one leasing and replanting the vines inside Rancho Cucamonga's Central Park, even though their own tasting room sits just over the city line in Jurupa Valley |
| D'Ellena Winery | Local Zinfandel from Lopez Ranch and estate fruit, plus Central Coast selections | The Filippi building, under new ownership and a new name |
| Sour Cellars | Barrel-aged sour beers, fruit wines, mead, and seltzers poured in a Victorian-style parlor near 9th and Archibald | Not a winery in the traditional sense, but built on the same barrel-and-patience philosophy |
| Sycamore Ranch Winery & Cidery | Estate wine from a 3.5-acre San Bernardino Mountains vineyard, plus hard cider from heirloom apples grown on site | Proof the region's wine identity now stretches into the foothills, not just the valley floor |
| Grafted Cellars, Snow-Line Orchard, Barrel 33, North Cork Vineyard & Winery | Rotating small-batch pours across several newer tasting rooms | The current circuit is wider than most residents assume |
A Saturday built around three or four of these stops, starting with Galleano for the history and ending somewhere newer, covers more ground and more actual wine history than most people realize sits inside their own city limits.
What this changes about the place you already live
The easy version of this story is nostalgia, a plaque on Foothill Boulevard marking where a winery used to stand. The version backed by what is actually happening on the ground is different. A sitting city government has leased park acreage to a working winemaker, funded new plantings, and started designing a public building around grapevines that were, less than two years ago, indistinguishable from weeds. A century-old tasting room on Baseline Road has new ownership, a new name, and a new wine program already pouring. That is not preservation for its own sake. It is a city actively deciding what it wants to be known for, and choosing something that predates the strip malls by about a century.
If you already live here, that is worth knowing the next time you walk past Central Park's tennis courts, and worth mentioning the next time someone visits and asks what there is to do besides the mall. If you are the kind of person who tracks what a city invests in and why, because it tends to say something about where that place is headed, that instinct applies here too. 1st Class Realty Group works and lives in this market every day, across Rancho Cucamonga and the wider Inland Empire, and pays attention to the kind of local detail that doesn't show up on a portal listing. If you have questions about this neighborhood, whether you're settled in or thinking about what comes next, Schedule Free Consultation and let's talk about it.
