Rancho Cucamonga
— the old vineyard land at the foot of the mountain.
Not only on a wall.
“A valley city at the foot of Cucamonga Peak, east of Los Angeles. The land grew oranges and vines before it grew tract houses. The Cucamonga Valley was one of California's oldest wine regions, planted in 1839. Route 66 still runs through. The Jack Benny radio jokes outlived the trains they came from.
Rancho Cucamonga, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Rancho Cucamonga sits in southwestern San Bernardino County, about forty miles east of downtown Los Angeles, on the alluvial fan where Cucamonga Peak (8,859 ft) and the rest of the San Gabriel Mountains step down into the Inland Empire. The modern city was incorporated in 1977 from three older communities — Alta Loma, Cucamonga, and Etiwanda. The name traces to the Tongva word for 'sandy place.' Population is roughly 175,000. Old Route 66 (Foothill Boulevard) still runs east-west across town, past the surviving stone wineries.
The Cucamonga Valley is one of the oldest wine regions in California. Tiburcio Tapia planted the first vineyard in 1839 on his Rancho Cucamonga land grant. By the early twentieth century the valley was the largest wine-producing region in California, with more than 35,000 acres under vine. Prohibition, suburbanisation, and Pierce's disease cut the acreage to under a thousand by the 1990s. The Cucamonga Valley AVA was federally recognised in 1995. A handful of old-vine zinfandel and grenache blocks survive between the freeways.
Cucamonga sits at the mouth of Cajon Pass, where the Santa Ana winds funnel down from the high desert each autumn. The winds come dry and warm and can reach hurricane force on the foothill slopes. They are the same winds that drove the 2003 Grand Prix Fire across the slopes above town and the 2020 El Dorado Fire farther east. Average annual rainfall is about sixteen inches, almost all between November and April. Summer afternoons run to a hundred degrees; the mountain holds the heat off the city after dark.